by submission | Jul 15, 2010 | Story
Author : Mike Marsh
“Tell me again about the dime. How is this relevant?”
Charlie was tired. This was the end of a long day; his head hurt. He swatted at a buzzing fly.
“The dime is just part of it, doc. Don’t you get it? Who’s on the dime is just the start.”
The man across from him nodded. “Okay. But who is on the dime?”
Charlie sighed. He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a dime, and tossed it across the table. The doctor looked at the dime over the rim of his glasses for a moment, then reached over to inspect it.
“Look at the dime.” Charlie demanded. “Who’s on it?”
“Greek god. Mercury? Gotta be valuable. They haven’t minted these in a long time.”
“The date?” Charlie demanded. “What’s the date?”
The doctor flipped the coin around. His face blanched.
“Gotta be a joke. A trick. You bought it as a gag.”
Charlie sighed again.
“Yeah. That’s what they all said. All day long. Except I didn’t. I had a bunch of other coins, even some bills. But they all disappeared hours ago. I hid this. Just in case.”
He snatched it back from the doctor.
“Okay, so what if it is real? You’re saying what? That you aren’t from our world?”
“I don’t know. I guess. Look, I’m just a cab driver, okay. I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout this kind of stuff. I get up this morning, my wife’s hair is black, not red. I have my coffee and eggs, but my wife thinks I’m crazy when I ask for cheese and honey on my toast. Says I mean butter. I always have cheese and honey. Thirty years, and suddenly she doesn’t know what I eat?”
The doctor shifts in his seat.
“When did you suspect something was – umm different?”
“I was headed to work. I only live a block from where I park my cab. But the streets were all laid out wrong. And the names were wrong. There was this Roosevelt Street. Who the hell ever heard of a Roosevelt?”
“Wait. You don’t know who Roosevelt was?”
Charlie shook his head, rubbed his temples with his index finger and thumb, and sighed deeply.
“That’s what I been trying to tell everyone! Where I came from there ain’t no Roosevelt. It’s different! The same, yeah, in some ways, but different!”
The doctor slid his chair back. He stood and fastened the button of his suit jacket.
“Look, Mr. Simms. Relax here a few minutes. Let me go converse with Detective Anderson. Let’s not dwell too much on this dime, for now. Okay?”
“It ain’t just the dime!”
“I know. I know. Why don’t you let me hold onto it. As evidence. Alright?”
Charlie flipped the coin back over to the doctor.
“Fine. Whatever. I’m too tired to fight anymore.”
“Just give me a few minutes, okay?” The doctor slipped the dime into his pocket and knocked on the Interrogation Room door. When it opened he stepped through.
“So what do you think, doc?” Detective Anderson asked. The doctor slid his glasses along the bridge of his nose.
“The poor man is obviously delusional. He needs treatment.”
He fondled the dime in his pocket, flipping it between his fingers.
“He has to be delusional.”
“How do you mean?”
“A world, like ours, but different? Yet the same? I mean, really, how would you even explain that? No, he’s obviously over stressed. Needs therapy, quiet surroundings”
“I guess. You’re the expert.”
Charlie Simms stroked the hair on his chin and waited.
by submission | Jul 13, 2010 | Story
Author : Cesium
To my love,
By now you will undoubtedly have gotten the news. Yes, it’s true. The train did derail… and I was one of the casualties.
I am sorry this final message could not bring better news. I cannot bring you hope, or ease your pain. But… take joy in our daughter; comfort her. Find another who will love you both as I did. I only wish I could see her grow up…
You may be wondering — as I did — how it is that this message has reached you. Did I save it to be sent in the case of my death? Did I entrust its writing to another? Did I, perhaps, know that today would be my last?
But it is not any of those things. It is something much stranger, which I am not sure I understand myself. But I will try to explain it, in the hope that someday, someone else might.
You’re aware of the wetware implants I received… in fact, I remember you argued against my taking them. In the end, though they improved my efficiency and my position in the company — and we could certainly use the extra money — you were never completely happy with them.
I’m not sure whether I agree with you, now. On one hand, your arguments were right, in a way. On the other, maybe this is a blessing, not a curse…
What appears to have happened is that while I was using my implants to interface with the company servers, my mind somehow… imprinted itself on them. While I was alive (which still sounds odd to say, though I’ve had a while to think it over), there was a constant wireless connection running in the background, so the trace of me on the server remained linked to my human brain. But now that that’s gone, the trace is all that’s left. It’s… me, I suppose. I’m not quite what I was before, but I’m close enough. I think. I hope.
