by submission | Nov 26, 2010 | Story
Author : J.D. Rice
I twist my ankle as I land in the ditch. Mud spatters over my uniform, filthy water pooling in my socks. I ignore the stench, the reek of the jungle, the pain stabbing up my leg, and press on. If I can only make it another ten minutes, I’ll be free. Ten minutes… That’s wishful thinking.
I need to get out of this muck. It slows me down, sucking at my feet, making my ankle burn with agony. To my left the slope is muddy, but not high. It’ll have to do. On my hands and knees, I pull myself out of the ditch and crawl back into the brush of the jungle. Out of breath, I turn over onto my back and stare at the canopy of leaves high above me. Beautiful, but all too deadly.
Then I hear the guttery screech of my pursuer.
Exhausted, I force myself to my feet. My weapons are gone. The energy grenades I used; The rifle I lost in the deepness of the woods. My team? Dead. I watched the Quorrics, those off-world monstrosities, slit Johannes’ throat. Smith? Wilcox? Gervais? All charred to a crisp by the plasma weapons. I can’t stand alone, unarmed and injured, against these alien hunters. My only choice is to run. I glance at the chronometer on my wrist. Seven minutes.
Half running, half limping through the jungle, I hear my pursuer rushing up behind. Low vines and branches hem me in, obstructing my path. As I hear the creature gaining on me, I know: I will never make it seven minutes. I will die today.
I fall. With my face in the mud, I hear the Quorric saunter up behind me. He lets out a few unintelligible croaks, which passes for laughter on his world. He seems to be waiting for me to roll over. Mustering what’s left of my dignity, I turn onto my back, looking up at the disgusting creature. My eyes are watery from some combination of the mud, humidity, and my own desperation. I cannot make out its features, for which I am thankful. They are disgusting creatures.
And now the moment has come, with only five minutes remaining. Five minutes more, and I wouldn’t have to face death in the mud and the muck. It’s just not my day.
He could use the plasma rifle hangin from his side, but that’s not good enough for him. The blade jutting from his arm, that gives him more pleasure. Pleasure in the tactile nature of the kill. Pleasure in humiliating me. The assault on my reputation hurts more than the blade passing through my chest. It strikes not through the heart, but through a lung. A few more croaks from the Quorric. He finds this hilarious.
Running out of air and unable to speak, I curse the creature in my mind. Then my body starts to go numb. Vision fades. Muscles still. Darkness creeps into all five senses, into my very soul. This is the worst part.
I awake in the infirmary. The cellular regenerator has just finished reconstructing my internal organs. My eyes watch as the skin of my chest slowly reseals itself. I won’t even have a scar, come morning. Johannes is already up and about. As my lungs fill with air, I choke out just one question.
“What was the score?”
Johannes sighs heavily. “20-18,” he says, “Quorric victory.”
I swear loudly.
“We’ll get them next season.”
by submission | Nov 23, 2010 | Story
Author : Clint Wilson
It always felt lonely when the ship sailed off to tow more rocks. After all, being the only companions for eighteen light-years Jim didn’t want to see them wander too far. But somebody had to stay here in the processor and make sure things ran smoothly. The constant mechanical hum carried through the station as he looked out the window to the splendor of the brilliant gas giant below. Besides this and the field of rocks in-waiting the only other thing visible against the starry background was the tele-gate, their doorway to home, six kilometers distant, motionless in its matched orbit.
The com sounded. What could they want? They just left. He activated the monitor array and there appeared the face of Commander Hunter. There was not a hint of emotion in his demeanor.
“What’s up Hunt?”
For a couple of long seconds his superior said nothing, showed nothing, just stared at Jim through the monitors. Then he uttered the words that Jim almost certainly knew would come one day. “It’s over Jim. I know everything.”
At first he tried to act aloof, knowing he had nowhere to run, nowhere to turn. “What do you mean sir? What’s over? I don’t get it.” Jim hadn’t called Hunter Sir in nearly two years. He had already given up on the lie, and the lowering of his eyes toward his feet pretty much confirmed it.
