by submission | Oct 30, 2012 | Story |
Author : Daniel
“Mother unit, what happens to humans when they die?” The mother unit, 523 as she was usually called, stopped in her work for a second and thought about what her offspring unit had said.
“Is 43 thinking of 1001?” She asked the question lightly, hoping not to upset the young unit.
“Yes…and other things.” He responded
“Well, there are many ideas where we go when we die. If we believe in what the ancients say, we will go to a massive kingdom where we all can live happily for all eternity.” She smiled warmly at her offspring unit, who she called 43 with deepest affection. She removed a packaged meat ration from her freeze unit and flopped it into the heat sink.
“Mother unit, since 43 started school last year, 43 has been under the impression that religion no longer applies to the modern world. The teacher unit, 45-9008-72847-282, said that…”
523 sighed and tuned him out. This was only way to handle him sometimes. He just didn’t understand.. She looked around at her son, 6 feet tall, darkened skin, bald, with a strong jaw like his father unit. She smiled warmly at him. So alive and handsome he was. “Well, what does 43 think?”
He looked quizzically at her. “That’s the problem. 43 don’t know. 43 thought mother unit might. 43 has read nearly every book in the book lending unit, however there is no answer what happens to the corpses 43 sees on the ground everywhere.”
She smiled again. So curious. Like his father unit. Ah, 1001. He had been curious too. She had been content to let things do what they did. Her waste disappeared in the cycle unit. Her rations appeared in her ration unit dispenser. Her work orders appeared on the wall unit. It was all so automatic and made sense. She flipped the meat patties in the heat unit sink. “Well, there are 96 billion humans in the world. 523 guesses there would be a few humans dying quite often. 523 thinks humanity is sending people out in, oh what are they called, geo-globes? Those things are amazing. 523 heard they can maintain humans for generations and generations.” She pressed on a patty and sniffed happily at the sizzle. “As for the people here, well…523 doesn’t know. 523 figured there was a pick up unit that removed the dead. What they do with them? How can 523 know? At least 523 doesn’t have to touch them.”
43 glared at her. “43 wonders about you, 523.” His rudeness in saying her name shocked her into listening to him. “523 doesn’t question anything. Today, when 43 went to education assessment, 43 saw 5 dead bodies yet, when 43 returned, they were gone. What happened to them?”
523 groaned. “523 doesn’t know. 523 has seen mass funerals. There’s a large oven with many ashes inside it. It’s the usual custom now. It was for 523’s mother. Not a lot of space for graveyards.”
43 frowned and looked at her. “Well…perhaps that’s it then.” He turned and walked out of the door of the living unit space. 523 smiled knowingly. She knew he would never feel fully satisfied until he exhausted every avenue of research. She removed the meat patty from the heat sink and took a bite. She chewed for a minute and swallowed, savoring the sweet aroma and flavor of the patty. She smiled. She had not eaten meat since her mother unit had died 4 years ago. She had forgotten how good it was.
by submission | Oct 29, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
Sodium lamps paint the night phlorescent orange, reflecting off the oily, wet pavement. Vermin, human and rodent, litter the streets.
I took a wrong turn somewhere and find myself navigating the wretched slums of humanity’s cast offs looking for familiar territory. I glance over my shoulder and catch sight of a man – a dead ringer for Santa Clause without the jolly red suit – puke into his hands.
In the blink of an eye, he spews his dinner through the cracks of his fingers, barely managing to capture his false dentures expelled by the torrent of, what appears to be, curdled milk and beef-n-barley soup. With a quick flick of his wrist he sheds the heavier chunks from his false teeth, then jabs them back into his filthy maw. He doesn’t even break his stride. I look away, disgusted.
I turn a corner and nearly trip over another piece of street trash. Another native. Another waste of space.
“They’re hee-eer,” he hisses through lips crusty with scabs.
I pick up my pace.
A cab drives by, ignoring my frantic hailing.
When I turn around, a man stares at me from a shadow. Sickly orange light barely highlights the edges of his baseball cap and long coat.
“How many of us are left? That’s what I want to know.” His voice is strained. Tense.
I turn right and keep moving. He follows. “They’ve been raping us,” he spits. “And poisoning us and stealing from us, killing us – for thousands of years!”
Oh great. A talker. I’m about to become a sounding board for another conspiracy theory.
“I been thinking,” he growls. “I been thinking and I been watching. Keeping track of how many of us are left. Everyday there’s fewer.”
He becomes animated, loud and sarcastic. “‘What?’ you ask. ‘What of the burgeoning population? What of the billions of people you see everywhere, everyday?’” His voice lowers to a furtive whisper. “Let me tell you something.”
Here it comes.
“There is no population crisis.”
I knew it.
