by submission | Jan 14, 2011 | Story
Author : Thomas Keene
“So,” the diplomat said, “is our offer acceptable to the people of Earth?”
I held my face in my hands and said nothing. The young lieutenant on my right, sat back down with another cup of coffee. The soldier standing on my left shifted his stance uneasily.
“This is a lot to… Can I ask you a few questions again?”
The diplomat twitched a tail, but said nothing.
“You’ve been surveying Earth for decades? That’s how you speak English?”
“Affirmative.”
“And right now some alien space-pirates, or the equivalent, are hurtling towards Earth faster than light, and they’re due in a couple of hours?”
“We estimate they will take action in one hundred and fifty-five minutes. If they commence with hostilities, you can expect enslavement and…”
“Right, right. And you’re offering to help… With only half a dozen of you and one small ship… You’ll help by broadcasting a distress call to the Galactic Something-Or-Other, and the space pirates will run away before a peacekeeping force shows up to arrest them for exploitation.”
“Yes. Our asking price is five percent of your country’s yearly gross product for the next century, with the stipulation that no more than twenty-five percent of any good be demanded. You understand the time-sensitive nature of this predicament. We would have contacted a more appropriate leader from your country’s executive branch, but our atmospheric engines are very slow.”
A soldier passed me a memo. I crumpled it up before my eyes had finished it. Still no word from command. Phones, radio, Internet, all dead or jammed everywhere. Space pirates go for communications first, apparently.
“If it will persuade you of our goodwill, we will let you know that we are risking our own lives. The liquid assets and sophonts on our ship exceed the value of your solar system and civilization by two orders of magnitude. We are a tempting target for criminals, and we must either hide or run regardless of your decision.” The diplomat blinked for the second… No, the third time since we’d started the discussion.
“Right… And as a local authority, by your laws, I’m a representative of my country. And if I agree, it’s like everyone in the government approved it unanimously.”
“Correct.” The diplomat blinked again.
I leaned forward. “So what happens if I say, ‘yes,’ and you help, but then Congress doesn’t ratify it?” The lieutenant next to me half stood up as if she was going to protest, but then thought better of it and went to get another coffee.
“Well… For breach of commercial agreement, standard precedent is to exact one hundredfold as the injured party sees fit.”
I nodded. I hate politics. I hate meetings. I hate being up at three in the morning.
“I’m sorry, but I’m unable to decide due to my low rank. Please help us, we will be very appreciative and try to recompense you with trade agreements or mining rights or something, but I can’t promise anything. I’m sure you understand.”
The diplomat nodded, lowered itself to the ground, and gracefully padded out of the conference room. My eyes hurt just walking it walk on five legs.
The lieutenant turned to me. “Do you think they’re lying, sir? Trying to set us up?”
“Lying or not, they’re only offering to send a message to some authorities, but not actually promising to help out in any way. No way I’m paying that much for a collect call!”
by submission | Jan 13, 2011 | Story
Author : Carter Lee
What happened to your future? We’re it. We, men from the future, have kidnapped you the day before you were going to make your ground-breaking new invention known to the world. We’ve taken the invention itself, and every scrap of paper and every shred of information about your process, and we’re gonna keep it. All of it. And, this is the good part, we’re going to remove not just all memory of your invention from your brain, but make it impossible for you to ever stumble down the mental path you’d need to follow to recreate it.
It makes us sound like Republic serial villains, doesn’t it?
Of course, the Ape with the Brain of a Robot, our leader, knows the repercussions of your little machine would have led to an unacceptable level of upheaval and collapse, along with all the death and suffering such things entail.
Food for thought.
That’s where the future you wanted went. The jetpack, the ones that maimed and killed thousands in the future, we made it disappear. We dropped agents into every year of this century, and they built up automobiles and air transport, along with the infrastructure to support them. And jetpacks faded into dream, only remembered by lovers of musty science fiction.
Weather control. Personal laser guns. All those crazy airplane designs. Dirigibles. We took them all away. The easy way, like this. We stop you, and whatever like-minded inventors might follow a train of thought similar to yours, from following through. We come here, remove your life’s work, everything connected with it, including your memory and some of your ability to reason, and then we go forward and look in the history books to see if any of them still mention you. Your singular contraption will be displayed in the Museum of Unreal Inventions.
The first removal I took part in, we saved the entire world. All by this, what I’m doing to you, happening to another genius with no common sense. I’m going to make the modern house as clean as clean can be, this clever fellow thought, and came up with a living floor covering. A live rug, that would digest any dust or dirt that settled in it for too long. Its excretions? A scent of your choice.
Do you have any idea how many dead skin cells are in household dust?
By the time it occurred to someone that walking on something that was subsisting on your very flesh was not the best of ideas, we’d already lost. The rug-things had discovered they liked the taste of human. One of them found that they could produce a scent that was a soporific for us. Made us just want to lie down, spread ourselves out, and feel good. It was the most merciful way of killing a person I’ve ever heard of.
The cities were overgrown in days, but the things, although it might have been just one big thing by that time, well, they hit their stride when they got to open country. Places to root, soil to drink from, animals to lull and consume, they just spread and spread and spread. A huge, crazy-quilt blotch spread over the Bavarian countryside, growing visibly even when viewed from space.
