by submission | Jan 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Page LePage
My wife is angry. I have no idea what I’ve done.
“DESTRUCTION SEQUENCE INITIATED.”
It’s at times like these that I know my brother Shen was right when he told me I should have married something with more sophisticated logic calibration — or at least a better emotional processor.
“SELF-DETONATION IN 10, 9, 8–”
I grit my teeth together. “Abort auto-destruct.”
Her eyes twinkle at my concession, a miniature light show in progress in her sockets. “REQUEST GRANTED.”
“You know, Delta, I really wish you wouldn’t initiate your emergency protocols at the first sign of conflict.”
She stands there mutely.
I sigh. She’s never been much of a conversationalist. I’d skimped on those features, too, on the initial install, not wanting a companion who’d talk my ear off. I’ve had enough experience hanging out with Shen and his model Gamma with her incessant “did you know” followed by interjections of factoids only tangentially related to the situation at hand. “Boy, honey your skin looks lovely today.” “Did you know that the skin is the largest organ of the human body, while the liver is the largest organ in the human body?” No thank you.
But sometimes, the silence gets to you. If you can call it that. There’s a subtle humming when she’s operative. I thought I’d learn to block it out after a while but no dice. I often ponder switching her off.
“YOU WERE THINKING ABOUT GAMMA AGAIN.”
“No, Honey, I wasn’t,” I say.
“THAT IS A LIE.”
Technically she’s right of course. I was thinking about my Shen’s wife but not in the way she’s implying. “Delta, it’s not like that.”
“YOU WISH YOU HAD PURCHASED THE GAMMA MODEL. YOU CONSIDER ME AN INFERIOR UNIT.”
Again, what she’s saying is true, though taken out of context, blown out of proportion. I wonder what aberrant biorhythms she’s picking up, how she detects my deception. She either has a specialized chip or was initialized to be insecure and skeptical. Either way, it’s highly irritating. I sigh. “It’s late, Delta. Are you coming to bed?”
I hear her internal fan kick on, and the whirring grows louder. She is apparently working through complex processes, working out an algorithm to weigh pros and cons. I turn from her, change quickly into my pajamas, crawl beneath the covers.
“REQUEST GRANTED,” she finally replies, switching off the light and climbing in beside me.
Touch is the one sensation the designers got absolutely correct. She backs into me so I’m holding her. Her skin is soft and warm. I smooth her stray hairs from her face. “Good night, Delta,” I say. As her gentle hum lulls me to sleep, I let my mind wander, make a quick mental note to call Shen tomorrow and see if he and Gamma would like to have dinner.
“YOU’RE THINKING OF HER, AREN’T YOU?”
It’s going to be a long night.
by submission | Jan 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : Gordon Day
The man was dressed in ivory and on his chest for all to see was a red bolt, declaring his allegiance to the Militant Atheist order. His audience did not know it yet, but he would be the last to publicly wear it.
His lightly freckled cheeks begin to vibrate in tune to his lips as he turned on his PA system and began his speech.
“The world is a carnival of sins, temptations, sorceries, and fear organized by men who claim their faith holds them above such vice. They promise to deliver from the bite of reality and to place you into the hands of God. He will lighten your load, they say. The captain of his ship will take you through the straits, where vile cliffs of indecency border on each side. If you do not wish to pay for charter you are left on the beach of a world crumbling apart. And if you cannot suffer his orthodox rule while aboard, you are thrown into the salty depths.”
His bulky, but soft frame had become the object of a small collection of consciousness.
“But brothers and sisters, I ask you to divorce such rancid and illogical thoughts from your head. The parcel with which man has been burdened with is not sin, but intellect. It is not our task to carry it to the top of a mountain to sacrifice, but to carry it through the universe in an effort to understand how chaos is ordered. We are not the product of a divine manifestation, but of the natural tendency for reproduction to overcome the static and inert.”
The crowd had grown larger as the freako unhinged his jaws and openly defied not just God, but the society that had long since rejected the need for science.
“We must rise from the mud that we have mistaken for gold. We must open not our hearts, but our minds. We must expand past the limits of spirituality and discover the boundaries of our physical and glorious reality. Life is meant for-”
A thunderous cascade of lightning erupted from the sky. The crowd recoiled a half second to late as the heretic was consumed in light, a black imprint against so much white.
*******
Edson scanned the courtyard again. There was no undue damage, though the radiation would cling to the stucco of the houses for a couple of months. And he did not see any more ivory fools. He leaned back in his chair and said, “Hey boss, looks like the satellite flattened him. And I don’t see any more mice in the underbrush.”
The commander replied, “That’s good, imagine, going into the capital city, and trying a stunt like that. He might have actually started a revolution out of the darkness!”
by submission | Jan 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : George S. Walker
Before the EMP went off, the sky over Stonehenge had been aflitter with fairies scattering pixie dust.
Agent Jack Bishop pulled off his mirrorshades as tourists around him tried to blink away the afterimage of the electromagnetic flash.
“Mummy,” said a little girl, “the fairies are gone.”
“They’ll be back, Love.”
No, thought Jack, they won’t. His days of swatting fairies with rolled-up newspapers were over. Surreptitiously, he looked down at the remote in his hand. After triggering the EMP device, it was dead, like every electronic device for miles. People were vainly fingering their phones, checking the earbuds on their iPods. An excited swell of conversation replaced the electronic void.