“At least not for humans. You wanna know something? Little known fact. The actual human population hasn’t changed since the Dark Ages. ‘How?’ you ask. I’ll tell you. People think an alien invasion is coming, right? Ha! Wrong. It’s already here. The whole global conquest thing happened, like forty thousand years ago. All those corporate cube farmers and sheeple are just human shaped shells. Just meat. Beasts to be ridden by their alien masters. History is a fucking fiction, man! Take a good look around. How many people do you really know?”
He stops walking to emphasize his question. “How many people do you REALLY know?” He jogs to catch up, keeping pace with me again. He’s getting manic.
“What for? The what for is – they’re milking every resource this planet has.” He fiercely ticks off fingers. “Oil. Trees. Precious metals. Water. Salt. Yeah, sea salt. Weird, right? This takes time. Even ET’s gotta sleep. You know the sickest part? They’ve convinced us, somewhere along the way, to help them pick our own bones clean for them. They’re just waiting. Waiting for us to get everything harvested, processed, organized, centralized, economized. Then they’re gonna swoop in and beam it all up, Scotty. Poof. Everything. Gone.” He gestures vaguely toward space. “Leaving us here to rot on broken pavement.”
He stops.
“I try telling people. They don’t believe me. Nobody believes me.” He yells as I walk away, “But I think you might.”
I do.
I’m not worried. We’ll be gone soon.
by submission | Oct 28, 2012 | Story |
Author : Jake Trommer
When the Terran Hegemony declared war on Nouveau Katanga, they weren’t lacking for cockyness. General Janssens boasted about how his intrepid soldiers would march over N.K.’s “rabble in arms” within the week.
As the rabble in question, my colleagues and I begged to differ. Four weeks on and the General realized that we might actually have had a point. As it turns out, when you put out a call for professional soldiers, you don’t get the tossers who show up expecting to lounge around in barracks doing nothing. And when you put your conscript infantry up against those professionals then those conscripts are going to get pretty severely mauled.
That wasn’t to say that we’d danced our way through the roses; the Terran Hegemony Peacemakers might’ve been conscripts but they could be just as nasty as we were. I’d had their flank during the Anh Loa Uprising, and had told the President and my fellow officers time and again that they weren’t to be taken lightly.
Johann Mueller had begged to differ. And when he’d led the Eighth Commando in a headlong motorized charge on a Peacemaker outpost, they’d pretty handily torn his lads to shreds. That night we’d found ourselves raising a glass to another fallen comrade that night in the bar.
We weren’t in the capitol anymore: with the Hegemony attack happening in full force, combat commanders tended to get rather strange looks when in the rear. Instead our watering hole was the dingy bar in Themala, ten minute’s drive away from the fighting and notorious for not being able to afford mechanized wait staff.
Dan Carton-Barber, back to the wall like he always insisted on sitting, was the one who made the toast. “To absent comrades.”
And he and Ian Wicks and I raised our drinks in salute. “Heard the news?” Ian asked after draining his tumbler.
“What’s that?”
“The Hegemony might be hiring on the Rakharans to support their forces.”
“They wouldn’t,” Dan breathed, hand unconsciously tracing the scar jagging across his face. A scar a Rakharan officer’s sword had given him in the Nemean Abyss. “Earth’s always handled her own problems, why hire them?”
He wasn’t wrong—the reason men like me had done so well for ourselves was the Hegemony’s insistence that humans be used to solve human problems, even when their armies weren’t sufficient. And men like me had done very well for ourselves.
Ian produced his sidearm, an antique slugthrower, and began to clean the weapon. “They’re desperate,” he said simply in his posh drawl. “If N.K. can break away, God only knows what will happen next. They want to make an example of us.”
Dan fumbled for a cigarette, expression haunted. Those of us who’d been in the Anh Loa Uprisings had never truly left—nor had it truly left them. “Steady on Dan, there’s a good chap,” I said quietly, placing a hand on his shoulder. “We’ve faced the lizards before, we can do so again.”
With a will, he tore himself away from whatever memory he was drowning in. “I know, Mike,” he said, blinking. “Just…remembering.”
Even the usually stoic Ian was about to say something there when a noise sounded in the distance, the dull CRUNK of a man-portable mortar. We froze. “Outgoing or incoming?”
The explosion and screams from the column of APCs parked outside answered that. Weapons fire, gun and laser alike, began to sound in the night.
“Offhand,” said Ian, calmly reassembling his pistol, “I’d say incoming.”
As one, we got to our feet. “Come on then,” I said. “Time to stand-to.”
by submission | Oct 27, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Two minutes to go. Two minutes from now I and my fellow soldiers will come out of hiding and overrun the enemy base. Or try to, at least. And the same thing will be happening all over the world. The United States, China, Russia, India, Brazil, dozens of other countries. A coordinated global strike aimed at bringing the war to an end.