The uninfected areas of the world were arguing their way towards doing something when Pakistan went silent. Cambodia dropped away. Kenya vanished, followed by New Zealand, all of Southern Africa, Taiwan, Peru, the Pacific Rim, the North American Union. Separate outbreaks. Projections indicated that the death of the last human would run neck and neck with the death of the entire ecosystem.
So we dropped back to the proper year, and made it all go away. We don’t solve the problem, we make sure the problem never needs to be solved. Not removing the mistake from existence, but removing it from ever having existed.
For what it’s worth, I’m sorry we have to do this. Your breakthrough would have made you a name for the history books, in many different ways. But, for the sake of 120 Billion people forward of us, I’m more than willing to cast you into an uncertain future. You’ll still be a genius, after all.
You won’t remember any of this, just like all the other times we’ve met and I’ve done this to you. You just can’t seem to stop with the world-shattering inventions. Three more of these and we give you a neat tattoo you’ll never know how you got.
Well, time to get to it. This is gonna hurt like hell.
by submission | Jan 12, 2011 | Story
Author : Steven Holland
“Mr. Coleman, I already know everything you will teach; therefore, I’m going to ignore you and read about time travel and reincarnation.”
Jamie Faulkner was 17, beautiful, and knew it – but didn’t seem to care. She possessed a lean, athletic body, blonde hair, and intensely blue eyes.
Gordon Coleman gave her a bemused smile, his way of granting permission. Everyone knew about Jamie Faulkner. She read professional scientific papers and graduate level textbooks – items demanded and granted from her bewildered parents. Jamie could have been at college with a full scholarship, but she had steadfastly refused to skip any grade.
She had no friends and wanted none. Last year she sent Jimmy Forsythe to the hospital with three broken fingers and a cracked collarbone; he had tried a little too hard to play the dominating seducer with her in the hallway. The year before that, she and Beth Bailey exchanged unpleasant words. Beth was found two hours later in the girl’s locker room, sobbing hysterically. Later, rumors circulated that Mrs. Bailey was taking her to a psychiatrist in Biloxi.
As the months progressed, Jamie read unobtrusively in the back of the classroom. Occasionally, she would close her current book, slump over in apparent defeat, and rest her chin on thin, folded arms. On those days she watched Mr. Coleman, her eyes moving over his body whenever he paced, centering on his face when he stopped. Gordon chose not to notice. Young Jamie Faulkner unnerved him; her eyes were too knowing for someone her age.
One day three months into the school year, Jamie closed her book, The Physics of the Impossible, and slid it off the desk. Jamie laid her head flat on the desk. When the dismissal bell rang, she remained, motionless. Several minutes after everyone else had left, Gordon tentatively approached her.
“Miss Faulkner, are you all right?”
Jamie raised her head. Her eyes contained the deepest despair Gordon had ever seen.
“What’s the purpose of being the most popular girl in school… or curing cancer… or winning the Women’s State Basketball Championship?”
Gordon pursed his lips, uncertain of the direction of this conversation. “Fulfillment maybe?”
“What’s the purpose of an etch-a-sketch that shakes itself every 10 seconds? What if I want to die and stay dead?”
“You… seem to feel that life is meaningless.” he answered slowly, in a worried tone.
“I want out.” she stated with a dead flatness. “Maybe the science is broken; maybe the religion is broken. Maybe I have to build a machine that can destroy time. Nothing else works – not even becoming president and initiating a global nuclear holocaust.”
“What!?”
“I don’t think life on Earth was meant to be lived more than once. At least, not the same life. I’m going to build that machine Gordon. No more pleasure lives. No more passive learning lives. It’s time to get serious.”
“Miss Faulkner…”
“Stop. Tell me something meaningful.”
Gordon had been slowing backing away, but Jamie’s pleading look of despair stopped him. She looked old and tired.
“Miss… Jamie… I don’t know if success for you is a good thing, but sometimes the craziest hope is better than none.”
She let out a small sigh. “Thanks. You’ve never phrased it like that before.” She rose and walked listlessly to the door. Pausing, she turned. “I love you Gordon.”
The next day Jamie missed class. By lunchtime, the entire school had heard. Jamie Faulkner had committed suicide. Gordon Coleman sat in his office, staring numbly at the wall, trying to create sense from senselessness.
by submission | Jan 11, 2011 | Story
Author : JC Crumpton
The brown-haired man raised his eyelids that felt swollen and heavy to a sky filled with a burning light as it bore pain angrily into the back of his head. A deep crack split the right side of his bottom lip, forcing him to wince and shrink from the pain when he tested it with the tip of his finger. But the fact that he had entirely no recollection of his name momentarily frightened him and forced a shiver to run through his body.
He sat up, pushing his hands against the gravel on the dirt road. The pieces of rock bit into his palms, and a warm breeze began to build until it blew several strands of hair across his eyes. He couldn’t remember why, but he knew that the last time this had happened to him was just before he had met his second wife. And for some reason, that thought relaxed him enough that he felt buoyant and almost exhilarated.