Time passes differently in here. The company has top-of-the-line servers, and I’d say it’s been maybe two or three seconds since the news about the train came in. Two or three seconds since this… me… became an independent entity. But that’s a long time. Data moves fast, and I’ll show up as an unauthorized process in the logs. My guess is I won’t have much longer before the security daemons erase me from memory.
I wonder if that counts as murder.
I guess, regardless of the answer, I don’t want to see the company suffer for it. There are a lot of great people working there, making better technology for all of us. I’m proud of these circuits, this code… even the code that will destroy me.
I don’t have much time left, and I have to make sure this message is sent. By the time you read this, I will no longer exist.
So — take care, and farewell.
by submission | Jul 11, 2010 | Story
Author : Thomas Desrochers
We’ve turned into such a peaceful race. We are so… So… Dull. We never fight any more, wars are a thing of the past. Even violent crime seems to have just disappeared. The typical city needs, maybe, one law enforcement officer per every million people.
Yes, violence has been replaced with communication, war with learning, militaries with space programs. Children listen and want to learn, science and math are favorites among them.
This is a problem. English and music have been usurped, and nobody cares about history any more. Culture is non-existent. Media is simply news. Radio is just an information exchange system. There is no music any more, except for what people play in their suits, and even then it’s mindless three- and four-note “techno,” a mockery of the music it was derived from.
I am not alone in my thoughts. There are others who agree with me – very few, but they are there. There’s Andrew, he writes music. He’s the only one out of all humanity who still does. Then there’s his wife, Anne. She paints. Her friend, Eilene, also paints. The three of them live together on The Subcontinent. I live on the west part of Continent B, with Marcus, Dominic, and Sheila. Marcus likes to work clay, Dominic makes sculptures. Sheila and I are just along for the ride.
See, none of us can get any inspiration from the blandness around us. There is no nature anymore, it was wiped out long ago in the name of humanity. The oceans are tamed, the weather under our control and as magical as a door. So we get our inspiration from people. We get people to show real, genuine emotion.
It’s very easy to draw them out of all that contrived peacefulness. After all, their suits connect directly to their brains. With some simple hacking we have direct control of their thoughts, emotions, and senses – most of which we don’t even need.
Our latest kill was a wonderful example of how we work. It was a young girl named Ana near here who is much like all of her peers, striving to excel in mathematics and science, her suit doing its job and regulating hormones quite well. The seven of us, myself, Marcus, Andrew, we all connect our systems together. Then Marcus sends out a feeler to make contact with the girl’s system.
Once we have a connection the seven of us mentally destroy her firewalls and silence any warning systems, in the space of about a second. Then we start pumping her full of hormones, and she very quickly becomes unstable. After that it’s simple. We just plant thoughts that she wouldn’t normally think, and she thinks she’s the one thinking them. Before long Ana decides she shouldn’t be alive any more.
Ana was quite creative. Instead of the usual “Jumping off a building” or “Forcing suit shutdown” she opened up a transformer and shoved her head inside it.
And God, that was so good, feeling the abrupt end when she did it. Andrew wrote a symphony that night, Dominic matched DaVinci – It was a wonderful night for their creativity.
And me? I rode that lovely buzz and philosophized. I thought about Secular Humanism that night, pondered the idea that all people are fundamentally good. I don’t believe it. If people were good they would have let the violence continue.
Luckily for them there’s still a few of us right-minded people left.
God, I do love that rush.
by submission | Jul 10, 2010 | Story
Author : Waldo van der Waal
Nobody warned me about the pain. Creeping from your brain and slowly extending to every bloody nerve-ending. Hot acid makes way for molten lava before the really hot stuff arrives. A million tiny needles prod at every part of your body. From the inside outwards and from the outside in, right into each atom that makes you what you are. Feeble movements of your fingertips are as much as you can muster. There’s nothing to do but scream until your throat bleeds. Nothing to do but wait. Nobody warned me about the pain.
They didn’t warn me because they probably didn’t know. Not at the time, anyway. Back then it was all smiles and champagne and fancy pens to sign the contract. Their office looked like the Ritz and their salesman – his name escapes me while I scream some more – their saleman was glib and self-assured and just a little cocky. And I fell for it. I took the diamond-encrusted Waterman and signed on the dotten line. And I gave them access to my First Bank of the Confederation account. It all sounded to good to be true. But their scientists must’ve known. Maybe they even knew themselves.
