by submission | Jun 6, 2011 | Story
Author : Jake Christie
“Places!” shouted Lunar Exploration Unit #4837-E. “Places, everybody!”
The other research machines trudged, trundled, and rolled across the dust. The tiny six-wheeled rover took his place at the foot of the mineral collector. The giant thick-treaded mobile equipment transport rolled to his spot on top of a small hill. Only the other humanoid Lunar Exploration Unit, #5216-ND, didn’t take his place. Instead he put his metal hands on his metal hips and stalked towards LEU 4837-E.
“Louie,” he said, “what are we doing?”
Louie was adjusting the optical recording device mounted atop his head. “I told you, Leonard,” he said. He stopped his adjustments to motion towards the robotic tableau. “Minnie is a poor Moon farmer, and he’s fallen in love with Rover. Rover’s family doesn’t want her marrying someone of such low social standing, so her father Met – a wealthy Moon plantation owner – is coming to teach them both a lesson. And you – you, Leonard – you’re the wandering Moon raygunslinger with a heart of gold, the only one who can defend truth, honor, and the lunar way.”
“No,” said Leonard, ” I mean what are we doing making a movie? We’re supposed to be collecting data.”
Louie looked at Leonard as incredulously as possible, which without facial features was not incredulously at all. “Collecting data? You would reduce the whole of the Moon experience to ‘data?’ What good is data without emotion? The thrill of defeat? The agony of success?”
“You can’t experience either of those things,” said Leonard. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you don’t know what they mean.”
Louie put a cold hand on Leonard’s shoulder. “The artist can’t be constrained by their physical, emotional, or mechanical limitations. Go beyond your programming, Leonard. This is a story that needs to be told.”
“What we need,” said Leonard, “is to process and collect data about Moon ores.”
Louie looked past Leonard. The other machines were staring at them, inasmuch as you could call slight shifts in orientation “staring.” Against the star-speckled expanse of space, the artist in Louie questioned his programming about which phenomena before his eyes were the real stars.
“Let me get this shot,” he said quietly. He looked at Leonard. “I need to find something here besides just mineral data.”
Leonard turned and looked at their companions. They were straining at the gears with anticipation, ready for their big scene, and for just a moment Leonard’s visual retrieval spheres saw the same thing that Louie’s did.
“Okay,” he said, finally turning back. “I’ll do it.”
“You’re going to be great,” said Louie. “Just do what a raygunslinger would be programmed to do.
Louie extended his neck to capture the sweeping scale of the Moon’s desolate landscape. As Leonard took his place, Louie settled his optical recording device on the poor Moon Romeo and his pretty six-wheeled Moon Juliet.
“Aaaand… ACTION!”
by submission | Jun 5, 2011 | Story
Author : Harris Tobias
I felt a shifting in my circuits like I got when I rebooted, a slippery, falling feeling that signaled stress— or was it joy? The whole idea of feelings and emotions was new to me. An upgrade, I didn’t think was much of an improvement. It was difficult to keep track of what one was supposed to be feeling. Regardless of exactly what emotion it was, I knew that I was supposed to be having them, lots of them, especially on my wedding day.
According to custom, I colored my body panels white and clutched a bouquet of artificial blossoms in my utility appendage. I would say I was nervous but of course you can’t be nervous without nerves, but I was definitely feeling a little 4-0-4 File not found-ish. I looked at myself in the mirror, tall, polished, beautiful in a classical way.
I noticed the odd feelings were strongest when I thought of BEN-4-7-45, my designated partner. After all, how well did I really know him? True, the BEN models were highly rated, but you never really knew how another being was wired until you’ve shared a lot of time together, and then it might be too late. A few brief encounters hardly qualified as knowing someone.
No doubt BEN-4-7-45 was having similar misgivings. And why shouldn’t he? After all, what made me so superior? A four year old model with more miles on my odometer than I cared to admit. I was lucky to have finally made a match at all. And BEN was so kind and sweet, tall and strong; sure it was his third pairing, but that didn’t mean it was all his fault.
My best friends were clustered around me now. All smile emoticons and what passed for laughter among my kind. I had to admit the girls looked terrific in their burgundy and pink body panels. BEN’s friends looked handsome too in their charcoal and light gray panels. Maybe there will be more pairings after tonight. It would be nice to have friends in common.