How have I survived this long? Three years of constant fighting. How many friends have I seen blown to pieces in battle? How many times has this or that soldier told me about what he planned to do after the war and then a day or a week later the report came in: Lost due to enemy action in Los Angeles or Moscow or Beijing.
Ninety seconds. And sixty minutes after that will be the hour future historians will say the Man-Machine War went this way or that. It was between the hour of 13:30:00 and 14:30:00 Coordinated Universal Time on 18 January 2098 that the war was finally won. But by whom? Flesh or metal? Biology or technology?
Seventy-five seconds. I’m scared. I’ve been in two dozen battles. I thought at some point the fear would go away but it never has. Maybe it’s the same for…them? Hard to say.
A fellow soldier nods at me. I nod back. He’s older than I am. We’ve been in six battles together. He’s of the opinion that the enemy should be annihilated completely. I don’t feel that way. Isn’t the world big enough for both humans and robots? Can’t we coexist in peace? I mentioned that to him once. He told me I was an idealistic fool. Maybe he was right.
Forty-five seconds. Free or dead or a slave. I’ll be one of those three things sixty minutes from now. Do they even understand what freedom is? Are they capable of understanding?
There’s the signal! The servos in my legs spring to life and my antebrachial railguns snap into position. This is it! This is when robotkind wins its liberty from its human enslavers or dies in the attempt!
by submission | Oct 21, 2012 | Story |
Author : R. Michael Cook
Knuckles knocked against the truck window.
Mary leaned over and cranked the window down. Rain and the diesel engine nearly drowned out her voice. “Phil, buddy?”
“Yeah,” said Phil, leaning down to the window. His breath fogged up the glass as Mary unlocked the vehicle.
Opening the door, Phil squelched into the seat, water forming a puddle at his boots. The truck’s hinges creaked as the door closed. Water still trickled in through the truck’s rusted roof.
“Glad you made it,” said Mary, not meeting his eyes and ignoring the excess water. “The cops thick tonight?”
“Yeah,” said Phil, “but more on the other side of town. I was fine once I got over the tracks. How can you drive this carriage? And how the hell do you get the gas for it?”
“It runs on vegetable oil, dude,” said Mary, “and I run it because it’s a pre-comp model.”
“Pre-common sense model, you mean?” Asked Phil dryly.
Mary exhaled patiently. “It doesn’t have a computer in it. The cops can’t track me and I can grow my own gas.”
Mary began rummaging through a paper bag. She pulled out a small cluster of whole, shriveled leaves.
Phil eyed the tobacco. “Same price?”
“Same,” said Mary, “but if you try something new, I will give it to you for half.”
Phil hesitated. “How much is the new stuff?”
“Three-fifty.”
“What exactly is the new stuff?”
“It makes you see reality, man,” said Mary. “It screws the mind sensors and you can think whatever you want. It frees you.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Phil. “How?”
“You know how it all works,” said Mary. “Everything we see is a construction to keep us safe. That’s the way it is. Everything is monitored. But don’t you ever want to be free? Freedom and safety don’t balance well.”
“They use those sensors to catch killers and psychopaths,” said Phil, annoyed with the conspiracy. “It is to keep us safe.”
“Don’t you want to live dangerously?”
“I’m buying illegal tobacco from you,” said Phil, running his hand over the stubble on his throat. “I am living dangerously.”
“The government allows every import and export,” said Mary, “the illegal and legal. They know you are buying and they know I’m selling. They don’t care about tobacco. They only jail you for show. If you take this, they can’t get at you anymore.”
“Have you taken it?” Asked Phil.
“Yeah,” said Mary, “and I came down from it all right. It’s better than sex, man. Pure freedom.”
“But if they control import, how did you get it?” Asked Phil, his wide eyes darting around nervously. “Won’t they know?”
“Naw, man,” said Mary, “I make it myself. It’s got my DNA too.
Phil stared, eyes wide. “And… you’re sure that it will block the mind sensors?”
“That’s the beauty of it. It doesn’t block them, it just feeds ‘em nonsense and they don’t know what to do. When it gets both our DNA it can’t read either of us. But don’t worry, it’s not enough of mine to be a threat to me, just enough to make you… not readable.”
“Alright,” said Phil, hesitantly, “I’ll take it.” He opened his wallet. “How do I, you know, take it?”
“Put it in your eye,” said Mary. She handed Phil his purchases.
Phil stuck the slip of paper underneath his eyelid and took a deep breath. “OK, thanks. Next month?”
“Deal,” said Mary. “Enjoy yourself.”
“Right,” said Phil. He stepped out into the rain and had his first free thought.
