by submission | Dec 23, 2013 | Story |
Author : Dominic Daley
Sometimes, as I let the knowledge packets bleach out my old preconceptions and dull misapprehensions, I’d ponder, considering how sluggishly my brain operated whenever I indulged in this arthritic retail therapy, how boring it must have been to have had to read this junk. “Introduction to Modern Conflict”. “British Military History”. “World Empires 101”. All fluidly installable, straight into your memory banks, for two grand a pop. Progress.
You could get anything, within reason. It had to be offered by a licensed university – no third-party crap (if, for whatever absurd reason, you wanted it). I knew people who had submerged themselves in Hardy, Keats, Hugo, Blake and Larkin, but who could also speak fluent Mandarin, repair a Cessna engine in minutes and confidently multiply a dozen prime numbers off the tops of their heads. My own ambitions, however, were a little more specialised.
I had bought the cartridge from a code-rinser in Solihull, for ten thousand pounds. I don’t know if he knew what it was he was selling but he seemed happy to be rid of it, which at least told me he knew it was hot.
‘It’s totally clean,’ he had said. ‘Not a malicious line left.’
I had raised my eyebrows, impressed. ‘You’re sure? Nothing spring-loaded that you might have missed?’
He had assured me that he had been very thorough and had then hurried me out of his pigsty of a den. I had taken the cartridge back home and prepared it, hooking it up to my terminal, readying the sleek neural plugs for connection. Now, I massaged my temple socket with moisturising gel, to take the edge off the transfer burns.
Dead modules aren’t really dead, but they’re hardly ever retrievable. Usually, specialists will riddle them with fail safes; corrupt them to the point of unintelligibility, or program footprint traps to track down new users, or, in exceptional circumstances, tack on viruses that induce comas, or brain death, or worse. After all, they’re dead for a reason.
Mine was written by a mad genius, Professor William Cyrus Hanks. The campus eccentric (back when they still had campuses) who had built a module in secret and in so doing had made an artefact out of contemporary war. His students had started the first Psy-age, nearly half a century ago. They had come close to bringing the western hemisphere completely under their control, twelve brilliant people, devastating any who opposed them, willing their enemies into ash, tricking them to death in visions and smoke, piecing apart their very infrastructure like pulling off a spider’s legs. Only the Philistines had been enough to stop them, they with their brute manoeuvres and their raw, archaic tactics. But the Philistines were all gone. Dead in defiance of the future’s warm embrace. So, “Advanced Conquest: Manual for Surrender” was worth its weight.
The console light flickered green, ready for upload. I closed my eyes and dreamed about my empire.
It was the smoothest installation I’ve ever had.
Isn’t education grand?
by submission | Dec 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Suzanne Borchers
Maybe in a dozen years I’ll forget you. Maybe I’ll forget your face and your feet and your fur, but not tomorrow or next week or next year. My nerve ends from optic to tactile quiver when I remember you.
I loved you.
Was it only last summer that I lay on the warm grass musing about life as I gazed with rapture at the stars, drawing imaginary lines? This one is a picture of a two-headed goat (see the horns?) butting his heads into Mighty Mouse’s butt–one per cheek. That one is a large muscular cat arching his back…
You stood over me looking down into my face, bending close enough to tickle my nose with your whiskers, your long black whiskers. I smiled a toothy smile at your bright yellow eyes, so wide with wonder. Your silver suit glistened like the Milky Way.
“I assume you have never seen a being like me before,” you purred through a device. “I know I have never seen one like you.”
“And never again,” I growled before I sunk my canines into your neck, leaping up to shake you like a rag doll.
Oh, you were delicious. Better than kibbles.
by submission | Dec 18, 2013 | Story |
Author : Aaron Koelker
The first note, neatly folded into squares, appeared a short ways off the park path where I enjoyed my evening walks. Had I not spotted the strange rippling effect, like a vertical pane of crystal clear water broken by a gentle leaf cast down from the tree of time, I would’ve never seen it. I wouldn’t have hunched my shoulders against the autumn chill and left the path; have never known she would exist. I picked it from the grass and unfolded it with cold fingers, frosted breath screening the neat handwriting.
To anyone who finds this, kindly write your name and the date in the space below. Then return this message to the EXACT spot you found it, or as best you can. It is very important to us, and will be much appreciated.
I thought it a joke at first, or some student’s social experiment. Did they assume I’d have a pen? I did, though. I had written out a check to my psychiatrist earlier that night.
Walter Kinsley. 11/29/2013.
I folded the note back into the same little squares in which I’d found it and lay it back on the grass, more or less where it had been. Then I returned to the path and waited a moment, wondering if whoever had put it there would run to retrieve it.
Instead the ripple returned, though now directly before me and leaving little doubt as to its existence, and the note vanished. I was bewildered, suddenly exhausted, and decided I would need to see my psychiatrist again sooner rather than later.
The next evening, while walking the same route at roughly the same time, I found the second note much like the first. I snatched it up and found the same handwriting; the same message. Below that was an addition.
If this is Walter, then hello again! And thanks for your help!
I replied.
Who are you?
The next night I found a third note, though this time I waited an hour for it, alone and shivering.
My name is Claire…
She told me she was from the future, at a time when dozens of private parties raced to produce reliable time travel, the goal being to send a human there and back in one piece. She told me that the notes really helped the project; eliminated bugs, honed the data, perfected the art.
