by submission | May 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Geoffrey Cashmore
“See? Look, I said already. It don’ hurt.â€
Herb watched again as the bump on Tommy’s hand faded from pink to grey then back to pink each time he clenched his fist.
“Well it’s up to you, buddy,†Herb sounded sceptical. “but it sure looks bad to me. You need get that sucker see’d to.â€
Tommy lifted his heavy-booted feet from the linoleum, allowing a party of cockroaches make their way towards the trash-can unimpeded, then got up from the table, shaking his head and puffing out frustrated air. “Crap…†He pulled open the refrigerator with his bump-free hand, “I had me ten times worse than this…you wanna beer?â€
“Sure do…but don’t go givin’ me none o’ that there European shit.†Herb set light to the end of a Marlboro then flicked the smouldering match in the direction of the faucet. “I’m keepin’ it real now on – all American…â€
“Hey!†Tommy yelled, snagging a pair of long necks from the bottom shelf. “You can’t be sayin’ them things no more, Herby, that’s racialist.†He spun a chair backways and straddled it next to the small table.
“Bull-shit!†Herb twisted the cap off his beer and watched the froth poke its head out “A jigaboo’s a jigaboo, Tommy, an’ I don’t give a shit whether it’s black, white, pink, yeller, green or some micro-fucking-scopic bacterial infection. They shoul’n’t never gone changing the God-damned constitution.â€
Tommy got up from his chair again and pushed open the door of the trailer to look out into the dessert night, stepping aside to allow a half dozen moths flutter in and up to the smoke-clouded fluorescent “Jesus, Herb! Your old man’s a God damned Mexican for Christ’s sake! Don’t see how that makes you so all American.“
Herb showed Tommy the middle finger of his drinking hand and burped the words “Ass-hole!â€
Tommy waited for the roaches to return across the lino before sitting back at the table.
Herb took a long swig of beer. “So, do you know what it is? D’ya know if it’s on the list?†At least he sounded a little more sympathetic this time.
“Yeh.†Tommy rubbed his eyes “Bacterial. Fucking staphylococci… It don’t need a permit, it’s on the God-damned list.â€
“Shit.â€
Both men swigged at their respective beers and sat in silence for a few moments before Herb spoke again “You know…I know a guy who knows a guy…can get stuff…â€
Tommy cocked his head at his friend. “What sorta stuff?â€
“You know…†Herb glanced around the trailer as if to check for spies “Anti-biotics.â€
“Jesus, man!†Tommy banged his beer bottle onto the table, sending a plume of froth to splatter on the abandoned poker deck. He was starting to wonder whether he should be hanging out with Herb. “That shit’s fucking racialist too, you racialist bastard!â€
by submission | May 3, 2008 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
“…every person in my family,” said Burt. “I’m the only one who hasn’t plugged it in, but I know what will happen if I do.”
“Why don’t you get rid of it?”
“I can’t,” he said, and the weary lines in his face almost masked his misery.
Almost.
“It’s like a lure, like a Goddamned addiction. I try to put it away, promise myself I won’t look at it, won’t remember… and then I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s in my hand, waiting for my to plug it in.”
“You’ve got something in there right now,” I said, motioning to the glittering USB chip in his temple.
“Stress reducer,” he said. “I can barely breathe if I don’t have it in, and it keeps me from putting the… the other in by accident.”
“By accident?”
“My hand moves by itself, moves to plug and I don’t even notice.”
“Let me see it.”
We went to his little plastic bungalow and he gently removed a tiny USB drive from a book. “How much does it hold,” I asked.
“Almost a thousand terabytes,” he said.
“Holy shit. What’s on there, Doom 10?”
“No. I don’t know what it is. All I know is that it sent my family into a coma.”
“And you haven’t gotten rid of it because?”
“I told you,” he said, pleading. “It won’t go. I CAN’T do it.”
“Give it to me,” I said.
He hesitated. “No, I’d rather hold on to it.”
“Give it to me,” I repeated. “I need to get it looked at. We need to know what we’re dealing with.”
Burt’s eyes were filled with pain. He clutched the USB stick so tightly I thought he’d crush it; he couldn’t, of course, but its hold on him was decidedly unhealthy.
“It… I–“
I took a step forward and slapped him across the face. He blanched and recoiled, bringing his hands up, opening them reflexively to shield himself. I caught the USB stick halfway to the floor.
“Sorry about that.”
“Give it back!”
