by submission | May 11, 2011 | Story
Author : Eric Poch
“When legend becomes fact, print the legend”
-The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
I’ve learned that if you put a man in a hole long enough, he’ll think of everything you could ever imagine. Put a dozen men in there long enough, and they’ll create the stuff of legend.
For the longest time we didn’t know what to call him, until one of the boys remembered a name they read in an old book. It was fitting.
We call him “La Longue Carabine”: The Long Rifle. Command swears up and down that he doesn’t exist. That it can’t be one man.
I know better.
Rumor spread fast as more and more of our boys were picked off. Slotikin thinks La Longue Carabine is a genetically enhanced soldier. He started ranting about intel that command had in its possession detailing the modifications the Reds made to their man. Some were believable: enhancements to the endocrine glands, rewired synapses for faster reflexes, modification to the pupils and iris to allow for low-light vision- the usual “super soldier” stuff. The more radical shit he came up with was frightening.
“I saw it. I’m telling you I saw it. They had pictures, man. The Reds grafted the rifle to his fucking arm. They got it wired to his brain so he doesn’t even need to use a scope. His eyes are the scope.”
Aside from the dozens of treaties they would be violating, we pointed out that the Reds wouldn’t surgically attach a rifle to a man’s arm; it would be too difficult to take off without killing him.
“You’re not getting it. They’re not planning to take it off. They’re not coming back to get him. That’s how the Reds work: They drop him out there and tell him to shoot ’till he’s dead. ‘For the motherland’ and all that bullshit.” He was getting too loud. “They wired their boy to kill, and that’s what he’s going to do. It’s not even about taking us out. It’s a fucking mind-game. Psychological warfare. Why do you think the uppers are covering it up? How come none of them get clipped? Have you ever thought about that?”
An MP overheard this and ordered him back to his bunk for a period of “mental leave.” As Slotkin was being escorted out of the mess hall he yelled back to us:
“He doesn’t sleep. How can you sleep if you don’t have eyelids? How can you sleep if you don’t have eyelids?” He just kept yelling that over and over as the MP dragged him out.
It’s been days since it happened, and Slotkin hasn’t spoken to anyone. The boys don’t know what to believe anymore… but I do.
I see him. Every day I look through my scope and there he is. Sometimes he’s bald, or fat. Sometimes he’s a woman. Today he’s short. Very young. He looks as though he hasn’t eaten in a week. He looks scared.
I watch him through my sight. He’s scanning the base… searching… looking for me. The weight of the rifle is making his arms shake. I bury the cross-hair in his chest. He keeps scanning. I flick the safety off. He’s almost got me in his sights when I pull the trigger.
No twitching or coughing up blood today. He drops, and I pack up and head to my bunk. I know there will be another tomorrow. A new legend. It will be my life against his, and they will call him La Longue Carabine.
by submission | May 10, 2011 | Story
Author : Aradhana Choudhuri
“John, I’m done. I’m getting rid of all of them.”
“Go for it. You don’t need to ask me.”
“Do you want something? There’s lots of vid, from when mom was little.”
“Where would I put it? Just…just flush it, ok?”
“Tomorrow. Federal Data Bureau will certify the wipe. Then I can sell the things. Do you want a part of the cash?”
“Nah, you keep it.”
“There’s a lot of them.”
“Wait a mo…” the vid-screen goes blank as John puts her on hold. So she counts the drives, in her head.
The oldest ones, each as big as her palm, black and utilitarian, are already on the truck. Then there are the cutsie-wootsie ladybugs and ballerinas and an entire array’s worth of koala bears from the thirties, barely a hundred TeraBytes each. They did get smaller for a while, till the superparamagnetic threshold was breached. The newest drive in the house is twenty years old, a striped orange cube the size of a small child.
The screen clears and John is back. “We’re doing ok, sis. Jill says you should buy yourself something.”
“That’s really nice of you two.”
“You’ve been paying Mom’s Datatax for years…” something in the background distracts John. “Mo…” He puts her on hold again.
She remembers sitting on the floor, playing with her bright blue rolling pin and ladle and a small sticky wad of dough, and her mother saying how Quantum Storage was just a year or so away. Then it was how Quantum ran into problems, but SpaceFold Memsisters would solve the data crisis. Give it a couple of years.
Her mother had stopped talking by the time she was in her teens. The pile of drives continued to grow, from the study into the spare bedroom and then into the hall.
The kitchen was half-full by the time mom retired. It took another two years for Social Services to send somebody around.
They all sat around the table, and the lady from Social took her mother’s hand, gently, and told her that hoarding pension payments – it took seven months of pension, by then, to buy a 400ExaByte drive – was not ok and there was more data generated every second than there was storage for it manufactured in a year, and did she really think she could save it all?