Hunter exploded in sudden rage, sending spittle toward the camera in his com station aboard Lifeboat. “You KNOW what the FUCK I MEAN!” Then he slid his chair to one side showing an utterly horrible scene. There were the other three crew members; Hanson, Desebrais, and the commander’s wife, Colonel Jillian Hunter. They were all very distressed looking, bound and gagged. Jill looked as though she had been roughed up.
“My god, what are you doing to them?”
“Don’t worry Jimmy, they’ll be fine. I just don’t need them interfering with your punishment.”
He did not like where this was going but what could he do? Whatever Hunter had planned for him, he knew it would be sinister. It was obvious that the affair was now out in the open. Had they missed a security camera? Not in any of their spots he was pretty sure. Certainly not a pregnancy, they had discussed this, they were both fixed. Maybe Hunt had simply gotten an intuition and had somehow coerced a confession out of Jill. She was too good and pure to lie. Jim cursed himself for ever putting her in this position.
“So spill it Hunt. I can hardly wait to hear how you’re going to kill me.”
“Oh I’m not that stupid. I know murder is the only thing left that can get you the death sentence. I plan on living a long and happy life in a federal institution while you wait the… he stopped, mock calculating, tapping fingers back and forth on his palms to build suspense …let’s see, including acceleration and deceleration you should see a replacement tele-gate in about thirty years.
“Hunt! Please man, I know this is bad, but think of our friendship. Please don’t do this to me!”
Commander Hunter looked almost regretful for a split second and then straightened back up. “You’ve got enough food and water you prick. See you when we’re old men.”
Jim turned to the window in time to see Lifeboat flash out of existence through the tele-gate and then watched as the tow line followed until the three-hundred-million ton asteroid, far too large for the porthole, smashed his doorway to home into nothingness.
by submission | Nov 21, 2010 | Story
Author : Julian Miles
We met at a parts fair. We simultaneously laid hands on opposite ends of an Emptor storage array. She smiled and brandished a handful of gigaflex at me.
“Mine.” She said.
In one of those moments of prescient genius, I replied “Ours.”
It started for real a week later and finished two hours ago, with fifty years in between. We had gone from two lonely computer geeks with a thing for efficient storage to the founders of DataSure.
Yes, that DataSure. The one that can map you into the Alphanet; “Making Death Merely a Transition” as our promotionals say. She’s there now, a Transited, getting used to peripherals that can operate kit in different galaxies. We argued so much about that. She wanted the merge as her body failed; I couldn’t bear to see her go. Her crossing was the end for us. Because a transited consciousness cannot run slow enough to mix with mortals. It just isn’t possible. A machine slow enough to allow us to interface would demise the transited. A certain processing speed is necessary to maintain soulullar cohesion.
Yes, I am wealthy enough to ignore the assisted suicide laws and the mandatory consciousness directives, but my problem is something I cannot buy off.
In amongst the genetic diversity of mankind there is a peculiar combination that although mapped decades ago was a mere curiosity until transit was discovered. It means that a minute fraction of one percent of the population cannot be transited. They are quietly and pityingly referred to as ‘The Bodybound’. Something in their makeup means their consciousness cannot remain cohesive outside the shell they were born into. I have the dubious, lonely privilege of being one of them.
So I lie here next to her precious body, the cortex feed bundle hidden by her still luxuriant white hair. I write this having just completed putting my affairs in order. Now I look at the dark sheen on the barrel of my antique Desert Eagle and hope beyond reason that one day my afterlife will find her eternal circuits, somewhere out there when science and heaven finally meet.
by submission | Nov 20, 2010 | Story
Author : Brian Bartolomeo
Apparently I have a face that invites unsolicited advice.
“Are you even listening to me now?” my brother asked from the driver’s seat of his semi-classic car. “Aren’t you supposed to be a genius or something? What you need to do is to get a job that pays real money and pull your weight around here. We’re all tired of the position that you’ve put us in, so you need to move on.” His tiny, blonde girlfriend in the front passenger seat conscientiously ignored our heated argument in favor of texting rapidly while we all sped down the green corridor of a winding back road.
