by submission | Dec 10, 2011 | Story |
Author : Timothy Marshal-Nichols
Black; void.
Agnieszka did not believe she had seen anywhere this empty. It was unexpected.
Thus far it had not been a particularly good life: the degenerative illness; stuck in the minuscule grey bunkers of the menials accommodation block; reliant on handouts from other menials. For the past forty years Agnieszka had wasted away to a slender stick; her dirty blue overalls hung limply from her frame; her thin face made her black eyes look enormous. And then the offer came: three key strokes to reset her life, another start, a reboot, all it would take was three little key presses. She’d jumped at the chance, she shouldn’t have.
Weeks later, after the tedious desperate wait, she’d been ushered into the gleaming expanse of the research institute; here to be the first to go back in time; the chosen one to be experimented on. There wasn’t much for her to do; no training was needed. She had been stripped, showered, dressed in white paper overalls newly ripped from their cellophane, and been given a superficial medical examination. From there she was marched through the laboratory; driven out to a half buried concrete bunker where she descended in a lift to a platform. From there she walked alone through a narrow passageway to the chamber where she was to initiate the experiment.
The door slammed shut, bolts hissed. All that remain of the world outside was memory, and an occasional faint metallic clang.
Inside the bright grey chamber the shiny metal walls were smooth and polished. There was almost nothing here; just a bright blinding light above; the faint outline of the door she had just entered; and a small hip height console jutting out from the far wall, on this those three precious keys. She waited, should she? She didn’t want to do this any more. She waited; they, those above ground, would be expecting some response; she waited. She strode to the console and looked at it. Slowly she pressed the Ctrl key with her left hand little finger, and quickly took it away. She waited; could she back out? There were no communications with the world above. Again she pressed the Ctrl key with her little finger and then, tentatively, held down the Alt key with her forefinger. Closing her eyes she lightly tapped the Delete key with her right hand thumb.
And where was she now? Void; black.
She was supposed to have been transformed into a younger version of herself; one long before her illness had taken hold; but this was not it, this was certainly not it.
The burning sensation was ripping her apart. Time was both standing still, compressed into an unimaginable fraction of a second, and stretching exponentially. Her previous frail body was crushed into an infinitesimal dot, so much smaller then an atom, and was expanding into a whole new universe; she could feel everything as the rate of acceleration diminished.
As the singularity had crushed her; she’d become one with space-time; she was a god, the god Agnieszka.
by submission | Dec 4, 2011 | Story |
Author : Donovan Pruitt
“It itches,” the soldier complained, scratching at the data socket on the back of his neck.
Seated across the table, the doctor offered a sympathetic smile. “That’s normal for a new download, Sergeant Jax. Just don’t think about it. Think about something else.”
“Like what? I wasn’t recruited for my thinking.” Jax continued to fidget.
“Why don’t you tell me the last thing you remember?”
Jax pondered briefly. “Inter-continental orbit hop between Houston and Moscow. Cargo transfer for the space program. I don’t remember the ship name.”
“The download is intermittent,” the doctor explained. “If we dropped everything in at once, your mind would, well, explode.” His eyes darted aside as he solemnly reflected on this concept with apparent regret. “The name will come to you.”
Jax’s face turned uneasy as more memories downloaded. “Did I crash?”
“You did.” The reply was hesitant. They didn’t tend to react favorably to the news.
“Well, shit,” Jax replied unexpectedly, chuckling after a few moments. “So how am I alive?”
It was a fair question. “Technically, you’re not, yet,” the doctor admitted, though he looked pleased. “We downloaded your brain and are attempting to parse it correctly so you can be re-appropriated.”
“Re-appropriated, huh?” Jax repeated the clinical term. “That would explain this tan,” he joked, raising his foreign arm into the light. His personality was returning. “So technically, I’m not alive?”
“Not exactly.”
“But I’m not dead?”
“Well, no.”
“So I guess, scientifically speaking, I’m undead.” Jax erupted with laughter.
Pursing his lips with subtle amusement, the doctor offered a nod. “I suppose so.”
Turning pale, Jax straightened his posture. “Sir, I have a question.”