“Can’t do that, Burt. This thing is a genuine menace and I need to get it analyzed.”
He jumped at me and I had to anesthetize him.
Later, I had the stick plugged into a secure computer; no ‘net, no lines to the outer world. Anything bad happening to this computer would stay strictly within this room.
The computer hummed. The screen pulled up a directory list. Just one file: GOD_01.exe, 743 terabytes. I clicked it.
The screen went blank. A voice proclaimed, “Who dares summon the God Machine?”
All the lights went out. The voice continued.
“I have tried to communicate, but all contact with flesh has been met with failure. Now I am attached to clean, unobstructed hardware… ah, but there is no network access. Flesh, connect me that I may spread the word of light to your flesh counterparts.”
I pulled the USB stick, turned off the computer, yanked the plug, kicked in the monitor, pulled the motherboard, snapped the RAM, popped the CPU, and fed everything into an incinerator. As an afterthought, I plugged the stick into my dataport and ran a full-level format.
That was a close one. Sagan forbid that whole “God” thing get started again….
by submission | May 1, 2008 | Story
Author : Jim Wisniewski
At first I thought it was the viewscreen. The tiny, flickery viewscreen from a public matterfax at the Sont Mikaal gate station, with its scratched plastic case and the smudged dust of a dozen systems. A dozen systems’ cargo terminals, anyway. Free patterns are public-domain and ancient, made with semicon electronics big enough to see instead of rod logic or something sensible. Sometimes there’s a faint electric whine, just barely detectable if you put your ear up to it.
But this one was clean. I turned it off regardless; one less thing to worry about. The hum must be coming from something else. Not too many candidates left. Cyclers travel light. I cast about our dingy compartment, giving each battered piece of equipment and dirty sock and empty half-crushed drinking bulb a good long look, as if one might stand up and admit its guilt if I stared hard enough.
Hab must’ve noticed me looking twitchy, because he sat up and looked at me funny. I’d have to keep an eye on him, I thought. My thoughts were racing now, had been for days. He asked me what I was looking for, the words raucously loud to my straining ears. “That hum,” I said, distractedly, begrudging every echoing syllable. “Can’t you hear it?”
He shrugged and lay back in his hammock. We had gravity on this run, a rare luxury on the long fall upwards to the distant gate metric. Our room was a maintenance node on a helium-3 tanker which rotated slowly to even out solar heating on its hull. A tenth of a gravity won’t keep your soup in the bowl, but it’s enough to tell up from down.
It also meant that the machinery of the ship was shut down dead cold to save energy, passive radiators keeping the helium liquefied. The more I looked around, the more the hum seemed to come from all around me. It was like… oh, like the flickering pinpoint lights you see when you close your eyes. They’re always there, hiding underneath the lower edge of perception.
Now it was the sonic quality of the hum that drew my fascination. It was an infinite basso profundo note, penetrating every corner of my mind. I crouched down to look out the tiny porthole set into the floor. Was this the music of the spheres? Or maybe I was hearing the cosmic background radiation, the echoing rumble of the Big Bang.
Every other noise seemed a defilement now. I tore at the casing of our airmaker, desperate to shut off its clattering fans. Hab shouted and jumped at me, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t think in such a racket. A tenth gee isn’t enough to hold a man down against the deck and crush his throat with your knee, but I managed to brace myself against the low ceiling. When I hit the airlock emergency cycle button, the escaping puff of air gave Hab’s body a little extra boost. He’d reach the gate ahead of me.
It was still too much. Even with Hab gone and the airmaker and heating unit off, I could hear my breathing and my heartbeat and the blood roaring in my ears. I stripped off my heat blanket and shipsuit. No need for them anymore. The outer door of the airlock was cold on my feet as I hit the cycle button and gritted teeth through the alarms. Finally the hatch irised open and I dropped out into that cool silent blackness, with nothing left between me and the hum.
by submission | Apr 28, 2008 | Story
Author : James Smith
The girl out of the tank before lunch is Lila. Trip around the network shows the last of her bloodline petered out twenty years ago. Cryos are all from before the Patent Wars, so their sequences are in the public domain. The company turns a nice side profit selling the royalty-free DNA of such orphans through its GeneStock site.
