by submission | Mar 30, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Four minutes. That’s how much longer I have to be human. Or, if things don’t go as planned, to be alive. I could have elected to be anesthetized for the procedure. If I had and anything went wrong, I’d never know it. I’d simply never wake up. But I chose to remain conscious for the transformation. Death will be almost instantaneous if this doesn’t work. And if it does work, I want to be wide awake and remember the moment when I became…something else.
How long has it been since anyone underwent a totally novel transformation? It must be nearly 300 Earth years. Yes, that sounds about right: around the year 2700. The first settlers on Venus. That was a particularly difficult one. Surface temperatures over 460°C and an atmospheric pressure almost 100 times that of Earth. It took the bioengineers even longer to transform people to live on Venus than it took them to adapt a human subspecies for life in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Not every world is a Mars or a Titan that will let you get by with only a moderate amount of biological transfiguration. Even the people who live on Luna still look vaguely like humans from Earth. The extremophile worlds just don’t tolerate much evolutionary baggage.
Just over two minutes. They told me the neural scanners will continue operating right up to the end. Theoretically, I shouldn’t notice any “interruption” of my consciousness. From my perspective, one moment I’ll be here in the ship and the next I’ll be out there, neither the spacecraft nor my original body surviving the transformation.
In my new form (again, theoretically) I should be virtually ageless. If that’s true, maybe I’ll live long enough to see the human race, in all its various forms, finally achieve the age-old dream of traveling to the stars. It’s hard to believe that after a thousand years of spaceflight, we’ve still never succeeded in reaching even the nearest star system. Multigeneration ships, suspended animation craft, near-light-speed vessels, countless schemes to create wormholes and space-warp corridors. And yet no one who has ever tried to cross the gulf between the stars has ever signaled back that they made it. But surely humanity won’t be confined to one solar system forever. One day mankind will leave the cradle and take its place among–
Transformation! It worked! My personality and memory are intact, preserved in a network of magnetically-woven plasma. I am vast. How could that infinitesimal creature I was a moment ago have ever been me? I can…”see” isn’t the right word. I can perceive the last remnants of the spaceship that brought me here vaporizing. And here’s a 500 kilometer wide spicule jetting alongside me at 20 kilometers per second, but to me it feels like a pleasant breeze. Now, I have to modulate the local EM field to emit a radio signal to let them know we’ve succeeded. After three centuries of stagnation, humanity has slipped the bonds of planets and moons and comets. Mankind has finally colonized the Sun!
by submission | Mar 29, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
Tara giggled and leaned over the railing of the walkway, peering down the cyclopean shaft. “You know,” she told Camus, “I bet that if you were to fall down this you would fall forever and ever and never even stop.” She trilled out a laugh again and kicked a can off the edge.
“Hey, silly,” Camus rasped in his failing synthetic voice, “Stop that. For all you know there might be somebody down there. How happy would you be if you had a can traveling some ludicrous speed hit you on the head?”
The young woman paused and considered this. She frowned and bit her lip. “I suppose I wouldn’t like that a whole lot.”
It was sad, Camus thought to himself, how Tara had the mind of a child and would always have the mind of a child. She couldn’t help it, of course. Nobody can help how they’re born.
It was sad.
“Right,” he affirmed. “You’d be pretty mad, I’d imagine.” He shoved his pry bar in the access hatch’s lock and pushed all his weight against it. It gave out with the shrieking typical of unhappy metal. “OK. I’ll go first, and then you follow me. Stay close, alright?”
“Yes, Cammy,” Tara chirped. “And be very very quiet so that the monsters don’t find us.”
“Right. Good girl.” Camus’s bad shoulder creaked and groaned as he crawled into the lightless access shaft. It was fairly roomy, he decided. For a coffin, at least. He kept crawling, listening intently to make sure that Tara was behind him and nobody else was ahead of him. If the map he’d found was right the shaft would go by some old store rooms. Hopefully they had food. He just had to find the right one, M778. He counted the rooms that went by under his hands and knees, feeling out the numerals: M772, M774, M776.
There it was. 778. And it was unlocked. Small miracles were better than no miracles, Camus thought to himself.
He undid the two bolts and eased the door down, revealing more black space.
“Cover your eyes, love,” Camus whispered back to Tara.
“Alright,” came the reply.
Camus switched on his headlamp. He played the dim beam across the walls, the floor, the mostly empty crates strewn about. It didn’t look promising, but it was worth a look. Camus eased himself down into the room and then helped Tara down. The two began to look through the refuse, searching for something edible.
“Cammy.”
Camus picked up a box. It was too light to hold anything, and he tossed it aside. “Yes?”
