by submission | Mar 23, 2012 | Story |
Author : Chris Daly
There were two, quite different, options open to him now.
The optical sensor domes sprouting from his aft projections registered six thermal spikes; a quick cross reference from his synthetic aperture radar strips confirmed the incoming ships. Pulling a polite one gee acceleration towards him, they were slipping into a rough hemisphere about three kilometres apart. It was a subtle combat stance, if you counted subtle as not actively broadcasting your intent to surround and confine the target. Of course, that broadcast came over within minutes, gently tickling his microwave sensors: the ship captains urging him to deactivate.
He looked slowly out over the empty starscape ahead, his gravity field reshaping to align him towards a polar orbit of the vast B-class star stretching below his bulk. The blue radiance below was blinding his ventral sensors, especially in the incredibly bright UV region. He knew that his pursuers would have difficulty seeing detail, only a faint smudge due to his stellar occultation at half a light second distance. His transversal velocity was steady at nearly two kilometres per second, forcing the hunters to aim ahead to the intercept point; at their current range missiles would not have enough fuel and acceleration to hit him. He began small, random adjustments to his acceleration, negating any projectile targeting completely. Time was now the limiting commodity.
He retreated to the faster optical substructure within his core, buying him additional thinking time, and began weighing up his options.
The first was the most obvious, easiest to perform and physically safest choice: Surrender. He had no online weapon systems, so fighting was contraindicated. Of course after surrender the pursuers would not destroy his body; it was far too valuable as a technological entity. However, his personality would probably be etched away or modified, which was the worst outcome. Fear of death, it seemed, was not limited to biologicals.
The second was riskier and much more difficult: Running. His body was much stronger, faster and more agile than any two of the other ships combined, but there was one major physical limit. The vacuum he swam through was permeated by the mass shadow of the brilliant star below him, allowing him to anchor, push off and resist against the gravity field. The further away he ran, the less capable he would be – deep space was not an option.
Anger and frustration reached their apex and he sprang out of the isolated optical core, screaming into every available spectrum. Signalling lasers flickered into the darkness; microwaves tore out and superheated every polar molecule in a kilometre radius; his magnetic shielding expanded, producing bright aurorae as it focussed stellar charged particles. Finally he kicked out against the gravitational ether and felt massless as a great ripple raced out, like a tidal wave in space-time.
Two minutes later, his rage subsided. His sensors reopened and sampled the thermally hot sphere he now sat in. As it slowly radiated and cooled back to background levels, he observed hundreds of small objects slavishly following a dead trajectory where his pursuers once flew, on course to add their mass to the great star below him.
He lay in the vacuum, retreated to his quiet substrate, and slowly contemplated the third path.
by submission | Mar 18, 2012 | Story |
Author : Kyle Hubbard
Humans are remarkably ugly.
The kylhu child had never seen a real one before, so it stared with morbid fascination at the man on the stage. The human marched back and forth on two legs, bellowing and waving his bizarre limbs in grand, sweeping gestures. He was speaking a local kylhu dialect, but not very well; he did not meet the right vocal pitches, he paused frequently to suck in air, and his body language was all wrong.
“Come see aliens from all over galaxy!” he was shouting. The surrounding kylhu seemed confused and a little afraid as the human made his speech. The kylhu race rarely saw anything from off-world, as most space travelers felt that Kylh’on had little to offer them. It was a dry, desolate planet with harsh weather that spanned most of the solar rotation. The carnival had arrived on an optimal cycle, but it was unclear what they hoped to trade for the entertainment they provided.
The child began to wander the fair, marveling at the sights. Various alien life forms were on display inside metal cages, glass tanks, and fenced pens. As much as the child wanted to take its time looking at them, the carnival would be leaving soon, so it had to be quick if it was going to see them all.
Scurrying from display to display, the child stumbled blindly into the leg of a large creature. It looked up and up until it recognized the alien as the human it saw earlier.
“Greetings, young one,” the man said in the same barely-coherent kylhu dialect he used before. “You like fair?”
Nervous, the child said nothing.
“You like candy?” the human continued, though the final word was unfamiliar. He reached down and presented a pink, fluffy substance. “Cotton candy,” said the human in a language the child did not understand. “Human food. Try.”
Curious, the child took a small piece of the fluff and tasted it. The flavor was very strong, which the child disliked at first, yet it found itself ingesting a little more. Before long it was eagerly consuming the stuff, unable to stop itself. The child felt ill, yet it kept eating and eating until the pink fluff lost its color, and the world faded to black.