I tend to stonewall in uncomfortable conversations in hopes that the other person gets bored or shows a weakness, but I had heard enough out of my brother for the day. I leaned forward from the back seat and said, “I’ve done more ‘moving on’ than you have. How many swaggering, self-righteous bosses do you still have anyway? I keep losing count.” His only response was to upshift. I continued, “At least I have something to—” The car flipped.
I stood on the road and watched my brother’s car slide sideways on a patch of sand covering the road, hit the railroad ties lining the steep slope off the edge of the road and tumble over and down, twisting to absorb the impacts. Not twisting enough. I stood in horror and confusion. Wasn’t I supposed to be in the car? Was the sky supposed to flash those colors? Then I remembered. I remembered coming to myself and remembering again and again. I remembered that I wouldn’t allow myself to remember any of my previous efforts while I was in the car. That would defeat the whole point of the simulation.
I dragged myself over to the console to set the simulation up for another run. Maybe this time I would let it continue into the crash itself to see if I could have done anything to save my brother during that final collision. I had to force myself to face that memory again. I had to keep trying, keep tweaking my initial mood or my approach to keep me from provoking my brother over the edge. I couldn’t move on.
I had to know if I could have gotten it right.
by submission | Nov 18, 2010 | Story
Author : Cael Majin
There was a spider on his ceiling.
It hadn’t moved for as long as he’d been staring at it, which was… probably an hour now. Maybe two. He wasn’t knowledgeable in the acclimate taste of arachnidkind—were there brown recluses in this area? There’d been hoards if the damn things at his parents’ house—he’d found three of them in the bathtub at once one summer, fat ugly little monsters that hadn’t resisted in the least when he’d trapped them in a cup and flushed them down the toilet, accepting their dismal fates with motionless passivity…
If he moved, his bed creaked. It had always annoyed him, but it didn’t matter now because he didn’t want to move, not for anything. He decided to match the spider on his ceiling, will against will—he’d leave when it did, and they’d see which of them survived.
The sun set behind his unwashed cotton curtain, and he counted the remaining lights. One from his computer on standby mode, one from his state-issued laser pistol, flashing red as it charged on its cable, one from the newly-installed medical monitors, ready to alert him if his body began to change. The streetlights outside his window cast a sick yellow halo around the curtain. The spider cast a three-inch shadow.
At some point his cell phone vibrated on the table by his head, and he looked at it tiredly. It fell silent after several seconds of lonely beckoning, and remained so until a feeble beep let him know he had a voicemail. A few more minutes passed before he gathered the willpower to listen to it, setting it to speaker and letting it fall to the mattress, utterly unsurprised to hear Charley’s voice practically singing to him.
“David, you butthead. I know you’re there because you’re not here. Pick up!”
He shut his eyes and envisioned Charley, worried out of her mind about him. She and Zach had been killing him with kindness since that particular physical, falling over each other as they tried to figure out what to say, how not to offend—now it seemed they’d opted for the “just ignore it” tactic.
Which suited him fine.
“All right, fine. But you better be asleep, because we’re picking you up at the crack of two in the afternoon tomorrow. We’re going to act like five-year-olds all day. It’s going to be great.”
Zach had pulled a string and gotten them all off-duty the night before deployment, and they were tripping to the ramshackle amusement park erected in the civilian area. It had seemed fun at the time, because there was nothing like a couple of close-knit quasi-adults and the possibility of roller-coasters, but the thought of it now – being out among strangers, as if they’d see into him and see the illness – burrowed into his guts and squirmed around.
Charley’s voice stalled, losing a bit of its synthetic cheer. “Seriously, get some rest, D. Look, it’s not… it doesn’t change anything, alright? Nobody is afraid of you. See you tomorrow.”
“To erase this message, press seven. To save, press—“
He let the machine politely blather on until it disconnected itself and his phone went dark. The streetlight outside flickered a little—or had the spider moved just the tiniest bit? He watched it carefully, commanding his eyes to transform the silent speck into a living creature, whose life pulsed powerfully inside even as it clung there, motionless, for hours.
He would let it live, he decided slowly, even if it was a brown recluse. They’d shared this evening in silence and stillness, and he suspected he’d win this battle of patience. He’d probably still be lying here, drained of strength, by the time the creature disappeared back into the safety of its shadows.
