by submission | Mar 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Liz Lafferty
“Tell me the story again, Grandpa. Did we really have automatic lights? And could you really talk to someone on the other side of the planet?”
I laughed. We huddled by the fires every night, the children always wanting to hear one of my fantastic stories of the old days.
I had a hard time believing my own version of events. It had all started simple enough. Technology that had exploded from building-size computers down to palm-sized mega-devices. Our homes were loaded with scanners that heard our voices, obeyed our commands. We were too confident in our intelligence. We’d forgotten that nature had a way of humbling us.
“All true, Jack. I had a communication device that let me talk to people in Paris, France.”
“Where’s that?”
I didn’t even know if France still existed. My world, my family’s world, centered around a cave in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We went out on raids to gather our food.
“A long way away. I was eight years old then.”
“That’s how old I am!”
“Yep. We had everything, Jack. Food, safety, warmth. It was gone in an instant.” It was gone in twelve minutes, if you wanted to set your clock by it. That’s how long it had taken the solar flare to reach Earth.
The government might have known; scientists surely had to suspect… still, all that followed had wreaked havoc everywhere on the planet.
Print publishers, newspapers, magazines had gone out of business due to more advanced online capabilities; store front banks closed up, their asset information in securitized web farms; universities and schools no longer had buildings — all learning, scoring, testing was completed via webcasts. Friends and families existed in high-def.
Everything except farming and food could be bought, traded, read, transacted online.
It had all started with global warming. We were saving Earth’s resources with our more advanced capabilities and humanitarian efforts. It seemed to be working. Politicians and scientists hailed the reports about lower carbon dioxide emissions and fewer hurricane warnings and less polar ice caps melting.
Then again, it might have all been a huge plot to pull the wool over our eyes.
“Did the sun really make it all go away?”
“Indeed it did. It was a solar flare.” I spread my arms wide as I demonstrated, wiggling my fingers in front of my grandkid’s face. “The flare shot of the surface of the sun. Its flaming fingers searching, reaching out across time and space until those hot licks touched our planet. The orbiting satellites tumbled from the sky, blazing a trail to earth like fireflies. Power grids all over the world collapsed. Radio and television and computers all sizzled and ground to a halt.”
“What happened next?”
“Without communication, without money, without contacts — governments collapsed, chaos ensued, people died.” Even I didn’t know the full extent of the catastrophe. Only a few Hamm operators got information through to us. They called it a coronal mass ejection, a proton storm. The worst ever recorded.
We never recovered; so much of our technology was lost. We were back to scavenging old paperback books for our entertainment.
I threw a stick in the fire. We watched the night sky. Aurora borealis was still spectacular, eighty years later.
by submission | Mar 2, 2010 | Story
Author : Paul Starkey
The athlete sat before me took a while to speak. At first he just sobbed. It’s a common enough reaction; I see it in many of those referred to me. A combination of fear and guilt, with a spoonful of self loathing mixed in. As was often the case he started explaining with little preamble.
‘I used to be fast, you know?’ he said, wide eyed, on the verge of hysteria. ‘Won my first medal when I was just ten. I won gold at the under fourteens, under fifteens…won silver in the Commonwealth Games when I was nineteen. Everyone said I was going to win gold at the Olympics next time around.’
I said nothing, just sat behind my desk, nodding empathetically. I didn’t ask him what’d gone wrong. In all honesty I didn’t care. Maybe he hadn’t trained hard enough, maybe it was drugs. Probably it was just fate. He simply wasn’t quick enough anymore.
‘The final Olympic trials are in six months.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’m not going to get through; I’ve barely scraped through the preliminaries. All I ever wanted was to win gold, but if I don’t make it to Miami this time…I’m not getting any younger, this is my…my…’ He started crying again, burying his face in his hands.
I gave him time. Eventually he wiped his tears away and looked up with a new found determination in his eyes. Now we could get down to business.
‘Gary said you could help me, Doc. That you could get me to Miami.’
‘I can,’ I said. ‘But you understand the risks, yes?’ he nodded. ‘You also understand that you might not make it to Miami. You might have to wait four years, until Tripoli. Is that acceptable?’