“Where are mommy and daddy?”
Camus paused a moment. “Mommy and daddy went into the sky, dear.”
“What’s the sky?”
“Above ground. They went above ground.”
“Oh,” Tara said. “Why?”
“Because they had to escape the monsters.”
“Oh,” Tara said. “OK.”
Camus picked up another box. He saw the wire attached to it too late. There was a snap and a foot long steel bolt smacked into Camus’s chest.
“Oh,” he said, grabbing his chest. Oil leaked between his fingers. Camus swore. Hydraulic fluid was rarer than food in this place.
“Come on, Tara,” he rasped. “Let’s leave. Before the monsters come.”
“OK Cammy,” she chirped. She held his rusting hand. “Are we going home?”
“Yes, love. We’re going to go home.”
“Can we braid my hair when we get back?”
“Of course.”
by submission | Mar 26, 2012 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
“I really want to take this fork and stab it through your chest, Mr. Johnson.”
“That’s nice, Sam. Now please eat your food.”
The boy eyes me with his cold, twitching eyes, fork hand ready to strike, bits of gravy smothered chicken still stuck between the prongs. A few of the other residents at the table watch with mild interest, wondering if I’ll just smile and wait like I always do. Somehow, they think eventually I’ll break and show some actual fear. After a moment’s pause, Sam sits back down and starts in on his mashed potatoes.
“I wish you would have stabbed him, Sam,” a smallish boy says. “It would have been cool to see Mr. Johnson’s blood everywhere.”
“Thanks, Pete,” I smile. “But you guys should probably drop the subject.”
All the boys nod and start talking about the newest video game they picked up on our last outing. My boss tells me that this kind of group home treatment is a revolution. When he was a counselor like us, they used to have one staff for every three or four residents, just to keep the peace. With the advent of behavior modification chips, my partner and I can keep track of almost twenty residents between us. The boys have no choice but to behave themselves, despite what twisted things may be going on in their minds. The chip takes care of that.
After our meal, we walk the residents back to the house where they complete their evening chores and head to their rooms for the night. Once all is done, my manager regales us with stories from the old days, stories of residents locking themselves in bathrooms, peeing on the floors, running off into the woods or onto highways. He tells us of the attacks and restraints and of sending kids off to detention, to be locked in cells like animals. It’s all amusing and all degrading. The things these kids had to endure at the hands of the state were unthinkable.
As I begin to droll on about how much more humane our current system is, my manager gets a troubled look in his eye, as if he doesn’t approve. I explain how much better things are, how the children are allowed to be themselves, not forced to conform to society’s norms. The chips protect others from their violent nature, but they are allowed to hang on to their identities, their thoughts and wants and needs aren’t challenged by some religious or philosophical dogma. We respect them while protecting others. And as soon as the children are adjusted to the chips, we send them home, safe and sound.
It’s the perfect system. Perfectly safe. Perfectly humane. I don’t see how anyone could object.
***
Sam arrives home three months later and doesn’t hurt a fly. His mother is amazed at the change in his behavior, all thanks to the chip. One day, he sees girl about his age walking down the street. He imagines what it would be like to see her lifeless body in a ditch.
“Only a matter of time,” he thinks. “This chip has to break down eventually.”
by submission | Mar 25, 2012 | Story
Author : Thomas Desrochers
Bertie was a kind looking old man of eighty who had more wrinkles from smiling than anything else, and who looked like he always had a joke on his mind. He wasn’t particularly tall, though he was clearly handsome once. His shirt was plaid and tucked into his pleated khaki pants.
Drene was taller than Bertie by a few inches, and although she had begun to look rather severe in her old age of seventy five she had a friendly smile ready for anybody and everybody. Her hair was perpetually in a white ball around her head, a hair style reserved only for the old, and she was always sporting a pretty, if not plain, heavy-cut, and old-fashioned, dress of some sort or another.
Bertie and Drene had no children or grand-children left planet-side, and to make up for the lack of company would spend every afternoon sitting on their apartment’s front steps watching the people go by. Sometimes Bertie would read the news on his computer, and Drene was usually knitting something colorful and vibrant – today it was a scarf.
“It’s rather nice that they learned how to control the weather,” Drene commented one day. “Though I do miss the rain sometimes.”
“Mm,” grunted Bertie. “Never feels quite the same any more. Always too temperate.”
“Oh hush,” Drene told him as she rummaged through her bag for a small gauge needle. “You’re always finding the bad things in the new tech. You should just be happy with change for once.”
Bertie set his paper-thin computer down on his lap and watched the people who walked by. “What about all the surgery and cosmetics? Can I complain about that?”
