by submission | Dec 29, 2010 | Story
Author : Martin Berka
Krinna Lorens blinked as she woke up. She felt extremely refreshed, and was wide awake in about 15 seconds – sleeping was healthy. The lid of the bed slid aside, and the date appeared in front of her, hovering in mid-air. With a start, she studied the purple-tinted numbers again. Yes? Yes! She’d been waiting so long – those five years had felt like an eternity, no matter what she’d told herself – and it was time. A quick glance at his last message confirmed it – she had until mid-afternoon.
Sending the display away with a thought, Krinna sat up and climbed out, carefully. She dressed simply, ate (purely out of nostalgia), and spent several hours checking the news and downloading updates. Yes, it took a long time, but she wanted to be completely clued-in when she saw him again.
After triple-checking that she was ready, the 32-year-old surveyed the tiny apartment. It had served her decently for the last five years. Sure, it was slightly larger than a jail cell (though considerably better-equipped), but without Jeff around, it fit her living style. She’d always been the more practical of the two. Agreeing that her fiance should go on the trip was perhaps her only lapse, but the opportunity had seemed so rare, and the financial benefits, substantial.
Without a backward glance, Krinna stepped out the door, which locked behind her. The antique elevator took her up 14 floors, to what was once known as “ground level.” Being a cross between the real sky and ground areas, it was kept open and reserved for foot traffic. The street-like area was full of aliens, though she could tell that many of them were theoretically human, somewhere beneath all the modifications. She couldn’t blame them, since she had gotten the bare minimum herself, in the last few years. The rapid trend changes still tended to catch her off-guard, but one of the newly-downloaded patches kicked-in, and she confidently made her way through the crowd.
The transit center was nearby, and she waited several minutes before a one of the space elevator cages returned to the ground, using the opportunity to check the Expected Arrival Time on the public network. She reached the spaceport with a half-hour remaining.
The incoming ship was obsolete, launched as part of a third-contact wave of knowledge exchanges, to a star system some 15 light years distant. Despite relying on once-amazing advances in propulsion, it had taken just over 32 millenniums to arrive at its destination (and after alien improvements, nearly 20 to return) with its small crew of robots and 95 stasis-bound humans sent for their artistic, scientific, and technical abilities – including Jeff. He would spend about five conscious years away, and they had agreed to wait for each other. While he flew off and spent five years on the alien world (waking a few times during the voyage to reply to her messages), Krinna spread the same time evenly across fifty thousand. The routine quickly became familiar – awake every few centuries, explore the new world order, and try to fit in for a several months. The people she met during these “visits” were very helpful, though over time, they increasingly questioned why anyone would wait for the future, when the present was so wonderful.
But the present had included Jeff’s absence, until now. The ship docked, and he returned to a changed world, immediately heading in Krinna’s direction.
by submission | Dec 27, 2010 | Story
Author : Damien Krsteski
He heard the stairs squeak. A jolt of adrenaline shot up his spine, tearing his hand off her plastic face.
“What are you doing, Edgar?” His mother’s voice was shrill and loathsome.
The basement suddenly got colder and turned twice as dark. He was kneeling before Evangeline, hands innocently stuffed in his pockets.
“I c-couldn’t sleep,” he stuttered.
She shifted her weight and the wooden stairs gave another painful squeak. Out of all the places in the world, why did she have to be here?
“You look me in the eyes when you speak to me,” she shrieked and descended several stairs.
Edgar turned to face his mother. She was wearing her shabby white nightgown and pink slippers, and was waving one finger menacingly at him.
He hated that fat ogre more then anything, but managed to suppress his fear and hatred for a moment and said, “Yes, mother.”
She grabbed him by the hand and was dragging him up the stairs. Edgar looked down morosely at his Evangeline.
“Good night, Eva,” he whispered.
His mother tugged at his hand. “Don’t you call it that,” she hissed through her teeth. “It’s a freakin’ robot for heaven’s sake. I don’t know why your father insists on keeping it. He is as stupid as you are. Throw it out like a broken radio, I say.”
She led him forcefully to his bedroom and slammed the door shut. He heard the rattling of the keys, then the lock turned.
