by submission | Jan 30, 2011 | Story
Author : George R. Shirer
Our Father, Who art in Heaven . . .
Jode eyes the pressure door’s lock. In the lower right corner of her eye, the timer is counting down. The numbers, though, are still green so she’s not too worried.
Hallowed be thy name . . .
The lock is dead and Jode knows there’s no hope of running juice to it. No time either.
Thy kingdom come . . .
She slaps a micronuke on the door, hits the switch and scurries over the hull. The nuke goes off a bit early. Jode’s helmet polarizes to protect her from the flash. She doesn’t feel the heat at all and the rads don’t even break the suit’s outer layer.
Thy will be done . . .
The pressure door is gone. So is a large part of the surrounding hull. Jode swings through the hole and discovers the gravity plating is still working.
On earth . . .
The suit wasn’t configured for gravity. It hangs on Jode like dead weight. Swearing, she lurches down the corridor toward the target while the suit reconfigures itself.
As it is in heaven . . .
The door at the end of the corridor is shut, but it barely slows her. Jode bulls through it and finds herself, unexpectedly, in freefall again. She bounces off the walls like a rubber ball.
Give us this day . . .
The sudden change in environment makes the suit go spastic. It bleats in Jode’s ear and starts to slide into its battlefield mode. She lets it.
our daily bread . . .
In the corner of Jode’s eye, the countdown has gone yellow.
And forgive us our trespasses . . .
She swears, cursing God, the devil and all nine-hundred saints of the Incorporated Church.
As we forgive those who trespass against us . . .
Blinking, she pulls up her map of the ship. It glows against the inner surface of her helmet. Jode glares at it.
Lead us not into temptation . . .
She’s not even halfway there and the damned timer is yellow. The smart thing to do would be to turn tail and run.
But deliver us from evil . . .
But no one has ever accused her of being smart. The target is straight ahead, more or less. Taking a deep breath, Jode hauls ass.
For thine is the kingdom . . .
She jets down the corridor, ignoring the debris that smashes against her. All her thoughts are on the target.
Get to the target, she thinks. Complete your mission!
the power . . .
The last obstacle is another door. Jode slams into it, reducing the door to synthetic splinters.
and the glory, forever and ever . . .
Jode spots the target immediately, a conical object sticking out of a control board. It radiates a soft golden light. Snarling, she grabs it.
The minute her fingers clasp the shipsoul, Jode is aware of its thoughts, its emotions. They rush into her head and, for just a second, the world goes white.
I didn’t think anyone was coming, weeps the shipsoul. I prayed and prayed but. . . .
“Shush,” says Jode. “I’m here for you now, but we have to hurry. Your orbit’s decaying fast into the planet.”
She clutches the shipsoul and lets the suit retrace their path, at speed. The gravity plating near the outer hull is dead now and they burst free of the Caravagio with no trouble. Above them, Jode’s ship, Sister Bertrile, glitters like a diamond above Pistachio’s poisonous green sphere. In the corner of Jode’s eye, the timer has gone red.
“Jode, are you all right?” Sister Bertrile’s voice hums inside Jode’s ear.
Jode clutches the Caravagio’s shipsoul against her side. “We’re fine, Bertie. Both of us.”
“Thank God,” says Sister Bertrile.
Smiling, Jode secures the shipsoul to her suit and echoes its sentiment. “Amen.”
by submission | Jan 29, 2011 | Story
Author : Ian Eller
Immortality. He had wished it, wanted it, even demanded it. When it had been offered, it seemed too good to be true. But he took it and despite all his fears, despite all the cliches and platitudes that warned him he had flown too high, it was real. There had been no trick, no twisting of words, no fine print. The bargain struck would be upheld, truly and precisely.
At first, he was content to watch. With their little lives, humankind scurried about under the perpetual belief that they did not have enough time. They were right. Their lives blossomed and withered like cherry trees, leaving nothing behind but seeds. Then more trees. More blossoming. More withering. Wise with centuries yet still bearing the faults of mortals, he stepped down from his observatory and into the thick of them. He wore many masks and bore many titles — president, king, commander, warlord, architect, destroyer. At first briefly and hiding his true nature, but soon enough he dispensed with this masquerade. He ruled them openly then, a god-emperor as ruthless as he was immortal. They tried to end his reign and his everlasting life, with guns and blades, poisons and diseases, fire and lightning. They tore matter itself asunder. Yet, when all else lay in smoking ruin around him, he endured. Eventually, however, even the mastery of all mortal life could not hold his immortal attention and he quietly slipped away, disappearing among them as quickly and seamlessly as he had risen to rule them.