–
“You awake yet?”
It took the child a few moments to recognize the noises as words, but it could not decipher what they meant. Its vision returned slowly, and it let out a sickly gurgle, feeling queasy and disoriented.
“‘Bout time,” said the voice. The kylhu child peered around its surroundings and found itself trapped inside a metal cage. Everything nearby was grey and shiny, unlike the familiar orange sands of Kylh’on.
A figure approached the cage, causing the child to back into a corner. It recognized the figure at once: the human from the carnival.
“Have a nice nap, kiddo?” said the man, but the child did not understand him. The human crouched down and tapped lightly on a metal bar. “Sorry about this,” he said. “Your kind don’t have much in the way of currency. None we can use in the colonies, anyhow. But you… You’re something special. The colonies are just itching for a new display, and I think you’re it. You’re gonna put us on the map again, little guy.”
The young kylhu shrunk even further into the corner, its little body quivering. It wanted to go back home. It didn’t like this place.
The human exhaled and rose to his full height. “Buck up there, champ,” he said. “You’re in show business, now.”
by submission | Mar 17, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
I found her on my way home from a party. She was sitting in the middle of the park’s square in the four shadows of the four streetlights, and she was hugging her knees to her chest as if her life depended on it while her head was tucked in behind it. Her hair was short, dirty like her face and the nightgown that seemed to be all she was wearing.
She was pretty.
I sat down three feet in front of her, legs crossed. It was a little chilly out, and a storm was moving in, kicking up leaves and dust before it.
“You’re going to get cold,” I said. “Would you like my coat?”
She made a noise like a whimper and hugged her knees tighter. She whispered something, but it was lost in the wind.
I leaned forward. “What was that?”
“I have to stay in the center.”
I looked around. The city rose up all around us, towering over the trees. On each corner of the park was one of the four towers – two hundred stories each of pristine carbon, steel, and silicon and home to four million people a piece. She was sitting exactly in the middle of all four, at the center of sixteen million lives.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to be alone any more. I’m surrounding myself with people.”
I felt something catch in my throat. It’s so easy to be left behind and forgotten these days. I was like her once, sometimes I still am. There are some things that drugs can’t cure. I hadn’t imagined the tattoo on her wrist that marked her as broken, that read ‘Schz5-105014.’
At some point people stopped trying to even pretend to care about the schizophrenics, the manic-depressives and psychotic depressives, the hallucinators and day-time dreamers and the happily mad men and women of the world. Bag them, tag them, drug them, and if they cause trouble, neutralize them. That was the way society dealt with them any more. Cures are for the healthy, after all. Homelessness and poverty was easy to fix, but other problems? Too much work.
I hugged my knees to my chest, rested my chin on them, mirroring her. “It’s bad right now, isn’t it.”
She nodded her head, an almost imperceptible movement in the half-dark.
I wanted to tell her she wasn’t alone any more, I wanted to tell her that I would help her through this and help her through life and, if she wanted, through death. I wanted to hold her and run my fingers through her hair and whisper to her that everything would be alright.
I ran my hand over the rough scar on my wrist where I had burned my mark off and melted the electronic tag. MD5-103331. Manic-Depressive, fifth order. Most severe. Dangerous.
I couldn’t tell her that she wasn’t alone, I couldn’t help her or hold her or whisper in her ear. She was dangerous, like me, like all of us. She would draw attention, have me found out. I would be evicted back to one of the homes, I would lose my job and my friends. I just couldn’t do it. I stood up and left her sitting there in the middle of nothing, fat drops of rain beginning to fall like so many empty tears.
I saw in the news reports that they found her body after the storm, wet and cold and limp and empty.
They burned it with the rest of the ones that always turn up after bad weather.
by submission | Mar 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : A. Zachary Spery
I was looking good when I wheeled into Chaucer’s, the hottest singles bar in lower downtown. I just had my corpus bridge upgraded to a new Mitsushimi DX900q and installed prominently on the side of my Neodynamics’ engramatic coprocessor case. My high efficiency General Electronics’ sonofusion power cell glowed a brilliant green through the walls of the polyurethanic cylinder housing in my abdomen and my polished aluminum frame was gleaming. My drive wheels were new Goodyear’s.
I rolled across the room to an empty space at the bar and ordered my usual gin and tonic. The bar tender handed it to one of my end-effectors. I swung around and leaned back on the elbow of my quaternary manipulator to casually survey the room.