And thus began our strange relationship, with hundreds of messages to follow, growing progressively longer until it was several papers folded together appearing each night. I went along, all the while surprised at how calmly I handled it. Quite unlike me.
When we ran out of professional topics, we shared our interests. I said I liked 90’s rock. She liked the Oldies. Turned out they were the same. We shared our lives, our hopes, our dreams. At first for the sake of science, of course, but I couldn’t help falling for her. Hard. I figured she liked me too, since the notes continued even after she told me that phase of the project had ended.
She finally wrote.
Talk about long distance, huh?
The longest distance.
Of course, my psychiatrist thinks I’m completely bonkers. He’s changed my meds a dozen times, though I know I’m fine. I don’t even feel like I need them anymore. The anxiety, the depression; both gone.
She wants to volunteer as the first human through the ripple, and I’ll be waiting. Waiting for her to make that long distance through time and space feel so incredibly small.
by submission | Dec 15, 2013 | Story |
Author : Andrew Hollis
The manual had been totally inadequate. For a start the Chinglish translation was hopelessly out of date, there were archaic digiverbs in it that must have been superseded at least three authorisations ago.
Of course flight inexperience would be no excuse, especially when explaining how a Mastodon runner had ended up fur-balled across the front skid!
But if he stopped at a detox point on his way back to the Arc he could hose off the mess and concoct some story about pranging a floater. Tell the dispatcher it was a false trace, no runner found. Then on the return trip his ship had smacked into a discarded fuel pod. He pulled some hair from the twisted skid; shit, with floaters scattered all over the place it’s a believable excuse.
The Waxer buzzed in his ear, “three zero, snoozed the Masto yet?”
He winced at the static fuzzing across his eardrum, “Nope, it was a false trace, nothing there but prefabs and blowflies”.
“The trace looked strong, did you ask around?”
Sure he’d spoken to the settlers, they were happy to carve up the carcass and share it out, no questions asked. It made a change from blowing nosebags of disgusting Nutrinow.
‘Yeh I spoke to the land agent, they’ve seen nothing. I’ll checkout the bat farms in the valley. Maybe it’s there hoovering up fruit.”
The fuzz tickled again, “Ok but keep it slow through there, don’t want your air shock flipping trays.” Yeh the last thing I need on top everything else is a dozen hanging baskets of splattered fruit wrapped around the fins.
He flicked on the Grav-it and dropped gently to the red earth. The holoplay was scuffed but had survived his frustrations; he dusted it off and re-launched a how-to of the ship’s dashboard.
by submission | Dec 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Glen Luke Flanagan
Click, whir, grind. Melvin’s movements were always accompanied by this sequence of sounds. His jeweled clockwork joints moved with a decidedly inhuman precision, but his troubled face wore the mask of a truly desperate man.
“What is love?” he asked, while his golden fingers tapped nervously on the crystal casing of his knee. “This is the question that has been troubling me. It haunts all my waking moments, yet I cannot bring myself to wind down until I understand the answer.”
As if afraid that he would power down just by mentioning the matter, Melvin’s hands strayed underneath the casing on his back and began to wind himself up frenetically.
Delicate human hands came to rest on his crystal knees, and soft blue eyes found his mechanical ones. A gentle, melodic voice found its way through his tension, and soothed him.
“It’s alright, Melvin. As the first of your kind, it’s natural you should have these questions. We’ll find the answer together, I promise you.”
Dr. Lucy Malone always knew how to sooth him. Melvin relaxed with what almost looked like a deep sigh, but of course it was not, because he did not breathe. Dr. Malone smiled at him, patting his knee comfortingly.
“Same time again tomorrow, Melvin?”
She knew the answer would be yes, if only because the Institute of Strange Intelligences required these counseling sessions, but she always gave him the courtesy of treating him like any other patient. He nodded, and shook her hand.
Tucked away in a comfy little apartment provided by the Institute, Melvin poured over the classic human texts on love. Byron, Shakespeare, Solomon. But they all seemed to deal with the symptoms, rather than the crux of the matter.
Finally, Melvin gave up on his research, and spent the night in meditation, his gears and cylinders whirring quietly in the darkness.
Over the next several sessions, Melvin and Lucy discussed his problem. She described her personal experiences with love, and he tried to put these in context by comparing them to what he had read. Inevitably, there were discrepancies, which confused him and amused her. But eventually, he began to look forward to the sessions for the conversations themselves, rather than as an opportunity to sate his curiosity.
Then one day, he came in to find a stranger in the therapist’s chair. In many ways, she was like Lucy – tall, blonde, and soft-spoken. But she was not Lucy, Melvin felt that with every fiber of his being. Her eyes did not linger in the same ways hers did, nor did her touch have the same tender sympathy. She shook his hand with a crisp air of professionalism.
“Dr. Malone was in an accident,” she said. “She didn’t survive the resulting operation. I’m sorry, Melvin. I’ll be working with you from now on.”
Melvin sat quietly on the soft leather couch, processing. The new doctor watched him for several minutes, and finally reached to touch his knee lightly.
“Melvin? Is everything alright?”
Finally, he raised his head, and looked at her with sorrowful metal-and-glass eyes.
“I know what love is,” he said. “And I wish that I did not.”
In his own apartment, a curtain opened to let in sad silver moonlight, Melvin sat in reverie. The past weeks flashed through his mind, each moment with her as vivid as if he were seeing it again for the first time.
As the night crept on, the clicking and humming of his gears began to slow, but he made no move to wind himself up. After a while, there was only silence.