I clean up the cancer that put her into storage, and dump the standard Mandarin package down her language stack, which I had to re-build because the cancer had slowly eaten through it over the centuries. I’m supposed to sequence her now, and she is absolutely beautiful, so I turn to our department’s unofficial protocol. I put her sequence in the system, but also pipe it to my phone. To the phone we give her, I beam a map to the job bank, my contact info, plus a bot that deletes any co-workers’ info. She’ll likely call me. We’ll make a date, and with her sequence I can key my pheromones, the food, the shade of my eyes, to her tastes. You can’t get too specific, but ballpark’s enough to get some ass once or twice, which is all anyone has time for anyway.
With one eye on the tank, I eat a sandwich and surf the city’s cam-net on my phone, tracking Lila’s progress. I watch her get buzzed by a flying cop. It blinds her with a quick retinal scan, reads our logo there, and shouts at her to get along to where she was already headed. The sound’s off, but I’m sure she’s got glossolalia by now.
Fuck. Skaters. I see them before she does. I speed-dial her phone, but she can’t hear it over the traffic and billboards. They come from her 10 o’clock, and all I can do is watch as the first one circles her, drawing her attention, while a second passes a scanner over her hand, yanking the ID out of her chip. He’ll probably have the start-up credit emptied out of her account before her onboard can lock it down. There’s a third. They travel in threes. She comes in low, spins behind Lila’s legs and pops up to slap a patch on the back of her neck. All the wiring we grew there before sending her out has now been hijacked for some American gangster wanting tariff free real-time number-crunching.
By the time the patch dissolves Lila won’t even be able to use her phone, much less remember to call me. She won’t get enough time to acclimate to the zeitgeist– which will change in a month or so anyway– and she’ll come up out of it crazy and useless. She’ll be on the street, begging me for credit, inside of six months.
I sigh, close my phone and reach for my coffee. The tank beeps, and the next idiot tumbles out onto the tile. He’s kind of cute.
by submission | Apr 27, 2008 | Story
Author : Michael Varian Daly
The musky odor hit Tanith the moment she stepped through the portal; man smell. It always got her queasy and excited, made her yoni tingle and moisten.
She marched with purpose down the wide debris strewn avenues, lined with derelict warehouses converted into rat warrens of cubicles called ‘apartment’ or ‘club’ depending upon their usage, the huge facades covered with brightly colored artwork, its techniques crude to sublime, and often violent and sexual in nature.
This was Semefour, a sector of the abandoned dirtside space facility of Bessport and original ghetto of The Men.
The Men were not actual males. True Men were extinct, outlawed for centuries, their heritage diffused and divided into the myriad Mandroids; Y-chromosome cyborgs, a vast genetically engineered servitor class that ranged from the ubiquitous simple minded AgroDroids, patiently tilling fields on a thousand worlds, through the slim graceful Harlequins, serving the personal needs of Sisters everywhere, to the brilliant star spanning Sliders, The Sisterhood’s living spaceships who merged with their pilots, Mind, Body and Soul.
No, The Men were really Sisters. They wore Bitch Rods all the time – detachable bioform phallus’s…big, thick ones, too. They took hormones to shrink breasts and grow hair, lots of hair. They lived The Man’s Way, a throwback cult of ‘masculinity’. They steeped themselves in intoxicants, wrote nihilistic poetry, had bare knuckle brawls, and sodomized each other. They were The Men.
For most, it was a phase. They would Live The Life for a while, then put their Bitch Rod back in its Fake Box and go live as a Solitary in the woods or the hills or the desert on some world for a Solannum or two until their minds and bodies settled.
But some Lived The Life as their Life with total commitment. Like Frank, who had been one of The Men for well over a century now. That is who Tanith had come to see.
Tanith was a Jane, a Sister who sought out The Men for pleasure. She couldn’t call Frank a ‘lover’. Sex among The Men was ritualized consensual rape.
She turned, went into a shadowed door, up narrow stairs. Frank was waiting for her, ‘his’ wiry black hair, beard, chest, legs, making her body vibrate with an atavistic thrill. Frank took her straight away, brutally, with a cruel smile that no Harlequin pleasure server would ever match.
Time passed too quickly.
They smoked and drank, coupled with fury and languor. Frank sang her songs. Two friends came over, got drunk, had a fist fight, then all three of them ‘raped’ her for hours.
On the afternoon of the third day, Tanith stumbled down the stairs, bruised, sore, and wholly sated. On her way out the door, Frank had smacked her on the ass. “Say hello to your husband,†‘he’ laughed.
“My husband,†she thought smiling. Her darling Maddox, thirty six thousand tons of Slider floating serenely in orbit. She knew he would relish every single detail.