Pale moonlight flooded the room as he quietly pulled his Solar System curtains apart. Even after fourteen years, he couldn’t quite get used to sleeping in complete darkness. His mother called it cowardly. May be so, he thought, and climbed under the sheets.
That night he didn’t really think about his mother. Or the yelling he would endure first thing in the morning. He didn’t think of school, or of the neighborhood bullies. For the first time in ages, he was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
Yes, Edgar Little was beyond any doubt, unequivocally and irrefutably, very much in love.
by submission | Dec 26, 2010 | Story
Author : Thomas Desrochers
It’s just me and her out here. Stranded. Helpless.
I was taking her back home. She needed a change of scenery. Hell, we were a quarter of the way there when everything went wrong.
It was a bad wire. The gauge was too small because some stupid color-blind electrician can’t tell the difference between brown and green, and when I sent the signal to cut the acceleration to avoid another ship a few days away the already hot wire vaporised. Acceleration stopped, which was good. But now I can’t start it again. We’re going fast, but not fast enough to get both of us there on time.
There’s not enough food to last that long.
I’ve been over it a thousand times, sitting at the controls, helpless. We can slow down fine when we get there, that won’t be a problem. We can’t really turn without the rear thrusters, and the decelerators are single use. I try to turn around and then we’ll be worse off than before.
I have tools, I have parts. I could fix the wire. That is, I could fix the wire if it weren’t in the sealed tube on the outside of the hull that’s supposed to keep the primary wiring alive. I could switch to back-up systems, if it weren’t for the fact that when the primary wire went it took the whole tube with it. I could call for help but, let’s be honest, I’m not rich enough for anyone to care.
I looked at the food. Even on a survival diet, rationing things out to the very end, we’re a month short. If I just launched myself out the airlock she’d have enough to get by fairly comfortably. The problem is, if she knows I killed myself it’s all over. She’d relapse. She’d hear voices in her head again, see things move that really shouldn’t. She’d be dead a month before the ship gets there. But if she thinks I’m fighting, then she’ll be fine. She’ll fight too.
I really hate to lie to her like this. If she knew what was going on she would probably kill herself right then to save me. I can’t let that happen.
I programmed the computer to decelerate when we get there. It won’t need me for that. I’ve written this note, too. If I make it, fine, she won’t need to read it. If I don’t make it, and I don’t think I will, then she’ll know once she’s with family and friends.
I’ve stopped eating already. I’ll write it off as being sick. She’ll buy into wholesale.
I hope you’re not mad when you read this.
I love you.
I’m sorry.
by submission | Dec 23, 2010 | Story
Author : Clint Wilson
They all swam around the giant vessel in wonder. If this worked their hive would easily become the most prominent of either the day or the night side. Their queen would be elevated to near godlike status, although it was Quetrum who had made it all happen.
He glowed proudly as he and several of the thinking council watched it inflate. Like all technology on their world, the vessel was organic and had been bred in a lineage of flying creatures able to go systematically higher and higher over generations. This one though, called Shaylala, was to be the first to actually leave the atmosphere. And because the original concept had been Quetrum’s he would of course be the first passenger.
The others wished him well as he swam toward the goliath where a porthole in the tough outer hide had suddenly opened. He swam inside and it immediately closed behind him. Then he was carried via a series of purposeful currents into the cockpit where an inner organ encased him in a protective cocoon.
Quetrum saw the others floating and waiting as Shaylala made transparent a small window of her skin so that he would be able to view all that took place. From this distance he could only imagine their wondrous looks as the vessel quickly inflated to more than a hundred times its resting size. Then the creature’s internal elemental factory began separating and expelling heavy gasses causing it to rise up and float away, a behemoth biological balloon.
Quetrum knew that reporter workers were already busy sending pulses via the great weed web to thousands of other hives around the globe. The bragging rights would be theirs and theirs alone.