White, chalky powder dusted off his hands when he ran his fingers through his hair and then smoothed it away from his forehead. A quick search of his pockets for some sort of identification turned up nothing other than sixty-five cents in change and the numbered stub of a raffle ticket. After he absently reached for a pack of cigarettes that weren’t there, he realized that he must smoke, or did at one time. The thought made his pulse race, pounding a drum beat in both temples as he stood up and brushed the dirt from his knees.
When he tucked his shirt deeper into his pants, he noticed the crest on his breast pocket—Tommy Hilfiger—and decided that his first name would be Thomas. His watch read 3:16 in the afternoon, the black leather band fitting a little loosely. And he knew that his last name would be Movado.
The fact that his current predicament no longer caused him any anxiety bothered him most. It felt almost natural, planned even, as if he had intentionally perpetuated his own lack of detailed memory. No sense of panic caused his stomach to roil uncontrollably or forced him to swallow back rising heartburn. His heart beat a little quickly more for the want of nicotine than for any concern about his situation—one that would have been considered worrisome by any normal standard. After his initial panic, his thought patterns had become more methodical and structured.
He took the white, silk handkerchief from his back right pocket and quickly buffed his Lorenzo Banfi shoes, rubbing the cloth over it until he had removed all of the yellow dirt. A particularly caked on piece of mud on the inside of his left arch took a glob of spit and a dedicated scratch with his fingernail to dispatch it. But it proved not to be too difficult, and he tossed the handkerchief in the brown grass of the nearby field.
The sun glared down from straight overhead, and he shaded his eyes with his right hand as he looked down the gravel road. A plume of dust lifted off the road where it came over a distant hill at the horizon, approaching quickly as he watched. He started walking, grinning at the prospects presented him by his new name and reset life. A quick glance down revealed a streak of dried blood on the back of his left hand. Everything was going to be perfect this time—if he could only get the blood off his hand before the car arrived.
by submission | Jan 9, 2011 | Story
Author : James C.G. Shirk
CANINE STUDIES INSTITUTE HQ
(Abr. Final Project Report)
Status: One survivor Breed: Retriever (mixed)
Name: Pita Sex: Male
Age: 5 Weeks Pathology: Infected w/CCDV
Prognosis: Terminal within two weeks.
End of Report
Submitted by: Dr. Anthony Tolson, Director CSI, Mars Colony proper. Date: 10/22/2145
“What do we do now?” Dr. Hillary Kurtz asked. Her gloved hands, sticking through the enclosure’s side port access, trembled as the puppy suckled the bottle of enriched milk.
“There’s nothing left to do,” I replied. Anger clawed at my gut, begging for release. “Damn it! We did everything to protect them from the virus. We spent years in research; we formulated every conceivable anti-viral; we put them in controlled enclosures to prevent disease-carrying contact, and when all that didn’t work, we moved the last surviving dogs here to be clear of any earthly pathogens…and for what! The whole attempt has been an abject failure. My failure.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Kurtz said, putting aside the bottle and wiping mucus from Pita’s eyes. “Species have gone extinct before, hundreds of thousands of them. Viruses adapt, sometimes beyond our ability to contain them. The virulent ones can get buried in the species DNA. There’s nothing we can do about that.”
I nodded. “But nothing like that has ever happened to a creature so close to man,” I said, “and to have failed–. It’s just too much.”
“Sometimes God’s plan is unfathomable,” Kurtz said hopefully. She was a devout believer; I, not so much.
“If so, He must be mad at man,” I replied, perhaps a little too curtly.
She turned her attention back to feeding the puppy. “Why do you say that?” she asked.
“Religion and science don’t mix well,” I said. “Perhaps all our technical achievements displeased your God, and it was his hand that took the one thing from man that is irreplaceable in order to teach us a lesson.”
“You’re an idiot,” she grumbled.
Pita stopped nursing at the bottle and burped contentedly. The recorders surrounding him gathered data, analyzing everything, including the presence of the virus in his system.
Not that it mattered now.
I pushed back the enclosure’s protective covering and reached inside with my bare hands; no need for precautions any more. I petted his head and scratched his milk-filled, pink belly. His blue puppy-eyes glazed over at my touch, and he licked appreciatively at my fingers. “Mankind will be less without them,” I moaned.
An alarm went off behind me. I rushed to the monitoring console to examine the readouts. Something had happened to Pita, something extraordinary.
“What is it?” Kurtz yelled over the din.
I slammed the monitor button, killing the noise. “I don’t believe it! The virus is dying. At this rate, it will be completely out of his system in minutes.”
“How can that be?” Kurtz said.
I shook my head, wondering. Why so late? Why did this happen when there was just one animal left? And then it struck me.
Viruses mutate.
God’s hand? Man’s hand? My hand? Pita just received the first unprotected contact from a human in years. Some insignificant thing on my fingers found its way into Pita’s system when he licked me. That had to be it! Irony upon irony. The disease had only endured, because we denied dogs the one thing they ever wanted from us. Human contact.
“What now?” Kurtz asked for the second time today.
I smiled. “We clone.”
