by submission | Dec 27, 2009 | Story
Author : Gavin Raine
It’s ironic, but I’d been having having such a good day. The children all had their heads down, working on their numbers, and I even had a little time to daydream for once.
Then, I had that strange feeling that my chair had just sunk six inches into the floor – you know the one – and I knew it was real because the children reacted too. I was just about to reassure them that everything was OK when the gravity went off and all the lights went out and everybody started screaming.
The darkness only lasted a few seconds, of course, but it was terrifying for them – and for me too. If I hadn’t been shouting at them to be quiet, I think I would have been screaming myself.
Anyway, the emergency lighting came on and I started grabbing children out of the air and pushing them towards their lockers. They were all very good really and they remembered their drill perfectly, but it’s not easy getting into a pressure suit in zero gee. Most of them were crying and one of the boys was sick and Molly Davis got it in her hair and… well it was just a god awful mess.
We were just about getting organized when that idiot Lieutenant Birch started talking on the PA. “Wow that was a big one!” he said. “The engines have cut out because we’ve got a bit of spin,” he said. “We’re going to have a nice new crater after that one,” he said. He talks to us like were a bunch of kids on a fucking fairground ride! I’m sorry, but it’s just really inappropriate.
Listen, I know we’re inside an asteroid with a shell ten meters thick, but this is happening far too often. Inter-stellar space isn’t as empty as they told us it would be and traveling at 80% of the speed of light is just plain suicidal. We’re still six months from the turn-around and we can’t slow down, or we miss our target, so you know it can only get worse.
I’m sorry Captain, but you’re going to have to find yourself a new schoolteacher. I’ve made my decision and I’m going into the freezers tomorrow. All things considered, I’m not prepared to sit around and wait for the big one. I think it would be better to die in my sleep.
by submission | Dec 26, 2009 | Story
Author : Jim Wisniewski
She smiles and tilts her head to push a lock of brown hair behind her ear. I run the image back a few seconds and watch it again, entranced as always by the fluidity of the motion. The machines can show me any moment of her life, but this is the one I keep coming back to. Such grace, such elegance encompassed in so simple a gesture. Even so there is no sense of artifice in it. The beauty is simply a part of her, in everything she does.
I play the scene back in slow motion, studying every changing nuance of her face. The detail of the image is excellent, now. Resolution was low in the early days of the project, but at this point there’s enough holoscopes to sift even the tiniest detail from the shell of thirty-year-old photons. Before long we’ll push the cloud out to a hundred light-years and begin again. That much distance will be hard on the algorithms, but with enough patience we’ll see everything. Dirichlet will not be denied.
A changing shadow on the wall alerts me to one of my colleagues passing by in the hall. As casually as I can, I flip over to a different display until the coast is clear again. Everyone knows some bandwidth goes towards personal uses, but we’re not supposed to flaunt it.
Not that they’d understand anyway. This way I can be with her at every point in time, sharing in each completed perfect moment. Here I wince at the pain when she was twelve and broke her wrist. There I feel the stress when she has to decide which school to pick and which friends to leave behind. Laughing along with her and her classmates at the commencement party, worrying about her new job, right up until the accident–
I don’t watch that far ahead, usually.
It’s better this way, it really is. Unrequited love is the purest kind. Watching from out here we will never fight, never grow distant and drift apart. She will never age. Photons don’t experience time flying along their lightlike paths. I suppose they carry my own image outwards as well, to anybody who knows how to look closely enough.
But no matter how long I watch, I can’t seem to find myself in the picture with her.
by submission | Dec 21, 2009 | Story
Author : C. S. McClendon
I stepped out of the lobby just in time to watch the last metro transport of the day speed past and turn the corner without so much as slowing down. Great, that meant I had to walk home, and these heels were already killing me, wonderful. Still, no use complaining about it, and at least the trans-walks were clean, not like the way the streets had been ten years or so ago. I slipped the heels off and stepped onto the trans-walk. Technically you can just stand there and let the walk do all the work, as long as you keep an eye out for the intersections, but I didn’t get a butt you could bounce a federal credit off of by standing around, and besides, according to the flash message that had come in before I left work, there was a package waiting outside the apartment, and I didn’t want to risk one of my neighbors snatching it on their way up the shaft before I got home. So I ran.
By the time I made the last intersection and stepped through the entrance of my high-rise, the curfew chimes were sounding through the public address system. Guess it was a good thing I chose to run today. I was going to have to send my supervisor a flash about keeping me late though. If I get caught after curfew just coming home from work we’ll both be in for it.
Stepping into the air shaft I felt the heated gasses ease the tension from aching muscles as they surrounded me and sent me rocketing through the pressure tube toward my apartment. Stepping through the aperture, I snatched up the small, plain brown carton. It might have been anything. All mail comes in these plain unmarked cartons these days after all, since the privacy act of 2112, but I knew what it was, thanks to the flash from FedCom.
I stepped through the door to my place and kicked it shut behind me before slitting the carton open with the lacquered nail of my index finger. No invoice, that was all handled by flash. It was just a small, unmarked silver disc. Again, it could have been anything. I tore the RFID off the spine of the carton, that couldn’t go into the recycler, and tossed the carton itself down the chute. The small plasma readout above the recycler registered a two credit deposit into my account, not that I needed the reminder.
I slid the disc out of its packaging, and tossed it to my desk. Let the sensors start reading while I finished unwinding from work. I dialed up some soft Latin strings on the sound system and moved to the bar to pour a shot of rum, gods it would be good not to come home to an empty house every day. I tossed my heels into the closet in time to hear the beep from my terminal. The desk had finished reading the disc.