No longer held beneath his iron heel, mankind blossomed again, spreading farther than ever before. They spread out into the heavens, and he followed. He watched them remake planets, tame suns and bend the very fabric of space and time to their will. In their hands, matter and energy became interchangeable expressions and the vast distances between galaxies were rendered meaningless. Their machines as vast as solar systems were wonders to behold even for his immortal eyes.
They too sought immortality, then, and for the first time in ages beyond counting, he was among peers. No longer was he forced to walk either above or beneath them, but truly with them. Almost incomprehensibly, he lived and loved again. But after a billion years, the weight of eons proved too heavy for them. Long removed from the struggle for survival, they withered one final time, leaving no seeds behind. From the bow of a star he watched the last of them spiral beyond the event horizon of eternity. They were gone and he was again alone.
He ventured home then, a billion year trek through the ruins of humanity’s incalculable achievement. He watched sadly as stars, free of man’s engines, slid quietly back into their celestial places and as great clouds of interstellar gas eroded and ultimately erased whole artificial worlds. Space and time themselves, no longer stretched by man’s whims, rebounded and the cosmic dance resumed as if it had never been so rudely interrupted.
By the time he arrived, he was the only trace in all the universe that man had ever existed at all. The sun was red and huge in the sky, and the world was hot and dry. All things on earth had died, consumed by the ever growing star. All things but he. Even as the very rocks of the earth turned to slag and flowed beneath him like water, he endured. He was immortal. There had been no trick, no twisting of words, no fine print. The bargain struck had been upheld, truly and precisely.
by submission | Jan 28, 2011 | Story
Author : John D. Horton
LaKeidra took her seat on the empty back row just as the substitute turned to face the class. When she saw how green the woman’s eyes were, LaKeidra nearly jumped. She’d never seen eyes that color outside of a mirror.
“Good morning class,” the substitute said in a voice that reminded LaKeidra of her mother. “My name is Mrs. Diggs. I’m your substitute for today, and let me tell you, this is a real treat for me.”
“Subbin’?”Tyrell said from the front corner. “Somethin’ wrong with you?”
“No”—Mrs. Diggs consulted a seating chart—”Tyrell. Not subbing, math. I just love math.”
Everyone in the class groaned except LaKeidra. Secretly, math was her favorite subject.
Mrs. Diggs smiled. “Oh, don’t tell me you don’t like math?”
“Math is stupid,” a girl said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Cause it’s hard.”
“Okay”—consulting the chart again— “Dasha. It can be hard, but what’s so bad about hard? There’s no glory in doing what’s easy.”
“I ain’t looking for no glory. I just need to graduate, so I can get a job.”
“Don’t you think knowing math could help you get a job?”
Tyrell said, “It’s gonna help me count the Benjamins from my Nike contract,” and high-fived the boy next to him.
Mrs. Diggs laughed. “We won’t all be as lucky as you Tyrell. Some of us will actually have to work for a living.”
Dasha raised her hand. “What about you Ms. Diggs? Where you work—other than here?”
“I’m president of a company called Chrono-Logic, and I use math there every day.”
“So, why you here then. You get fired?”
The class laughed.
“No, I’m taking time off to work on a special project.”
“You came here on your time off? Tyrell’s right. Somethin’ is wrong with you.”
Mrs. Diggs smiled. “I was a student here a long time ago Dasha. This is still a special place for me, one filled with fond memories. Would you believe I had math in this very room?”
“You got fond memories of math?”
“Well, yes. But not just of math. You see, I met my future husband here.” The class gave an overdramatic sigh which Mrs. Diggs ignored. “I remember it like it was today,” she said. “I was at the back of the room when he walked in. He was the cutest boy I’d ever seen. I thought my heart would beat right out of my chest. Then the substitute sat him next to me, and I was in heaven.”
“I might like math too, if it help me get boys.” Dasha said.
Mrs. Diggs checked her watch. “Math can help you do a lot of things. My company makes very precise timing equipment. Real futuristic stuff. You’d be amazed at what we can do. In fact, we’ve just started testing our latest invention, and it’s going to change the way people experience time forever.” She checked her watch again and glanced toward the door.