That’s when she rolled in. She had a classy rig with the kind of right angles that would drive the Robopope to sin. It was elegant, with just enough acrylic-plexi to see there was high dollar hardware inside, but not so much that you could tell the bus speed of her hypothalamic multiplexor. She wheeled up beside me and ordered a girly drink–something with an umbrella. The other men in the bar were disassembling her with their optical sensors.
I craned my neck over and said, “Girl, you’ve increased my coolant flow by orders of magnitude.”
She pointed one of her optics at me briefly and removed a cigarette from her purse. “It looks like you can handle it.” Then she smiled and said, “Nice cooling system.”
My CPU voltage capped and the chrome on my heat sinks blued.
She continued, “But I don’t think you could handle me. You’re not my style.” She swiveled her optical instrument array away. “Too much show, too little go.”
I gestured to the transparent cover over my DSX-771 motherboard cluster with onboard cognitive accelerators. “Girl, I am all go. I am the Italian sports car of go. It takes me mere seconds to calculate pi out to a billion decimal places.”
She smiled again. “No, not that kind of go–”
Just then a large industrial unit lumbered up and put a hulking mechanical arm on the bar between her and me. He had a flat grey coat of paint over a steel art deco exoskeleton that made him look like a soviet era locomotive. Gears spun and clunked within him, heat waves emanated from a vent on his head, and I think my state of the art Trasco olfactory sensors detected a hint of burned oil.
“Is this jerk bothering you?” asked the locomotive while glaring at me.
“I think he was just keeping your spot cool until you arrived, baby.” she said. “Weren’t you, Fonzy?”
“Thanks.” said the locomotive as he pushed me over to the adjacent spot–stripping the gears in my drivetrain. “I owe you one.”
I left. Maybe I’ll try Duffy’s.
by submission | Mar 9, 2012 | Story |
Author : George R. Shirer
Thraewen hangs in the middle of the view-pool, pretty and pristine. Dillon and Three can see the nightside’s cities, bright constellations scattered across the Capwen Archipelago. Three strokes the Starfish’s controls and the bioship moves. Night gives way to day. The view-pool displays high clouds until Three fiddles with the resolution, magnifying an image on the surface.
The house is ceramic, all bright white curves, surrounded by green moss-grass and a white fence. Inside the fence, Dillon sees a child playing with a dog.
“Well?” asks Three.
Dillon glances at the alien. Three almost looks human, only the gill-slits in his throat and the webbing between his fingers suggesting otherwise.
“Well what?”
“Do you want them to die?”
“Back home, the government says the Thraeweni are monsters. Why would they lie?”
“Propaganda? Misinformation? Blind stupidity? Take your pick.”
Dillon frowns. He had met Three at a bar, back on Tranin. At the time, Dillon just thought Three was trying to pick him up. They talked about art and science, politics and the war. The war really interested Three.
After the bar closed, Three invited Dillon back to his place. Dillon was expecting a hotel, not a living starship able to cross interstellar distances in the blink of an eye! Now, Three had brought Dillon to Thraewen, to judge the people and decide if the war was worthwhile.
“Why do you care what I think?”
“I’m getting a second opinion.”
“For what?”
“I have to decide whether or not to stop the Tranin Armada and I can’t make up my mind.”
“How would you stop the armada? You’re one man, in one ship!”
“It wouldn’t be that hard,” says Three. “My species is much older than yours. We can do all kinds of things. I want to make the right choice here, but I’m not human. I won’t interfere if you tell me not too.”
“So you want me to make a decision that it took my government months of analysis to make?”
“Yes.”
Dillon looks into the view-pool. The girl is rolling around on the moss with the dog. If the armada attacks, she’ll probably die. He glares at Three. Why couldn’t he have just wanted to shag?
“You’re not human,” says Dillon. “You shouldn’t interfere.”
Three nods. “The Thraeweni girl said the same thing.”
“You spoke with one of them about this?”
“I had to be impartial. She agreed with you, although her reasons were different.”
“Were they?”
“She said the Tranin Armada was a joke. The Thraeweni Navy and their allies would obliterate it before it even got out of the Tranin system.”
Dillon shrugs. “It’s just bravado. Can you take me home now?”
“Of course.”
Three strokes his controls and the Starfish leaps across the parsecs. The interior lights dim and the image in the view-pool changes.
Dillon stares in horror at the wreck of his world. Tranin burns, reduced to cinders by a fleet of monstrous alien ships that hang in orbit around the planet.
“Well,” says Three, “I suppose it wasn’t bravado after all.”