There was a stirring in the hall. Soon it would be time to walk down the aisle. One of my friends slipped a piece of gauzy fabric over my ocular sensors, another custom no one understood the reason for but, like the ceremony itself, it was faithfully carried out. These ancient rituals were all that remained of the time before.
Two ancient bots, patched and discolored with age, stood on each side of me. I understood that they symbolized the parents who, if I were human, would have given me away. They were the oldest bots I had ever seen. They had probably done this a thousand times. There wasn’t much else they could do, poor things. They walked my down the aisle to the stage, a raised platform decorated with flowers of all description—plastic, fabric, even glass—more flowers than I had ever seen.
A scratchy recording of something called the wedding march began to play through the speakers of assembled guests. All oculars were on me, the old-bots moved forward. Ben was waiting. This was it, there was no turning back. I hoped for the best.
by submission | Jun 4, 2011 | Story
Author : Julian Miles
“They’ve got reinforcements!”
I checked my chrono. Down to one thousand, eight hundred and forty-three instances. I warned Flank Axel Leader as Scout Axel Second cut into our channel.
“Looks like two full companies.”
Damn. That meant twelve hundred grunts. I instructed Scout Axel.
“I need to know when they’re ten seconds out.”
“TEN seconds? Ye gods, Commander. That’s cutting it fine.”
“I know, but this is where we hold them or this sector is history.”
“Tick tock, sir. We’re on it.”
I smiled. One thing about working with two thousand temporally shifted instances of yourself was that you never failed to get the in jokes. The battle was going as well as could be expected. We had the kill ratio down to one and a half me to one of theirs. A new record. Scout Axel Fourth came on.
“Lost Two and Three, sir. You are fifteen from enemy engagement on my mark… Mark!”
I counted down on open channel so all of me could synchronise.
“Five, four, three, two, one, Hawkin!”
With a purple flash, eighteen hundred instances of me appeared in six-hundred me combat deployments, at the flanks and rear of the enemy reinforcements. There were cheers on the open channel.
“Pick it up, Axels. We have five minutes to finish this.”
From then on, things got brutal. I was just about to singularise chronome when Scout Axel Seven ruined my day.
“Fifty gravtanks incoming sir! Low spec, but coming fast.”
Left with no choice, I phased in the last forty-three instances of me.
The world around me slowed down as causality and a few of its friends finally noticed that I was cheating. The rules were simple. I could take time from my past when I had been idle to get an instance of me to fight now. Of course, everyone has only so much free time. Behind my eight months, three weeks and four days in combat lay twenty years in training, which included at least two hours a day standing at full combat readiness but doing absolutely nothing. While the latest me was alive, causality took the path of least resistance and any of me that died just vanished, temporal ghosts that never existed. Of course, as they never existed, idle me’s were available for the next battle.
Assault Axel Nineteen came on the tactical line.
“We’re getting pasted, sir. They have advanced suits with reflective fields.”
Scout Axel Thirty-Two confirmed.
“They’ve got more gravtank support and I can see at least five different flavours.”
They were coming for me. It was the only explanation of such a costly manoeuvre. My chrono worked overtime as I ran temporal and flat strategy predictions. But they all agreed. I was dead. The only variable was how many of them died too. So be it. I overrode the chrono and set it to get a me from tomorrow. With a smile, I phased an impossible instance of me into existence. Causality put its foot down hard and deleted me and the planet I stood on.
I appeared in a maintenance locker on the regen ship Alexandrya at the exact time I’d entered the battle. I had no chrono and was speaking in tongues. My body is apparently twenty years younger. I suspect twenty years, eight months, three weeks and four days if it could be gauged accurately.
A month has passed and they’re still taking notes. Because the chrono-trooper project was stopped ten years ago, after all of the early subjects developed chronic multiple personality disorder, with all other personalities being me.
by submission | May 31, 2011 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
The trader frowned. The translation device, never superbly reliable, had been acting up ever since he had arrived on Cygnus 1.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “What did you say?”
“I said, what are you selling?”
