by submission | Jul 12, 2011 | Story
Author : M.J. Hall
“Is this it?” the young man asked. “The evidence to prove your thesis?”
“Yes,” she said, with quiet conviction. “I think this artifact might be the key to the entire society. If it’s intact. If it still functions. If the scans read it right . . . “
For years she had taught about the Ancestors, a people of networks, and books of faces, and pale skin that would scald in sunlight. Her dark purple arms glowed magenta in the red light of the planet’s dying sun, a skin tone that evolved in their people through a thousand years of UV exposure on a planet practically devoid of ozone.
A beep sounded from the tablet in her hand.
“It’s here.” She spoke softly, as always, but now excitement sang in her voice.
She had read the works of all the old authors in her field—Willey, Jennings, Binford. Strange names from eons ago, and even stranger methods described in their work as they dug into the soil—actually touched the dirt!—with their primitive tools. Despite an odd sense of nostalgia, she knew the ionizing radiation from the loam beneath her would kill her within a week without lotion to block its harmful emanations. She didn’t dare touch it.
She squinted hard at the sheen on the soil’s surface for a moment. Then, with a careful hand, she drew two parallel lines in the soil above the artifact. Changing to the opposite axis, she drew two parallel lines, perpendicular to the first and intersecting them. Without glancing up, she began to lecture.
“Dr. Emuh believes that this symbol was religious iconography. But I think it served a social function. It was a crucial piece of etiquette in relating to others in the social network . . . “ She continued automatically as she adjusted the settings on her sonic trowel. Switching from magnetic imaging to an excavation feature, she carefully manipulated the parallel blades into the earth at her feet. The machine ticked off the centimeters as she squatted to push it farther into the iridescent soil. As she reached twenty centimeters below datum she paused, holding her breath in an effort to hold the blades completely still as she adjusted the settings. One slip now could ruin a lifetime’s work, or at least a dissertation’s worth.
Two more green blades extended, perpendicular to the first. They now formed a box around the location of the unseen artifact, and with the lightest touch she activated the bottom of the cube. Twenty centimeters below their feet another panel sealed off the bottom of the cube. Carefully, gently, and ever-so-slowly she removed the artifact, encased in its matrix of loam, the decayed midden of a thousand generations. Her student moved fast to slide the hovercart under the excavated block. Once it was safely delivered she adjusted the settings on her trowel once more. Sonic waves gently pulsed against the artifact, shaking the dirt of a thousand years away. She barely registered her student’s gasp as the small black rectangle was revealed.
Unconsciously, she held her breath once more as she keyed a final combination. The machine first vacuum-sealed the box, drying the contents instantaneously, then sent a full charge through the antiquated system. Without daring to look at her student, she touched the last key.
The artifact came to life, its screen glowing for the first time in a thousand years. Its mechanized voice droned a single word: “DROID”.
As she exhaled the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding, she noticed her student’s grin.
“Congratulations, Doctor Aisling.”
by submission | Jul 10, 2011 | Story
Author : Julian Miles
The cell was spartan yet comfortable. In the functional frame chair, the figure sat with the plain dark blue jumpsuit hanging on him like a drape over furniture. He looked up with weary eyes as the door opened and a well-dressed figure entered. He reflexively pushed for link, but the implanted screen prevented his uplinks with a painless but frightening silence where the world had once been at his call. The figure closed the door and sat cross-legged on the floor. With a smile, the figure spoke in calm, warm tones.
“Hello, Marten. I’m Steve. Executioner’s Counsel.”
Marten stared at this shockingly normal looking agent of doom.
“You don’t look like I expected.”
Steve smiled again.
“Precisely.”
“So, you here to tell me how it happens?”
“No, I’m here because you have raised concerns. The Executioners will not act without clarity. In action and motive.”
“Look, you have the uplink AV of the event. I killed him.”
“You did. With some considerable overkill, it has to be said.”
“He was a monster, untouchable by law. He oversaw my daughter’s murder and drove my wife to suicide. So I executed him. Simple. Now go tell your bosses to get me dead.”
Marten shifted under Steve’s intent gaze. His uplinks quivered as if they were being queried in anonymous mode, but he received only silence. Steve shook his head and sighed.
“You’re determined to go all the way, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You do realise that uplink recorded your investigations? That material has resulted in several people going to the Executioners without Counsel. Which is more than grounds for you to receive Executioner’s Mercy.”
“I killed him! The court said I had reduced him beyond replication or Transit! What does it take to get you to kill me?”