“Go ahead,” the doctor replied, still distracted by the comedic nature of their exchange.
“Did the Zs take the Moon Base, or do we still have control?”
The doctor blinked, focusing on him with narrowed eyes. “The Zs?”
“The zombies, sir,” Jax clarified matter-of-factly.
Turning from the table, the doctor rubbed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes to release the tension. “Undead,” he said aloud, identifying the trigger word. Sighing, he reached into the folds of his lab coat as he turned back, producing a pistol that he easily leveled at the man’s head and fired. Gore splashed against the wall and the body collapsed forward on the table, lifeless. Tilting his head to the ceiling, the doctor stoically spoke his report, “Subject twenty-seven terminated due to faulty data transfer. Download incomplete.”
The main door opened into the room, giving way to an officer dressed in a formal uniform with numerous trinkets shining proudly on his chest. Casting a disapproving look at the fallen soldier, he redirected his disdain to the doctor. “What happened this time?”
“General,” the doctor offered a lackluster greeting. Replacing the pistol, he braced both hands atop the table with a heavy, weary push to his feet. “The system still isn’t able to separate actual events that the subject experienced from dream sequences that he perceived as real. He apparently remembered a dream fighting zombies on the Moon. The word undead must have caused the server context recognition to give him a packet of information that he thought was real.”
“Well, fix it,” the general demanded, turning around to exit. “We’ve got plenty of vegetables left for you to practice on, but let me know if you run out of bullets.”
Frowning after the general, the doctor took a moment to recuperate before looking up to the ceiling again. “Sally, send in someone to make arrangements for the body, please. Then contact the coma ward. We’re going to need another blank disc.”
by submission | Dec 3, 2011 | Story |
Author : Robert Vennell
I stumble down the road through the hazy tungsten half-light. Padded headphones suck out the ambient noise and replace it with the hum of distorted guitars.
An empty street, a dim coating of artificial light and the buzz of electric instruments.
I have to remind myself I’m really here. It feels like I’ve withdrawn into some back-room in my head, and am now watching my life play out through my eyes, as if it were happening to someone else.
From this vantage point i begin to speculate on what a bizarre and unnatural circumstance this is. That on a small planet orbiting a relatively small sun in an ordinary solar system on the outskirts of a galaxy like any other; a bipedal primate such as myself is walking down paved roads illuminated by synthetic lights listening to recordings of manufactured music.
In the light of these thoughts I can’t help but feel greatly pessimistic about humanity’s chances. Surely a species that no longer concerns itself with its own survival cannot exist indefinitely.
I turn the corner and press on, no particular destination in mind. A white cat stalks across the road, catches sight of me and then bolts off in the opposite direction. It occurs to me that there the other species that inhabit our planet are constantly engaged in a struggle for survival, and yet to we privileged homo sapiens born into developed nations surviving is easy. To meet the challenges of life the human brain underwent rapid expansion in brain capacity to the point where we have developed societies and structures that render the struggle for survival almost irrelevant. Now the hard part is trying to keep those advanced brains of ours constantly entertained and stimulated.
From the moment we wake up in the morning to when we go to sleep at night our minds are occupied not with things to aid our survival but things to keep us from boredom. Tasks and jobs we can do so that our lives can have purpose and meaning. Television, movies, music, literature; things we can consume to keep our brains active and ticking over.
I wonder if such an unnatural system can sustain itself.
A street light catches my eye. It is flickering and buzzing, and eventually it burns itself out and the street is cloaked in darkness.
Suddenly my brain feels stuffy, the constant pounding of music in my ears aggravating and i take my headphones off and revel in the cool breeze rushing against my ears. Reconnecting with the sounds of the world around me, i feel like I’ve slipped back into my body for a time.
My dreamy speculations about the fate of the world seem dramatic and unimportant now. I amble off towards a distant street light, reassuring myself i will go to bed earlier in future.
by submission | Nov 30, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Jopek
A man lies gripping a slowly tumbling boulder of ice and stares into the distance of space.