When her mother died, someone suggested getting it all into a government Anthro-study, but Nonessential Data doesn’t qualify. Some grad student, maybe from Socio-Analytics…But she doesn’t know any students. And renting a room at a Data Warehouse makes the taxrate go up not down, even if it means that she gets the kitchen back.
This time it’s Jill’s face on the screen when it clears.
“Sweetie,” says Jill, “I’m so glad you’re doing this. You need space. You need to make room for your own life.”
“It’s not that…I just can’t afford it anymore.” She hates explaining. Her sister-in-law always gets that pity-faux-therapist look on her face.
“Of course dear,” says Jill. “Tell us how it goes, ok?”
“Sure.”
“Bye sweetie!” The vid-screen goes dark. Only the sensors above the panel, visible-spectrum and infrared and audio and chem-sig, record the fleeting expressions on her face, the slight wince, the microtaste of salt in the air. Nonessential. 6:00 AM sharp on Tuesday, all phones in the 5686 area-code purge their memories. There’s a huge fine if they don’t.
by submission | May 8, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
I sure don’t mean to say that the pods they sent us here in aren’t nice. There is a chance that they might be too nice, though. I’d be the first to admit that’s a strange problem to have, but we have it. I’m not trying to say that I’m better than anyone else here, nobody would believe that. I’m just saying that having ants in my pants, like all my teachers used to say, gets me out of my pod everyday. Nobody else has so much as taken a peak out of their pod, not even after a month.
I don’t know what’s going on in anyone else’s pods. I’m sure they’ve got all the great stuff that I have in mine. Plenty of them have partners or families in there, too. At first I thought that maybe I was too bold, that maybe none of the women would let their men out after they saw how I was carrying on. That had to be my ego talking; I’ve never been mistaken for a model. More often, I get mistaken for a tall boy.
Still, I’ve been doing my part to get our potential community functioning. I started all the plants from the garden pod. That didn’t work out as expected. The soil here is very fertile but also very strange. Everything I’ve planted is already huge. There’s the strange part, too. All the pumpkins bounce away from me when I try to pick them up. I wasn’t even going to pick any of them, just hold them up to test their weight. They didn’t know that, I guess. Also, the corn emits suspicious whispers whenever I walk by. It’s not the wind, I’d know the difference. I’m just concerned because the creeping phlox is creeping close to a few of the pods and I’m worried that will just give whoever is inside another excuse to stay in.
My main goals for now are taking away excuses for staying in. Mostly I’ve been doing this by applying paint to things. I make sure to only use the most inviting colors and interesting designs (interesting to me, at least). I’ve got a giant mural that says “Welcome Out!” in the most magical colors. The light of our new home interacts with our pigments in a way that makes them look extra magical. I had to build up to the big mural. It took a while to get comfortable with ladders and scaffolding and all that. I think the extra know-how on my part really shows. It’s not that I consider “You Are Special Avenue” a bunch of junk, just an immature work. Besides, all that repetition, it must say you are special a hundred times down that stretch of road, really sharpened my skills (the later specials are considerably more special than the earlier specials).
But yeah, I’m hoping somebody, anybody, comes out of their pod. I’ve always been kind of a loner but I’ve been realizing lately that I’m most likely growing out of that phase. It would probably be good to have some other opinions out here, too. I’m not entirely sure that all of my ideas are good ones. When you have as many ideas as I do, they can’t all be winners. Just to provide one example, I’ve been really second guessing sending out the robots to find me flowers. One of them brought back what strongly resembles a piece of an alien spaceship. Oh well, that’s how things are right now, out here. Feel free to join me, Insiders.
by submission | May 7, 2011 | Story
Author : Marlan Smith
Tark stared at the diagram. It was a golden square, clearly valuable, more valuable than the machine it came off of. He honestly didn’t think he would ever have found salvage this far outside of the galactic rim.
“What are they?” asked Pim. He was looking over Tark’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” said Tark. “Do you think we should call HQ?”
“Are you kidding?” said Pim. “We have explicit orders not to get involved in alien civilizations. Lets just keep the salvage and go.”
“But these ones are so weird looking.”
Pim sighed and floated to the far side of the bridge. He hovered for a while at the controls, touching this and that display. A meter wide square appeared suspended in the middle of the room. A representation of the golden artifact glowed in the center.
“Okay, look,” said Pim. “We’ll make a cypher okay?”
“A cypher?” asked Tark. “Why don’t we just try to contact them?”
Pim glared at him. “Look, you’re lucky I’m willing to allow this.”
“Okay okay, fine,” said Tark. “Let me program the message then.”
“Do you even know what to say?”
“Yeah there’s an audio transmission from the planet.”
“Fine,” said Pim, tapping the controls with a slender finger. “Then afterwards can we just go?”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll go.”