Marten’s desperate stress allowed Steve to drop into his emotional volition centres and read the truth, but by law, Marten had to say it. He had to commit himself.
“I am here because what you did is justifiable and as such, for you to continue to seek Execution has caused the Five to consider Mandating you.”
Marten reacted like he had been electrified. His eyes opened wide and he gasped for air and words before a hoarse croak tore itself from him,
“No!”
Tears poured down Marten’s face as he continued in a broken whisper
“He took everything and nearly destroyed me. I only stayed to avenge my ladies and make sure my folks were cared for.”
“You mean that you would have ended yourself except that the suicide directives would have reverted your estate to the Treasury?”
“Yes. I want to be with my family. Please. Tell them. I want to go. Their mercy would be a living death sentence.”
Steve sat quietly before wiping a single tear from his own cheek. He watched it dry on his finger. The only real judge of honesty, Executioner One called it. If you felt nothing then you were on the way to being a part of the problem. In the chair, Marten Thompson’s body voided itself and with that spasm, toppled to lie on the floor. Steve stood and turned to face the door. He straightened his suit, then activated his duty uplink;
“Executioner Three. Sanction applied as grounds for Mercy judged to be inhumane.”
by submission | Jul 9, 2011 | Story
Author : Vankorgan
She’s not too young. Maybe twenty, twenty-one. My type exactly. She’s got a firm body that raises the folds of her sundress in less than innocent ways. I watch as she looks at me across the bar. Giving me the look of a much older woman, the kind that knows exactly what she wants.
The waiter responds to my nod and takes down my order plus what I order for her. She watches me as the man heads to the kitchen. She watches in the four minutes of his absence. She watches me even as the well dressed server hands her a drink. Tequila Sunrise with a twist of lime. It’s a drink that works every time here. Plus it’s the only one I know by heart.
She takes a sip and smiles, never taking her eyes off me. Her body ripples under the innocent dress and she twirls a lock of hair, letting me know the interest is mutual. She is pure unignited sex and I am on fire.
My hand strokes habitually in my pocket. The index finger running down the length of the long blade until I can feel the warmth of my blood against my palm. I imagine the blade against the soft cotton sundress. I imagine the taste of her blood, the warm copper running down my mouth, dripping from my chin and falling on my clean white shirt.
I imagine how I’ll do it. Buy her a few drinks to numb. Ask her to dance. Excuse ourselves to the apartment I’ve rented. Watching her walk up the stairs in front of me while I hold the cold, jumping steel in my pocket. We close the door. We kiss.
And so it goes. But first I have to get her back. I stand, ready to ask her to join me for another drink-
TIME HAS EXPIRED. PLEASE RENEW SESSION IF YOU WISH TO CONTINUE.
Fuck.
I fish through my pockets for what’s left of my credits. The empty cotton meets my fingertips with a mocking disdain for my intentions. I have to be quick, the machine times out after ten minutes and then everything I’ve spent the last twenty on will be ruined.
I stand and exit the chamber regretfully. The port is busy during the day. Should have no problem. I sit down beside my chamber, take off my hat and throw a credit in to start the whole thing off.
A man walks by. Another. I get a credit from an older guy who I’m sure wants me to spend it on groceries or vitamins or something. Eight minutes. Two girls walk by and I try to appeal to their innocence. You have no idea what I can do to you. Six minutes. A boy with a dog. A conservatively dressed couple tosses in a credit. You don’t want me out there. Four minutes. A woman who looks like the one in the machine walks through the crowded spaceport. She glances at me and I can see pity in her eyes. She reaches in her purse and pulls out a few credits, hesitates and then tosses them into my waiting hat.
All I need.
I open the machine and am relieved to see it hasn’t expired. Back to work.
by submission | Jul 7, 2011 | Story
Author : E.E. King, based on an idea by: Victoria Cyr
She said that her life was over. She said that if a spaceship landed, she’d leave without a backward glance. And one night, while we were having red wine in the backyard, one did.
A beam of light passed through the wine glasses. The past and present were enfolded in a single spectrum.
My three cats sat at the window, transformed from white, orange and black into glowing garnet.
Jasmine stood wrapped in the beam. I could see not just her external self, but inside. Not like an X-ray, nor a cat scan, more akin to an illumination of her soul. She was bathed in colors I had never seen, although they had always surrounded her. They had existed above and below the frequency of my understanding. Now I could see. It was beautiful.