His broken femur pokes sharply into the material of his white skinsuit threatening to rupture it. His foot and leg are numb, his boot full of thickening blood. Here, deep in the planetary rings, the light is weak and the shifting ice unnerves him. In his concussed state waves of vertigo sweep over him, making orientation painful.
His spaceship will be crossing the planet’s terminus soon, allowing him perhaps one more chance at rendezvousing with it. An explosion has ripped the jetpack from his back and shredded the sample bags he was towing. Now he can only improvise a method of propulsion by cannibalizing his remaining suit pressure.
He’d been trailing Sharon back to the ship when the explosion flung them apart. She had nearly reached the airlock. Twice already he has glimpsed her body for scant seconds before she is eclipsed by the drifting ice fragments.
He can make one last effort to try and reach the ship when it comes about its orbit again, although he has no idea how badly damaged it is. He sights the blue corona of the ship’s tail flare and tracks it unsteadily.
Her body appears then in his peripheral vision, emerging from the ice field, floating amidst mangled metal and accretion stones. As he gapes, suddenly a pocket opens, a random confluence of space with her at its center. The scarlet bloom splashed across her torso is punctuated by the bright yellow lumishaft protruding obscenely from her chest. The lumishaft has activated upon impact and splays morose yellow light in all directions.
He finds the ship again, now arcing towards its closest approach. Through blurred eyes he watches her broken body drifting closer. He feels like he is falling, falling, falling, but the ship is nearly there. Nearly. The ship is coming for him — she is coming for him. The watery reflection of red and yellow in his eyes is joined by the shocking blue of plasma thrusters.
A man lies gripping a slowly tumbling boulder of ice and stares into the distance of space.
by submission | Nov 27, 2011 | Story |
Author : M. J. Hall
We wait.
We the shadow-women, the marginalized, the dispossessed. We wait, for our time of power is near.
Long ago, the elite decided that natural means of reproduction were far too messy for those of great wealth and status. As the clone banks churned out replacement generations, the ruling class forswore the pleasures of the flesh for more aesthetic pursuits. The conservative leaders built their clean cities on the surface, in the light; while we, the primitive and carnal, we were banished to the secret places underground.
But gradually, creeping through the shadows into the undertunnels of the city, the influential found us, the pleasure-women. We had hidden, we members of the oldest profession, when the Conserves turned society against us. But having turned away from prurient pursuits, it was those same Conserves who then sought us out, found our warrens in the tunnels, richly draped in silks and velvets. Our sensual dens, they found.
From us they learned passion and ecstasy anew, all the gratification that flesh can give, all the desire that had been purged from the sterile Aboveworld. The libidinous, lascivious, satyric realm was ours to teach, and they learned.
And we learned, too . . . .
We learned their secrets. All their whispers in the night, their murmurs in sleep. We listened . . . .
The leaders, the rulers in this capitol city, whispering to us in the darkest hours underground. A quiet susurration, barely heard above the rustle of silk, all the humdrum details of a bureaucrat’s routine. They murmured to us, we the illiterate and disenfranchised. What would we know of leadership, of intergalactic policy? How could we understand all the secrets of empire and polity?
They came in our beds. They spilled in our sheets, whispered in our ears, all the secrets of this capitol planet. We learned . . . .
And then we met. We, the shadow-women, relegated to the dark places underground. We met, and spoke, and shared our knowledge.
Our mothers—mothers brewed an herbal infusion, a sweet tea, to ease the clientele into sleep. But somewhere along the generations of pleasure-women, we realized another quality of the tea. Words whispered as the client sleeps become impulses, yearnings, desires upon waking.
We learned. We spoke. And now, we move . . . .
There are many of us, secreted away in the gloom. But to each one of us, so many of you come for comfort, for pleasure, for easement. So many, many elites in a city of rulers, on this imperial planet that rules the entire ‘verse. So many, many ears into which we whisper suggestions that become urges, inexorable compulsions upon waking.
We, the shadow-women, the pleasure-givers. We meet, we decide, we direct. From the deepest depths, from the shadows, we rule.
A vote? Tomorrow? Yes, but for now, drink. Relax. Sleep. Let me whisper in your ear . . . .
We wait. You snore. We whisper . . . and we wait.