“Compile, and execute,” I called out to the empty room, while feeling the first tremble of nerves.
The holographic pickups around the room hummed, and an image coalesced just in front of my chair. The well toned man in front of me cleared his throat, and looked around for just a moment before saying softly, “Good evening, I’m Andrew, your purchase from EmalE: A new kind of companion for a new Generation of women.”
Yes indeed, it was definitely going to be nice not to come home to an empty house every day.
by submission | Dec 20, 2009 | Story
Author : Glenn Song
Jeanette hated Dr. Kogen’s waiting room. It screamed blue at her – the cushions, the walls, and even the magazine covers were coordinated in a fan of azure. Nestled in a wicker basket, on a round table in the center of the room, sat a red delicious apple, a banana, and an orange like a zen puzzle to be pondered. It was too structured, too perfect, but Jeanette dismissed the decor with a mental shake. “Whatever floats your boat,” she thought, tossing a softball almost to the ceiling and catching it first in her right hand, then her left.
Doctor Kogen appeared from behind his door and stood before the blue wall. He flashed a smile at Jeanette, and she half expected him to present her with the five-day forecast. He approached her and shook hands. “Well, are we ready?”
“Hell yeah,” Jeanette said. “I’m ready to walk out of here.”
Kogen frowned. “Did you consider–”
“I’m sick of the chair.”
He plucked the orange from the wicker basket and tossed it to the left of her. She snatched it from the air and looked for traces of disappointment in Kogen’s face. Yeah, she wanted to tell him, I caught it. He simply smiled and said, “Jeanette, before we begin, how does that orange feel to you?”
She tossed the orange in her hands and ran her finger over the lumpy skin.
“What about it?”
“Take a sniff.”
She humored him. “Smells like an orange.” She tossed it back. “The new season starts in two months. I want to play again.”
He nodded. “Very well, this way.” Kogen opened the door a crack. Jeanette placed her hands on the back of her wheels and once the door was half open she revved herself down the hallway. “Third door on your right,” he called after her. She entered the room rolling over a speed bump bundle of wires. LCD panels filled out an entire wall displaying various statistics that would soon be drawn from her body. A stoic figure lay on a bed behind a curtain, but before she could see who it was, two nurses helped her onto her bed, began an IV drip, and placed plugs on her.
“Brainwaves normal. Heart rate, blood pressure, vitals all stable. We’re ready to download,” a nurse said.
“Jeanette, last chance,” Kogen said.
“Yes. Always, yes.”
“Then, take a last look with your human eyes.” Kogen left the room. Jeanette’s world blurred and darkened. The last thing she heard was the sound of her heart flatlining.
* * * * *
“Jeanette.” She identified Kogen’s voice and opened her eyes. Her visual cortex established a pixelated image and then adjusted the resolution. Behind Kogen, a fly fluttered its wings. She saw every wing stroke.
Kogen handed her a mirror. She looked like herself, maybe better. She ran her fingers through her hair. It felt like her hair, maybe softer.
“Diagnostics complete,” said the nurse. “She’s fully functional.”
“Jeanette, we’ll have a battery of tests to conduct before you leave the hospital, but as you are well aware, you’ve died and moved into a mechanized body. How does it feel being a cyborg?” Kogen tossed her an orange.
Her grip surprised her. She crushed the soft fruit, spraying pulp and juice on herself, Kogen, and his nurses. She faced her old body lying next to her and fingered through the mush in her hand, wondering for the first time what she’d done.
by submission | Dec 19, 2009 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
Forty-five feet over Ninevah, Phillip is enclosed in a spherically symmetric potential. He’s feeling somewhat philosophical.
Below, on the steps leading to the courtyard of the Library, Ashurbanipal, the last of the great Assyrian kings, faces his death. He’s surrounded, literally, by advisors, priests and acolytes, and a platoon of soldiers clad in full battle dress of conical iron helmets and rounded wickerwork shields, with short swords at their waists and pikes in hand. They’re waiting for Ashurbanipal’s traitorous sons.
Overhead Phillip is thinking, have I been the best man that I can be?
Outside the potential’s bubble, where crazy math occludes normal time and the obviated spin-state of subatomic particles creates a slight, sparkling shield, Ashurbanipal’s Library rises high above Phillip’s vantage. In two decades time the great Library will be gone, torn down and sacked by the invading Babylonians and Medes. The thirty thousand tablets and texts stored there will be discovered millennia later by the hapless Sir A. H. Layard and his sloppy successors. Inside the bubble the virtual recording gear is rolling, the minimal life support sighing. All systems are nominal.
Ashurbanipal is very old. He stands supported by his Queen, Ashur-sharrat, and two palace women from the bit-reduti, where he was born from the flanks of his father’s consort. A scribe is reading, from a papyrus scroll, a list of complaints against him, a diatribe of supposed crimes against his own empire. His sons, too jaded, too fresh with the power they will pull from his death, await the end of this reading in the comfort of the palace. Ashurbanipal, as the only Assyrian king capable of reading script, knows well what the scroll holds.
Phillip scratches his nose, bites into an apple. He thinks, have I been a good father?
The scribes conclude reading the scroll. The sons stroll in with their retinue, and the youngest son approaches Ashurbanipal. He has a foot-long, embellished ceremonial knife in his hand. Ashurbanipal slumps into his wife, and raises his head. His eyes seem to lock onto Phillip’s eyes, and he smiles slightly as his youngest son penetrates his abdomen with the knife
Phillip takes another bite of the apple and thinks, while watching Ashurbanipal slump further into his wife and consorts, I need to fix things.
Until they close for good, the dying king’s eyes never waver.