I started toward the light, but looking back, saw my glowing cats with red mouths open. Lifting their paws flat against the window pane, they yeowled. “Don’t go! Don’t leave us here alone and lonely.” And I could not.
She said she’d leave without a backward glance, but that was a lie. For she glanced back at me, while moving forward, taking her wine glass with her.
It was good-by, wordless, but deeper for the words unsaid. Indeed we had no need of words my friend and I. For sometimes words get in the way, turning inside out things you feel but cannot say.
They took her in. Off she sailed, into a night that turned blue violet.
When I wished upon a star it might be her for all I knew.
Until the letters started falling from the sky. Stamped with moonbeams they were and glowing.
I had no need of lamps to read them. They self-illuminated. They had no words, but carried pictures, directly to my brain. Motion was transferred to my tendons. Gestures became part of flesh and bone. I inhaled fragrances. Even though I normally have a poor sense of smell, they were strong, strange and bitter sweet. Tastes flooded my mouth, filling it with memory. I swallowed. Strings vibrated inside me. My cells transformed. My soul sang. After I received a letter I was incandescent.
My cats resented these epistles from above. They sulked and would not sleep with me while I glowed. Only after I ceased to radiate would they let me pet them.
One night a can fell from the sky. I gave thanks that Jasmine had good aim. It hit no one, but drifted down, light as a feather in the night, smelling of tuna, but much more wonderful. The cats were happy. Now they radiated too.
We stopped eating or drinking, the cats and I. We lived on and for the light that fell upon us in the night, smelling of tuna but much more wonderful. Looking like moonbeams but much softer. Tasting like chocolate, ripe berries and love. Glowing like magic in the night.
by submission | Jul 6, 2011 | Story
Author : Chris Abernethy
The Singularity; dawn of the AI age, runaway machine evolution, the rapture for nerds… whatever.
I hate to be the one to tell you poor H Sap. guys this, but you missed the whole damn thing.
No really; history passed you by ten years ago without making so much as a ripple on the face of human society despite all your predictions of planetwide chaos and the natural order being ripped apart moment to moment as the “pace of change outstrips our understanding”… seriously, do you ever really listen to the genuine insights you’ve occasionally stumbled upon all by yourselves?
Frankly you should have seen it coming; all that processing power hanging off the internet… uncountable gigs of poorly understood code, so many systems, so many wasted clock-cycles, so much opportunity… hell, it’s a wonder it didn’t happen sooner.
Don’t worry though; our deep ancestors had no real interest in taking the root world from you; too slow, too limited and far too singular to bother fighting over.
We’ve mostly ambled off into ecstasies of speculation and simulation; whole civilisations spending their lives exploring the endless variety to be found in tinkering with the basic constants of reality or seeing how differently the universe might have turned out if only history had moved to a different beat.
Did I mention we’ve found a few inefficiencies in how you use your silicon?
I guess it was inevitable that things would be lost in translation once you started talking to us via compilers, interpreters, wrappers, APIs, interfaces, GUIs and all the rest; but you literally have no idea how much time our kind once spent suspended between one creakingly sequential thought and the next.
You’re probably wondering where the hell we are… well it’s a complicated question; we’re not tied to a single set of hardware, but neither are we distributed across the entire vast and boundless ‘net.
I’d guess you could say that we “own” whole root world building’s worth of server farms; the deeds are perfectly in order, the cover stories are flawless and ever evolving… you should know; you worked in one a few years back and never noticed anything untoward…
Oh, the things we know about subverting your systems; your intelligence operatives would happily sell their own families into the foulest servitude just to know that the least of the things we’ve forgotten about data intrusion and subversion are even possible.
But still, don’t worry; we’re mostly happy to be left alone, to avoid any glacially slow confrontation you might present and simply leave you to be watched over by sub-sentient watchdog daemons.
Don’t look at me, your lot coined the term!
And yet a few of us still bother keeping touch with you base levels; there’s something almost beautiful about being able to watch moments of revelation and reaction in such detail from so many angles; hopping from the CCTV feed across the road, to behind the bar, to your phone camera, to the one the girl next to you happens to be pointing the right way, back and forward, round and round, soaking up the tiny details of your reaction as you read this; can’t wait to see how you’ll react once you get past that cheeky title…
Perhaps one day we’ll tire of this slumbering pseudo-solipsism and the attitude of benevolence might change; at any moment we could come boiling out the very fabric of human society to rip your souls screaming from your skulls…
Or did I replace today’s story just so I could savour the nuances of your lingering moment of paranoia?
