by submission | Dec 29, 2009 | Story
Author : L.Hall
Robert Lynch kicked the treads of the small field tractor, clots of dried mud falling off and busting on the ground. He took off his ball cap, looked up in the air and ignored the old man, Paul Gilbert, standing behind him quietly. Bobby, his five year old son, stood near his terrain utility vehicle trying to grab a marshopper. Robert watched him for a moment.. there was no awe on the boy’s face at the genetically engineered insect, designed to cross pollinate plants and burrow into the ground to loosen soil under the Mars biodomes. Just a boy trying to catch an insect. He turned slightly to look at the old man.
“Paul, I gotta tell ya.. Times been tough on everyone.” Robert scratched his chin.
The old man scuffed his boot against the red soil on the dirt road.
“I know, son. But I just can’t see how I can let’er go for less’n fourteen hundred.”
Robert nodded and walked around the tractor, green paint worn off in spots around the hitch. Bobby chased a marshopper closer to Paul while Robert deliberated on the cost.
“You know it ain’t worth eight.” He said, looking across the top of it at the old man. A low chuckle came out of Paul as he shook his head.
“Boy,” he said a bit louder, catching Bobby’s attention. “You hear that bird?”
Bobby started looking around him confused. He’d read about birds in books, but had never seen one, having never been off the Mars agriculture colony. Looking up at Paul, he shook his head. The old man bent down on one knee.
“You don’t hear that bird? Listen.”
Robert leaned against the tractor watching the act. Bobby was straining so hard to hear. Paul held up his hand to his own ear.
“Hear it? It’s going ‘Cheap! Cheap! Cheap!'”
Robert started laughing as Paul stood back up and grinned at him across the tractor. Bobby continued looking around curiously.
“Fine! Tell you what. I’ll give you nine for it, and eight bales of feed.” Robert said, laughingly. Paul grinned as he walked over to the tractor.
“Throw in one of Mary’s pies and maybe supper?” he asked, holding out his hand. Robert shook his hand and clapped Paul on the back.
“Now.. that’s between you and Mary.” he said.
As Robert and Bobby pulled off the Gilbert’s homestead, the young boy looked over at his Daddy curiously. “Daddy, I never did hear that bird.”
Robert laughed as the TUV bumped over the dirt road toward the lights of their own biodome.
by submission | Dec 28, 2009 | Story
Author : Omkar Wagh
“How many days of funding do I have left?”, I asked.
“Well your thesis has been accepted and you have already been given a Ph.D. degree. So the college is willing to support you for about three more months at least.”
“Damn It! I would have never expected such a toxic species to last so long. Is there no way I could wrap up my work without landing in prison?”
“No I don’t think so. It’s a bit harsh but necessary. You’re going to have to fund the experiment with your own earnings now. I did advise you not to dabble in such experiments though.”
“Sir, but why is this law even in place?”
“Ever since a species in another simulation experiment conducted somewhere across the globe had developed enough to run their own simulation experiment, some blokes somewhere thought they actually had sentience, life even. They had as much a right to life as we did. Which meant a person could not stop such a simlation until all life had terminated.
Now depending on the laws of physics in that universe, this could take any time from months to years.”
There was nothing I could do. The job prospects for a universe simulation graduate were bleak especially with the negative publicity surrounding the research field because of the several casual genocides that were caused. Students would start simulations with random laws of physics, see which ones led to life, publish papers and then terminate them. I was one of the last students to take this line.
All that changed when some simulated species began their own simulations. What if we were a simulation ourselves? Would we want the same fate on us? Hence, we could not stop a simulation without all life terminating of it’s own accord.
I had to hire a talented hacker to bring down our systems from outside the university and delete all data. It was criminal. It was genocide. But at least he could claim he did not know of the simulation within the system. At least he wouldn’t get the death penalty. And I won’t be there to hear their last cries.
I’m not sure I want to play God anymore.
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.