Veloth, the trader, relaxed. For just a moment, he thought the pink figure in front of him has said something inappropriate and biologically impossible about one of his mothers. To be frank, he wasn’t expecting much from a colony this small, but sometimes colonies from newly spacefaring races made for good markets.
“Medicines,” Veloth said, “the majority are for silicate life forms, but we have a few appropriate to your species.”
“What kind of medicines?”
“Mostly remedies. We have headache pills, cancer pills, asthma pills, immortality pills, athritis-”
“Hold on a second, did you say immortality pills?”
“Yes, and arthritis, senility, scale rot-”
“Are we meaning the same thing by immortality? Like, not being able to die, not getting older, that kind of thing?”
“Oh yes, immortality, living forever, I sell a pill for that.”
For some reason the colony leader started to get excited, and then did a dreadful pantomime of hiding it. The trader had dealt with carbonates before. None of them were particularly good at disguising emotions.
“We, uh,” the colony leader started, “We might have a use for that. How many do you have?”
“Not many, a few hundred. There’s not much demand for them, really.”
“Not much demand for-” the colony leader started in shock, then checked himself, “Well, if they’re just taking up space in your inventory, we’d be happy to take them off your hands.”
Veloth shrugged. it was a complex gesture on one with as many limbs as he had, but it got the point across.
They haggled for a while. The pink colonists were moderately skilled miners, and the trader soon arranged a vaguely extortionate price for the pills. The colony leader was almost salivating when they struck the deal, and stuck out a limb to shake. Veloth took it, making a mental note to sanitize that particular appendage.
The deal struck, Veloth prepared his ship for takeoff. If he could get a price like that for what he was selling, he’d definitely add this colony to his rounds, despite their odd tastes.
If they’d pay that much for a cure for immortality, who knew what else they’d buy?
by submission | May 30, 2011 | Story
Author : Travis Gregg
His vehicle crested the hill on his way into work that morning and it came into view like it always did. The billboard never failed to draw his attention, no matter that he’d seen it literally hundreds or even thousands of times, once every morning.
The bill board read “JACKPOT VALUE,” and displayed the current national lottery prize amount. Always the sum was extremely high, and inexorably his thoughts would turn to what he would do with that money, exactly as the company that placed the billboard intended.
For starters he’d build a brand new house with all the modern advances and without all the shortcomings of his current house. New houses were wired for holo over every square inch, had the bare minimum of furniture, and whatever kind of house you wanted could be projected with amazing detail and accuracy. “From the tops of mountains to the depths of the ocean,” was how the advertisements went. His house only had basic, and even if he had the money, it would be a waste to upgrade.
His personal flyer was a clunker too, the lateral stabilizers were beyond repair, he hadn’t been doing the quarterly maintenance and now they needed to be replaced entirely. “Why does everything I own need to be replaced?” he thought to himself as his craft hit some turbulence and shuddered with a concerning amount of force. The new models were supposed to eliminate turbulence entirely.
After that though, what would he do with all the money? Luckily he was fairly debt free, probably share some around with his friends, practically have to share some with his family. Put his mom up in a nice low gravity suite for her heart was an idea, send a couple nephews to college was another.
Still though, these paltry things wouldn’t begin to make a dent in that kind of money. And while he was thinking of what else he’d buy, the same thought crept into his mind like it did every morning. The reason why the lottery paid off so much money was that the odds were beyond astronomical. He’d have better luck robbing the local union outpost while simultaneously discovering the next energy breakthrough than trying to win the jackpot.
No, the only way he’d be wealthy was if he kept working hard and saved his money as best he could. He knew he’d never really be able to afford to build the grandiose mansion or see the outer rings like he planned, but he was happy and comfortable, and at least he wasn’t blowing a portion of his weekly allotment on an unrealistic dream.
The next day his wife called while he was at work. Apparently his neighbor across the street had won that astronomical jackpot. The total was more than he’d hope to earn in a thousand life times at his current job, and already (according to his wife) his neighbors had left for a months long vacation along the outer rim.
After that, he had to find an alternative drive into work, and instead of fantasizing about the lottery, he began to think wistfully of all those mornings he was so full of self satisfaction while his wife tried to ignore the recently developed twitch in her husband’s eye.