He nodded. ‘I realise there’ll be adaptations I need to make, to my running style and all.’
Before we did anything else we discussed money. He’d brought the full amount, in cash. I counted it, twice—someone who’ll cheat in sport won’t hesitate to try and cheat a crooked doctor. Satisfied that the amount was correct I walked over to the medicine cabinet, twisting my body slightly so he couldn’t see the combination I punched into the lock.
I placed a bottle of pills on the table in front of him. ‘You need to start taking these now; they’ll strengthen your immune system, just a precaution. Now then, as to the nature of your adaptation, I think a car accident is always best…’ His eyes widened. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said as reassuringly as I could. ‘My team are experts, the risks are very small and there will be no way of determining that it wasn’t an accident.’
‘Ok.’ He nodded. His lust for gold overrode all other concerns.
I smiled. ‘Excellent. Now we just need to decide; right leg or left?’
* * *
We discussed matters for another hour, then he left and I settled down with a scotch to check my fee for a third time.
I’m still amazed the authorities don’t crack down on me and my ilk, but I guess self interest keeps them from making a big issue of it, and whenever the media try to stir up a storm all manner of government officials quickly debunk the story.
With each passing Olympics the medal haul becomes more and more important, national pride is at stake and the Paralympics is almost as important and, more importantly, easier to influence. Maiming an able bodied athlete is a lot easier than prescribing performance enhancing drugs. After all, none of my patients ever failed a disability test…
by submission | Feb 28, 2010 | Story
Author : Tony Healey
When my heart decided to start failing on me around my seventy-fifth, the doctors offered me a bio-mechanical one. They called it ‘the ox;’ so called because it apparently never wore out. I remember sitting in the consultants office, surrounded by plastic models of replacement limbs and artificial eyeballs. Dr Fenwick sat at ease in front of me with his hands folded on his desk.
I asked him what the procedure involved. He described the removal of my damaged heart and the attachment of a device to keep the blood circulating in my body in its absence. It was then a simple case of reattaching the old arteries to the new ones in the mecha heart. I had enough of a nest egg put away that I could afford the procedure, so I agreed to it. Dr Fenwick stood and we shook on it. He regarded my prosthetic hand; the result of a traffic accident in my thirties.
“You know, we have replacements for these now,” he said.
“Do you?” I asked.
“Yes. We could replace it with one that looks almost life-like. You’d regain most of the dexterity in your fingers as well,” he said.
“Well I could…” I stammered, my mind reeling. I’d gotten used to not having the use of the fingers on my left hand, and now the thought of having it all back made me nauseous.
“Do you wear those all the time?” he asked, nodding at my glasses.
My head span. Hearts, Hands… Eyes… What else could they replace? I asked him.
He simply shrugged. “Everything,” Dr Fenwick said. “And we do insurance…”
I was still in that office hours later, booking up more enhancements. I allowed Dr Fenwick to convince me into putting the last of my money toward an extensive insurance policy. It wasn’t until later that I realized they would just keep on replacing things, even the new parts when they wore out or malfunctioned. I should have felt full of energy, knowing that I’d significantly extended my life span beyond what it was meant to be, but I didn’t. I felt tired.
I wondered how tired I would become…
by submission | Feb 26, 2010 | Story
Author : KJ Hannah Greenberg
Snazzle considered, as she queued up, among the morning roses and goldenrod, that members of the machinists’ men didn’t take warmly to her puttering about their racks and chargers. Despite the technicians’ protest to the contrary, whenever she brought Little Guy to honk among the geese and ducks, those mechanics shuddered and pushed him and Snazzle away.
It was not so much that Little Guy emptied enough corn onto the ground for all of the barnyard’s critters, let alone the fowl, as it was that Little Guy picked up the heifers in the same way that more typical offshoots might lift a puppy. While they labored on their harrows and on their seeders, those lab guys slit their eyes at Snazzle and her kin.
Those thinker-tinkers especially got antsy when Little Guy wandered over to their self-propelled sprayer; they blamed that unit for her tot’s physical prowesses. They hadn’t known that Snazzle’s baby had snacked on foxes and on wolverines long before he tottled.