He had flown before in Shaylala’s smaller ancestors, but never to these heights. Below he saw the expanding sea, and could still make out the many structures and tubes of his home hive below the waves. Then soon he saw the dark shapes of Brahier and Toksana Hives to the north and east. Never had he imagined that he would see all three hives of the state at the same time! But his excitement grew even more as the shore of the polar cap came into view and as the horizon began to curve until he could eventually almost see the entire dayside ocean. My, what would his grandqueen think if she were alive today? He couldn’t even imagine.
The inflated vessel was now stretched almost to full capacity as the stratosphere of the water planet thinned away to near nothingness. Quetrum braced himself, as he knew what was coming next. They required lateral movement in order for the experiment to be a complete success.
The creature’s elemental factory instantly released the chemical contents of one chamber into another and the jet plume was visible from the hives far below as Shaylala rocketed herself and her lone passenger into a single freefall orbit.
Quetrum took in the stars, clearer than he had ever seen them, and the beautiful jewel that was the planet below. As they crossed the nightside he wondered about all the dark dweller hives down there below the ice and imagined his distant cousins being terribly jealous of their accomplishment.
But alas, Shaylala had only enough fuel for one revolution so once back to the dayside they careened toward the home hive with massive skin parachutes slowing them all the way until finally they touched safely back down onto the waves near the swimming throngs of jubilant spectators.
Quetrum and Shaylala were the heroes; and for their people this was only the beginning.
by submission | Dec 22, 2010 | Story
Author : D. W. Hughes
Yosef Strand took a moment after stepping out of the drop-pod to look once again at his home planet. It was his first time back after the vacation started, and he noticed for the first time how beautifully it had been terraformed. The plants had been mixed together in tiny little clumps and groups; quite unlike those huge fields of single species he had seen on the backwater moons.
Seemingly stepping out of thin air, Yosef exited the cloaked pod. He walked the main road to town, wearing the black hat of an adult of his people despite being only sixteen.
A man, also walking from the podport to the village, spoke to his wife behind him. Yosef could tell he was a tourist quite easily by his lack of facial hair and his accent. The man told his wife that it was ridiculous: a giant waste of government money. His wife responded that yes, it probably was, but wasn’t this a universal heritage site, and weren’t uncontacted peoples so rare these days? Yosef told the married couple to hush. He asked them if they wanted any eavesdroppers to have to get selectively mindwiped for their careless talk. They shook their heads and silenced themselves.
Yosef passed a man whom he had known very well since childhood on a horse and buggy. Yosef said hello, and the main greeted him cordially, as though he had not noticed that Yosef had been on rumspringa for the past year. In fact, he hadn’t. No one in the village had. Those Cultural Preservation Authority guys had some nice tech.
The man ignored the tourists: he couldn’t see them. Cultural tourists, made invisible by the CPA, paid for some of the government’s upkeep of this place, at least.
Passing the squat building of the blacksmith, Yosef entered the largest building in the village, made of hand-cut wood: the town hall, where town meetings and church services were held. He spoke the password his CPA contacts had given him, and the door to the basement opened up out of the floor. Everybody else in the village had forgotten it was there. After he walked down and into the basement, the door closed and became invisible once more.
In a metallic room waited the town’s pastor and mayor, Father Mendelson, along with Yosef’s CPA monitors who had checked up on him throughout his off-world journeys. They sat around a large table with a small cube on it.
Father Mendelson greeted Yosef, they and the CPA handlers chatted a little about Yosef’s rumspringa. Father Mendelson told him a couple of stories from his own rumspringa, which he alone of the townspeople remembered. The pastor then asked Yosef if he had made his choice.
It had never really been a choice for Yosef at all. Of course he would stay. Everyone chose to stay. Yosef remembered the civil war between the planets far away, of the news footage of anti-matter bombs dissolving inhabited moons. He remembered those impoverished people in the cities of the Core, who would kill for food or drugs.
Yosef said goodbye to his main CPA handler, Geoff, and joked that he would never forget him. He sat in the single empty chair and looked into the cube.
Yosef Strand woke up in his bed with his mother shaking him and telling him to feed the chickens. School would start in a couple hours, and he was to be tested on how the Amish had arrived here, in what they all thought was western Pennsylvania. In what they all thought was the late 19th century.