“Oh Bertie, why are you always going on about this?” Drene sighed.
“Because,” he exclaimed. Then, softer, “It’s sad.”
He watched the people go by. They were tan, perfectly so; They had well-proportioned noses and attractive cheek-bones; Their eyes were all blue or green, their hair blond or black to match; There was no fat on their bodies, just electrically stimulated and grown muscle; Nobody was taller than anybody else – the women were all five feet and ten inches tall, and the men were all six feet and four inches; Everybody had tattoos, though on closer examination they were really just different variations of the same popular thing; Everybody had perfect teeth and their clothes were all fashionable, albeit very similar.
“It’s sad,” Bertie said again. Everybody was the same at first glance, and sometimes even on closer inspection. “Kids these days.”
“They’ll grow out of it.” Drene paused her knitting to pat him on the leg reassuringly. “We did, after all.”
“Yeah, well,” Bertie grouched. “You’d think kids would learn more from the silliness of people before them.”
He turned back to his news. Long-range faster than light was finally ready for commercial use. Saturn’s Erys space station had finally reached twenty million people, and was continuing to grow. NovaCorp was finally beginning to harvest the core of Venus. The last veteran of the Gulf War had died. A senator had been caught having an affair.
Funny, he thought to himself, how some things never change while everything else is moving and changing and never stopping.
Bertie’s phone rang. He looked down at it and smiled, answering with a “Well, hello there.”
“Hi grandpappy,” a happy child’s voice giggled. “Daddy says we’re going to come visit!”
He smiled. Some things never change.
by submission | Mar 24, 2012 | Story |
Author : M. A. Goldin
Elise had been bellowing at the comms for two minutes. Where the hell was he?
Keeper McDermott scrambled into the room and fell into a chair before the console. He wore worn clothes and a week’s whiskers. “Sorry, I was just tinkering with the electrical shielding in my bedroom.”
She glanced at the readings on her screen. “Keeper McDermott.”
“Yes?”
“You were making it worse.”
“Really? You don’t say.”
“Since you kept me waiting, I’ve been through your systems.” She frowned. “Beacon’s fine, so I don’t have to get a repair team out there right away, but you’ve got an awful lot of screwy in there.”
“Wait, Boss –“
“Shut it. You’ve got unauthorized electronic devices wired all over the place.” She made a face. “Audio files called ‘creepy’ and ‘moaning’.”
“They draw zero power.”
“You’ve got abnormally high electric fields in most of the living quarters and the repair shop.”
He fidgeted. “They’re barely above background, really.”
“You’ve got a subroutine in the air processing system that’s intentionally causing random backups in your ventilation.”
“I like breezes.” Behind him, a door slammed violently shut.
“Uh huh. And now I see there’s… thinning in the exterior insulation? Re-directed heat ducts? Are you crazy?”
“It’s just a couple of cold spots, no big deal.”
“Cold spots! What the hell are you doing to my Beacon?”
“Nothing! Don’t you get it?”
She slumped back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “Clearly, no. Explain.”
“Please, don’t send a repair team.” He ran his face through his hands. “I’m fine. The station’s fine, I just –“ he sat there, staring at the console without really seeing.
“Keeper?”
“The weird feelings, the slamming doors, the moaning, the cold spots.” He looked up at her, his eyes pleading. “It’s better than the silence. Better a Beacon with ghosts than alone on a dead rock.”
Elise chewed her lip. Let him wait a little. “Had to send a crew out to Beacon 113 last month. New lightkeeper.”
McDermott looked confused. “Yeah?”
“The old Keeper wasn’t dead, so it never tripped the bio sensors here. Only reason we knew something was off was he had the oxygen cranked way, way up. Son of a bitch had drilled a hole in his skull. Big one. With that plus the oxy, he was blissed out of his mind when they got there. Walked out an airlock when nobody was looking.”
“Holy Christ.”
“So now I’ve got an emergency boat headed out there with a new Keeper. You got any idea what that costs? Company’s probably going to take it out of his life insurance.” She glared at McDermott. “Am I going to have to do that twice in one month, Keeper?”
“No, ma’am.”
She stared at him through the screen, trying to see the man through bad lighting and a billion miles of interference. The Beacon would run fine, if need be; would he?
“I suppose ghosts are better than tripping balls till your Beacon explodes.”
McDermott blushed and tugged at a piece of hair behind his ear. “Yeah.”
“You get any other ghosts out there, ones you didn’t make, you tell me. Let me send your replacement on a slow boat.”
He smiled, nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“San Martin out.”