Whistling, Jack strode down the road away from the standing stones, passing frustrated drivers behind the wheels of stalled cars. He was already dreaming about spending his mission bonus. If Queen Camilla and Charles realized what the CIA had done here today, they’d be Royally pissed. But the British military-industrial complex would thank him.
In a meadow, he saw two little boys in the middle of a fairy ring, mushrooms forming a circle around them. They were searching desperately through the grass and clapping to bring back the fairies.
He shouted, “Man up!”
They looked at him, startled.
“Go home and play Black Ops or something!”
Not in a home near here, of course, for he’d fried their Xboxes.
As he continued along the road, a driver stepped out of his Mini and waved to him. “What happened at the Stones, mate?”
“Fireworks. Having car problems?”
The man nodded. “I hope some brownies come along soon to fix it.”
Don’t hold your breath, thought Jack.
The fairies, brownies and sprites were a plague on the world’s economy. Ever since the web ads proclaiming, “Click if you believe,” fairy sightings had multiplied, starting at Stonehenge. This was the nexus, the portal between the real electronic world and the mushy green fantasy one. As the Director said, “The bucks stopped here.”
When Jack checked into his hotel, the clerk apologized for the power and phone outage. “I’m sure they’ll have it fixed by nightfall, sir.”
They didn’t. When Jack went to bed, the only light was moonlight.
But he awoke the next morning to the normal rumble of traffic outside. Sunlight leaked through the curtains. He was about to turn on the television to check if Wall Street was celebrating, when he remembered: the EMP had fried the TV.
Then he noticed a flicker of motion above the dresser. He saw his dead iPhone on top of it. But he distinctly remembered tossing it in the wastebasket last night. The back cover had been removed, the circuit board exposed. Next to it, an incredibly tiny soldering iron was plugged into an acorn.
The phone rang. Jack picked it up gingerly.
“They’re back,” said the Director.
by submission | Jan 8, 2012 | Story |
Author : Z. J. Woods
Crowley said, “You sure you wanna do this?”
I brushed at the front of the faded jumpsuit. Nothing on it, of course. Nervous habit.
He took a long drag from his cigarette, sighed the smoke out. “Well,” he said. Expecting me to fill the silence. With what?
“Dammit, Crowl,” I said eventually. “Just do it. You won’t be back this way for … what? Six, seven years?”
“Seven on the inside,” he said. “Really can’t say.”
“I can’t wait that long.” Pictures of my broke-down apartment tumbled through my head. Leaky ceiling, peeling wallpaper, the works. Anything you can think of to make a home uncomfortable, that place had it. That whole damned world had it. “Do the thing before I change my mind.”
“Ain’t nothing much better out there,” he said.
“We gonna sit here all day?”
He shrugged, ground the cigarette into an ashtray that pulled out of the front console. Then he held the bike handle-looking thing with one hand and flipped switches with the other. “Ain’t too far off now. Look.”
The black mass blotted out the stars ahead. Space serpent, as Crowley had promised. Only they go fast enough to make jumping between the settlements possible. And only they know where they’re headed.
“The fuck do you plan to wrangle that thing?” I had to ask. “Can’t hardly see it.”
He tapped on a screen above the bike handle. The serpent squirmed, an orange blob
in green space. “Besides,” he added, “the harpoon knows its business better than I do. Nothing to worry about.”
When the ship knows more than its pilot, well, let’s just say it’s a hell of a universe we live in.
“Alright now, watch this.” Crowley did something with the bike handle, and the harpoon roared out faster than the old tug it came from could ever hope to go. Took about twenty, thirty minutes to hook the serpent. When I tell you I could hear my heart beat the whole time, wondering if it’d work at all or if Crowley was just a crazy bastard like he’d always been, God knows I’m not exaggerating.
I can’t say Crowley isn’t crazy, now, and he’s sure a bastard, but one thing he isn’t is a liar. Pain kicked the serpent into action. The line behind the harpoon pulled tight. Space disappeared.
Seven years. On the inside.
by submission | Jan 7, 2012 | Story |
Author : Suzanne Borchers
Creak.
Edwin stopped his writing stylus. The screen pulsated waiting for the next letter.
Silence.
Once more, he began gliding the stylus, writing his letters with meticulous care. Edwin did not know why this was necessary when thoughts could produce the same effect on the screen, but his father had told him to do it. So he wrote.
Creak.
He stopped. Would the door open? Would he see his father? He sat, waited, and wrote. How long had he been waiting for his father’s return?
Creak.
The door opened, and his android approached him.
“Your father said to go to bed.” The metallic voice expressed nothing beyond the words.
“Is he home?” Edwin did not expect an answer, but he had to ask.
“Your father said to go to bed.”
“All right, I’m coming.” Edwin placed his stylus in its holder and turned off the screen.
Edwin and his companion moved down the dull metallic hallway and into Edwin’s bedroom. The android prepared him for sleep, and helped Edwin lie down on his smooth bed.
After a few minutes, Edwin’s father arrived accompanied by a woman. They stood together looking down at Edwin. “Yes, I think we’ve found an answer to the problem.” He held Edwin’s lighted screen in his hands:
“…Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh I am tired of writing letters Ii Jj Kk Ll…”
“Edwin has self-awareness.”
Sleeping yet not asleep, Edwin felt his father touch his hand, and the warmth spread up his arm. He heard them both leave the room.
His father’s words hung in the air behind them.
“We’ll add self-warming with the next one. We’ll name him Fred.”
Edwin touched one hand to the other. Cold. He blinked his eyes.
“Father?”
