by submission | Mar 14, 2010 | Story
Author : Petter Skult
“How was the game?” Ann asked as Jeremy crawled through the hatch. She had to wait with the answer until he had pushed it close, metal screaming.
“It was awesome!” He replied breathlessly, as he threw his bag off his shoulders and went directly for his cot to change clothes. “Jenny and Ahmed’s characters planned on having a garden party for Jia – that’s Mark’s character – on account of her getting that promotion.”
Ann chuckled lightly, continuing to fry that morning’s catch, the smell of meat permeating the whole container.
“Hey mom, what’s a ‘water cooler’? My character is supposed to go there to meet all of his new workmates, but I have some trouble imagining it.”
Ann explained what a water cooler was, and for good measure what it meant to ‘shoot the breeze around the water cooler’. Jeremy listened intently while gathering his .22 rifle, clearly making mental notes. She tried to keep the ruefulness out of her voice. By the time she was finished he was ready to go. He was already looking a bit glummer. Ann felt sorry for him, having to go out there again. When she had been his age…no use thinking of it.
“When’s the next game?”
Jeremy lit up.
“We talked shifts; I’ll be on night for the next week, Ahmed, Jenny and Mark are all crazy as well, but we thought Wednesday the week after that.”
“That sounds wonderful, dear. Be careful up there now.”
“Of course mom. See you tomorrow!”
Jeremy crawled back topside for his evening guard shift. Ann continued frying the ever-grey little pieces of rodent, stirring them in the sudden silence with her wooden fork. She was thinking absently of water-coolers and garden parties and promotions and regular jobs. Things that her children might only know through make-believe, role-playing games they play when they get together for those brief moments when there was no alert, no danger, no attack.
Still, she was happy they were allowed those moments of escapism into a world so completely foreign to their own.
by submission | Mar 13, 2010 | Story
Author : Credentiality
Cynthia was reluctant when it came time to leave the Machine Monastery. Nobody had predicted that machines would be Buddhists. Crazed killers, perhaps. Indifferent to humanity, perhaps. Cold calculators, almost certainly.
She had learned the tactile pleasures of sanding the walnut sides of an imperfect jewelry box she had made herself with hand tools. The visual pleasure of brushing a finish with a wet edge.
The empty contentedness of sweeping a floor. The ragged exhaustion of breaking out old concrete sidewalks with a sledgehammer and hauling them to a skip. The gleam of a toilet scrubbed clean.
The machines had done all these things, mostly better than humans could, and had found the same peace from their lessons. Cynthia would go back to her life in the city, where her finance skills would pay the bills, and where machine and human craftsmen continue to do their jobs with the labor-saving tools that made mass production cheap. But perhaps in the summer she would take another vacation to the mountains east of town, away from the noise, and rejuvenate with the joys of manual labor.
by submission | Mar 12, 2010 | Story
Author : William Garnett
The day the universe stopped expanding was the same day all the traffic lights failed to turn. But it wasn’t just the traffic lights. Cars didn’t start. Dogs didn’t bark. Radios were silent. Microwaves paused. Automatic drive-thru teller machines didn’t take cards and didn’t dispense any money. Nothing moved. All was at a stand still, and no one noticed because no one could think or remember, or even forget. No one could point it out to anyone else.
Then the universe began to contract. But no one really noticed it, because with the contraction of the universe, everyone’s mind and perception also began to shrink, so that any forward thought process ceased to occur and so people regressed and slid back along the evolutionary scale and grew hair in places where there had been none. They tore down the cities and set them on fire. They tore down each other in ways they had read about but had thought they would never do again because they had evolved to a point where popping brains out of a neighbor’s head was something only beasts did. But they were beasts now and couldn’t think straight or forward anymore. Blood ran thick on the broken sidewalks–on all the failed and burned infrastructure.
Men fought each other over women and killed each other’s young to ensure the advancement of their genes, which was ridiculous, because everything was regressing and going backwards so that the very idea of advancement itself was impossible, and the genes themselves would never survive. But they did it anyway. The blood lust that had never fully left the species reemerged to full strength as bodies were dismembered and emptied of their guts.
The universe continued to shrink, and as it shrank, all life regressed to globs of cells, and then just to cells, and then just to tiny strings of mindless amino acids. Eventually, everything was reduced to molecules, and then atoms, and then quarks, and strings, and then nothing.