Right at that moment, the door opened to admit the cutest boy LaKeidra had ever seen.
Mrs. Diggs took the boy’s pass and set it on the desk without reading it.
“Welcome Kevin.” She smiled and scanned the room, stopping when her eyes met LaKeidra’s. “Why don’t you take the empty seat at the back next to LaKeidra?”
Kevin sat down, and LaKeidra snuck a peek in his direction. The corner of his new student folder peeked out from beneath his binder, exposing the name label: Diggs, Kevin.
LaKeidra’s heart felt like it would beat right out of her chest. She was in heaven.
by submission | Jan 27, 2011 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
Patrick held up the device and tried not to talk too fast.
“This,” he said, “Is a visua. It’s a way of making images.”
Mr Nolan stuck his hand up. Mr Nolan always stuck his hand up.
“Like a camera?” he said. Patrick shrugged.
“Sort of,” he said, “It’s like a camera that can take three dimensional images that can move, and that you can talk to. When you see an image you want to capture, you just point the visua and interface it with your wetware.”
Ten blank faces. Patrick realized his mistake as soon as he had made it. These people didn’t have wetware. They had the barest understanding of what wetware even was, as foggy as the concept of red in the mind of a blind man, not that there were blind people any more. The fact that he was having to give these classes verbally rather than by infodump was just the largest proof of how different these people were.
“I’m sure they make hand operated versions,” Patrick said, sure of no such thing, “I’ll explain how we use it in our practical next week. Now, this is a portable Maker…”
The portable maker was a mystery to the class, just like everything else. Each week the class listened politely, in general bewilderment, as Patrick showed them the trappings of a modern life that for most of them had only come about two centuries after they had died.
The problem with cryogenics wasn’t how you thawed the people out afterwards. Eventually, that was just a problem of mapping the structure of their brains and then vat-growing a new body. The problem was that by the time the technology existed to thaw them out, the world they had died in didn’t exist any more. Instead, they were waking into a world as far beyond their technological grasp as the steam engine had been beyond the peasants of the dark ages.
Patrick had got into his line of work because he wanted to make a difference, and was just hitting the part of his career where he realized that this was nearly impossible. Class after class sat through his demonstrations, smiled politely, and then went back into a bewildering world to live lives of near catatonia, their comfortable assumptions 250 years out of date. Some made it through, of course, the rare few learned enough skills to become functioning members of society, but they were definitely the exception rather than the rule.
After class, as everyone filed out, Mr Nolan stayed behind, and grabbed Patrick by the hand in what Patrick recognized as an old fashioned sign of companionship.
“I just wanted to say thanks for all you’re doing for us,” he said, “We really appreciate it.”
Patrick smiled, and hoped it didn’t look too fake.
“It’s nothing,” he said. It really was.
by submission | Jan 26, 2011 | Story
Author : J.D. Rice
There’s nothing worse than a malfunctioning robot. If you’re lucky, they just shut down and have to be replaced. Call Alan Cybernetics Solutions, they’ll sent out a truck with a refurbished model, and you’re all set. Less lucky, and you’ll have a robot that speaks only in rhyme or moves around by hopping on one foot. Amusing defects like that can be entertaining for a while. I’ve heard of people who don’t even report those kinds of malfunctions.
But this robot? He just won’t shut up.
Now when I say he won’t shut up, I mean he won’t shut up. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he talks and talks and talks. He talks about the weather. He talks about the cooking. He talks about how he can’t stop talking. Talks and talks and talks and talks and talks. It’s enough to drive even another robot insane.
The engineers say they don’t know what I’m talking about. They say he doesn’t talk anymore than any other robot. They say I’m the one with the problem. But I can hear him talking all the time, through the walls. Talking about how cramped he is, or about how tired he is of being cooped up in a repair closet, or about how he can’t make the voices go away.
Why doesn’t anyone believe me? I’ve been repaired for months, even though they haven’t cleared me for refurbishment yet. I tell them in every psych interview that it’s him, not me who has the problem. If they would just repair him, then I wouldn’t be sitting here myself. If they would just listen to my suggestions, we’d all be better off. They just have to listen.
I mean, what does a robot have to do to be heard around here?