Tark held the square in his digits while the rest of the probe was crushed, cubed and reduced to its elements. In another chamber, a figure stood, ambiguous behind the glass. Pim tapped at the controls and turned to Tark.
“You’re sure they look like that?”
“Yeah,” said Tark. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know,” said Pim. “Just seems kind of odd. You don’t see many life forms so thin. And golden? Really? Do they carry some sort of isotope in their skin?”
Tark shrugged. “I guess. They’re clearly spacefaring, so they must have holographic technology. If they looked any different than what’s on the plaque, they would have just shown us in three dimensions.”
“So they’re flat? That’s ludicrous.”
“Look,” said Tark. “Trust me. When they meet the cypher, they won’t even be able to tell it apart from their own. It will blend right in, talk to a few of them. We’ll watch the whole thing cloaked, then we leave.”
Pim sighed again. “I swear, if HQ fires us for this, I am never forgiving you.”
“Trust me.”
The cypher was a thin creature, golden skinned and asymmetrical. It walked on the flimsy balls of its feet out the door and into the delivery pod. Pim watched it go with some skepticism.
“I don’t know… are the arms supposed to be lopsided like that?”
Tark held up his three fingers in a dismissive gesture. “Would you just trust me for once?”
They watched through the cypher’s eyes. They watched as the pod landed and the door opened into a lush, green forest.
Phyllis Guntmeyer had been walking her pomeranian when Spunky began to bark. A man stepped from behind a nearby tree–no, not a man. It was a cardboard cutout of a man, frozen in a waving pose. It was golden, naked and flat as paper. And it moved!
“HELLO FINE SIR!” it said. “I WOULD LIKE FOR TO VISIT A NEARBY TOWNSHIP!”
Its mouth was an animated gash in a line-drawing face, a living paper puppet, eight feet tall and impossibly thin. Its bent raised arm waved and twisted like a shaken saw blade.
Phyllis screamed, clutched her chest and fell to the ground.
Pim turned to Tark, his three eyes glaring. “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?”
by submission | May 4, 2011 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
Words cannot describe the light, the heat, the impossible closeness of a star. In this place, even with the best shields science could build, the sheer intense pressure of solar power is more than I can even attempt to explain.
Of course, it was worse outside the flare rooms. I cupped my hands to the comm and hissed, “I can’t open the gates!”
“You have to!” Her voice knifed through me. “There are literally two gates and I’m safe! All you have to do is open them two feet!”
“I can’t take the risk,” I said. “You’ve been out in it too long, and the flare is at its highest peak. If I open the gates we’ll all be bombarded with radiation. I have to save the mission.”
“I AM the mission! And I’m clean, the radiation hasn’t gotten me yet, it’ll be hours before it builds up that much!”
“Kang was with you,” I said. “Where is he?”
“I lost him, I don’t know. Just open the gates! One foot, even just half, I can squeeze through!”
“I can’t.”
She was so close. I ached to reach through the comm and stroke her hair, tell her everything would be all right, but I couldn’t lie to her or myself. She’d been careless. They both had. To be careless, this close to a star, was death.
The mission was everything. I tried to turn off the comm. I couldn’t.
“Let me in! The shielding is burning away! Just open the gates! You don’t even have to admit to it! I’ll take all the blame, I’ll tell them you were unconscious, let me in!”
Where was Kang?
“I’ll do anything you ask! Anything at all! I know I turned you down before but I’ll do it now! Anything, everything! Just please!”
He’d been with her, down there, outside the flare rooms and closer to the shields than anything in the station. I had taken their last reports, they said they were on their way up… it had never occurred to me that they might not make it. When the flare warnings went off, I sealed the rooms like I did every other time.
“You leave me out here and I’ll leave something for the next crew! Something that tells them what you did! I’ll make sure you never work crew again!”
The shields were very sensitive. Maybe the flare was false, just an artifact from the star.
“Promise me you’ll continue my research? I worked here from the beginning! My name, my legacy!”
Or maybe she killed him. I might never know, if I couldn’t find his body after the flare was over.
She had been quiet for a long time. I tapped the comm. “Sasha?”
“I can feel it now,” she said. “I know it’s silly, but I can feel the radiation eating me away from the inside. You were right. I’m sorry.”
“You and Kang never came back,” I said. “I didn’t know you were still out there.”
“It’s not your fault. I can see it coming through the shields.”
“Sasha, push the button.”
“Button?”
“On your suit, the one you should never ever push? Push it now.”
Silence. If she pushed the button, it would inject a vein with a full gram of morphine. She’d be dead in a few minutes, no pain.
“Kang?”
Her mind was going. “It’s ok,” I said, and my voice broke. The flare would be finished in a few days, and then I’d take care of their bodies.
“Just close your eyes. Everything’s ok.”