Things actually started going wrong some 872 years ago. That’s when I pinged the numbers in the Quadrant Lottomax – the only winner out of nearly 12 billion entires. What are the chances? It was a rollover, and I didn’t get rich from it. I got mind bogglingly, stupidly, richer-than-Zaphod-himself rich. Started snorting caviar because I could. Used chapmagne to brush my teeth. Bought anything I could see, including Pluto. And had a lot of money left over.
The only thing that was running out for me was time. I was 88 when the last lotto ball fell into place, matching my numbers. I aged considerably when I saw the result, sure, but realistically closing time was, uh, closing in on me. So I found a public terminal and did a bit of searching. Found the guys with the Ritz office and the fancy pens, who said they could make me live forever. They had tested it on rats and pigs and it worked.
So I climbed into the dewar they prepared – didn’t even wait to die. They said if I waited, I might be too far from their facility when the time came. So I went willingly while they pumped my body full of stuff. Cold stuff. I don’t remember dying, but my mind didn’t switch off completely. Blackness, but with peripheral dreams, if that makes sense. Lots of it.
I don’t know how much time passed, but it was a stack. Then, last week I became aware of the pain. My eyes started focussing and I saw a note pasted to the faceplate of my dewar. “Cryogenic reversal starting. Good luck.” Good luck? Then came the torture. Even through the thick sides of my casket, I can hear other screams. I hear more and more of them every day, but I haven’t heard one of them stop yet.
Needles filled with poison assault me constantly. They tested it, they had said. It worked, they had said. But surely they must have known. And not one of the bastards told me about the fucking pain.
by submission | Jul 8, 2010 | Story
Author : John Logan
At 34 years old, I was in bad shape. Sixty pounds over weight and wheezing like a dying man every time I trudged up a flight of stairs. The cigarettes didn’t help. My wife, Claire, constantly nagged at me to stop. She hated the smell. I also drank heavily. I’d abused my body. I was a wreck, a biological time bomb just waiting to explode. The day of reckoning finally arrived when I dropped off Claire at her office and moments later was clutching my chest while trying to breath through the intense pain.
Somehow I survived the ordeal. Angina they told me. After recovering, my physician insisted I visit one of the New Life clinics. I took his advice and ignored the financial grumblings of my wife. That’s when my life changed drastically.
I’d always been skeptical of their ads. “Take back your life, you deserve it!” said their slogan. They promised a total body transformation. And what did I have to do? Nothing. The tech at the clinic went through the details with me, I signed the papers and the next day lumbered into their lab room where a slab of metal awaited. Next to it, a man laid completely naked and deep in slumber.
“That him?” I asked.
“Yup, your trainer, Mike, he’s the best,” said the tech. “He’ll take over your body and get you into top shape. You’ll feel like a new man, mark my words.”
He was a fine specimen, rippling torso and bulging biceps.
I mimicked Mike’s posture and lay down on my own slab while feeling self-conscious of the rolls of fat that wobbled over my unseemly gait.
“See you in six months,” said the tech and smiled.
Syringes filled with colored liquid descended and the world turned dark.
#
I woke.
A voice beckoned me to sit up. I hunched my shoulders, expecting old pains to return. None came. My abdomen felt taut and strong as I sat up effortlessly. The room was a touch cold and for the first time I looked down at the gooseflesh skin covering my biceps. They were thick, powerful and vascular, like they’d been when I was an athlete in my teens. My breathing was steady, my mood pleasantly euphoric.
“Bad news I’m afraid,” said the tech who appraised me with a furrowed brow.
I shifted from the slab, marveling at how fluid my body moved, how light I felt with each step. “Bad news?” I laughed. “But I feel fantastic!”
The grave expression the tech returned cut short my pleasant mood. “What happened?” I asked. A feeling of apprehension began to worm its way under my skin.
“It concerns your wife.”
“Is she ok?”
The tech paused. “I’m afraid she committed suicide last night.”
“What?” I shouted and swayed slightly as though slapped in the face. “How?”
“Mike, your trainer, evaluated your lifestyle and determined that your wife was the main factor in your poor health. Five months ago, he divorced her.”
“What the hell?” I shouted louder. I heard my knuckles crack. “You can’t do that.”
The tech looked apologetic. “It’s in the contract,” he said then sighed. “Look, for what it’s worth I’m sorry for your loss but just look at you now. Mike made you his masterpiece.”
He gestured to a mirror. I turned and stared in amazement. Mike really had turned me around. “I suppose it is time to move on,” I said and my thoughts drifted to a cute twenty-something I’d had my eye on at work but never had the confidence to approach, until now.