The nothing regarded itself and found it paradoxical that it could do such a thing, and as it regarded itself, it found itself lacking and then once again it attempted to make something out of itself.
by submission | Mar 10, 2010 | Story
Author : Bryant Pocock
“Dammit,” grunted Sam as the wrench slipped and he lost his grip, drifting slowly away from the mining craft. “Now I’m really in deep shit.” Mentally running through his options, the panicked miner came up with nothing.
The battered and stinking p-suit never came with a long-distance radio, so that was right out. Similarly absent was the fuel for his maneuvering jets or the (theoretically) Company-mandated safety tether. These he had pawned at the Company Store to pay his fare on the freighter to this lonely outpost. That left the small but efficient solar collector on his back to power the oxygen scrubbers, electric heater, and water distiller to keep him alive, floating through this asteroid field until he starved to death. Or there was always the grisly possibility that a microscopic spec of space dust, traveling faster than any bullet, would pierce a pinhole through kevlar and flesh, spewing a miniature fountain of bubbling blood and precious atmosphere at entry and exit. One way or another he would die here, floating and turning slowly, meters away from his modest habitation capsule.
Considering this possibility, he preferred suicide. Sam pondered this solemnly for several minutes, said a quiet prayer, and tugged hard at his helmet seals. Nothing. It seemed that the only pieces of safety equipment still functioning in this man-shaped composite crapcan were the vacuum-activated safety locks.
This left the pistol strapped to his side. The only non-vital piece of kit that Sam had held onto all these years, he had been wearing it since before he sold the hydro farm back on Earth and set out for the asteroids to try his luck extracting ore. “Second Amendment and all, can’t be too careful,” mumbled Sam to himself. Not that any government’s constitution held real sway in this corner of space, but Sam had lost count of how many times the old-fashioned revolver had saved him from unpleasant confrontations. Now it was once again helping him forge his own destiny.
As he drew the gun and said his prayer again, Sam suddenly remembered with surprising clarity the voice of his high school physics teacher, droning in his driest monotone, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” A smile crept over the old miner’s face. Turning the gun away from his helmet, Sam took careful aim and fired all six rounds, slowly and deliberately.
It took nearly two days, but eventually the impulse of those few ounces of lead moving at the speed of sound was enough to send Sam gliding slowly to within an arm’s reach of the thruster pod he had been repairing. He was even able to grab the dropped wrench before making his way back inside the small metal can he called home.
“Damn the Company and damn this cloud of rocks,” thought Sam out loud, banging a fist on the bulkhead. “Soon as I can, I’m getting back to God’s Green Earth. But first things first, I’m getting my hands on some more bullets.”
by submission | Mar 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Daniel Fuhr
The haze of smoke lingered over the sharp nose and into aged eyes. Smoking on spacecraft was strictly forbidden according to regulations. Jascon owned this tugboat; he made his own rules and could give a damn about those regulations.
He squinted to try to see through the smoke covering his eyes.
A few months ago, when the space marines contacted Jascon about using his ship as a decoy and trap for the local space pirates, he scoffed at them. They explained about the local growing number of pirates, calling themselves “The Barate”, not quite pirates, not quite bandits. He rebuffed the space marines, declining to assist them.
He coughed into the smoke, the tightness in his chest making it harder to breathe.
Eventually the request turned into a demand and the space marines requisitioned Jascon’s ship, his annoyance became anger. Under the marines control his craft was turned into a by-the-book regulation ship. Then the problems came. “Not enough lifeboats”, “Unsecured instrument devices”, “Nonworking emergency backup”, “No Smoking”. That last one chapped his ass more than anything. The only way he was able to afford paying his crew the small pittance they deserved was by allowing smoking.
Struggling, he pulled in another breath, he wasn’t sure if it was his last one.
As suddenly as they came, the space marines transferred. They abandoned Jascon to a condemned ship. His craft wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t good enough to run cargo runs anymore. It wasn’t even good enough to leave the dock the space marines placed it in. The government revoked his license and the ships registration.
So he stole it.
The foot on his chest put another ounce of pressure on his chest. The number of strangers on his bridge was uncomfortable. The knowledge that he could be killed was uncomfortable.
“So you want to become a Barate?” the rough voice came through the smoke.