Rather, those applied science guys figured that a strong dose of nitrogen had altered Little Guy’s chemistry such that his xylem, which flowed among the cells of his mental engine, leaked out in almost organic guttation. The agricultural artisans reasoned that Little Guy performed feats during the day because at night his stomata remained closed. They hadn’t counted on his need to cuddle with his mama.
Snazzle shook her filaments in answer to that imagined discourse. Little Guy no more possessed hydathodes, through which he could express excess water, than he did any other means of transpirational pull. His mutant state meant that he would be, forever, forced to evaporate fluids through his tongue. To wit, he left his main orifice open. That he swallowed whole sheep or goats during his ambulations was accidental.
Consequently, Little Guy considered their jaunts to the ranch occasions for seeing and tasting animals. Snazzle, however, saw those journeys as opportunities for borrowing utensils she needed to create a system of secondary growth, of activated vascular cambium for her child.
To Snazzle, circumstances are caused by vicissitudes, not karma. Solutions derive from effort, not from self pity or blame. Ennui means lack of faith. Feelings of victimization mean not trying hard enough.
The thought of having to rupture Little Guy’s epidermis in order to accommodate his growth left her discolored and dried, but Snazzle was resolute about helping him. In the end, she would help him form cambia on the outside of his phloem.
Such direction would necessitate Little Guy ingesting a few horses and a couple of the farmer’s sons, but it would solve his metabolic quandary. Thereafter, Little Guy could cross pollinate with any woody vine of similar genetic material. The couple could produced mobile, flowering grandchildren for Snazzle and could rid the farm of its rat problem, its cats, its donkeys, its llamas and its prize elephant.
by submission | Feb 24, 2010 | Story
Author : Lisa Marie Andrews
“What’ll you choose?” She stood behind the boy and looked into the mirror. His cheeks were dusted with freckles; eyes darkened with indecision.
“I don’t know.” He said. He’d always thought it odd that the skinless wore no clothing. They walked exposed in bright coppers, burnished golds, and tarnished silvers.
“Once we weren’t given a choice.” Her fingers were polished from use. They through the windows refracted light from fingers to mirror to the boys pale skin. “Once it wasn’t voluntarily and the process would have lasted years, now you can choose, Jacob. How long do you want it to last?”
Jacob inhaled slowly. The soft scent of ozone crept into his lungs and he wondered if he could stand to never taste the air again. The glass misted over as he exhaled.
“Why’d you pick to be the way that you are?” He asked.
“The way that I am?” Her laughter rippled in waves and bounced off of the walls. “You’re of the fourth generation, Jacob. You should be used to this by now. Natural growth is a slow process and I’d been flesh for long enough.”
“But, mother, is it really enough? You lost things when you chose to Transition. You could have stayed flesh, you wouldn’t have lost anything.” The metamaterial that was his mother’s face grimaced, but the emotion didn’t, couldn’t, touch her eyes.
“Look outside, Jacob.” The room shifted and the walls became windows. “How many adults do you see wearing original skin?” The figures that lined the streets below were varied in shapes, sizes, and colors, and most of them reflected the suns light. They rippled and flowed across aged pathways.
“You don’t miss anything? Any of it?” His hands pressed against the windows, the oil of his skin marred the pristine glass. “You didn’t love any of it enough to stay. To just wait through it. Grandpa waited through it. He said it could be, that it might be, better…to just wait.”
“What do you love the most?” She said.
“The tastes, the smells, the -feel- of the air on my skin, the way it brings warmth and coolness to me. I’ll miss that. I love that.” His voice cracked, just a bit, and his eyes widened in surprise.
“But for years you’d be uncomfortable. Your voice will crack and yes, the cracking will fade, but you’ll age, like your grandfather. It’s your final day to choose, Jacob. Your voice just proved that to you, even if nothing else has.”
Jacob pushed open a window and let the currents of air dance across his skin, let the warmth of the sun kiss his freckled cheeks. He watched a woman with sunken skin wrapped around hollowed eyes, with arms that hung in gentle folds of flesh, set a slow pace down the pathway. Would she live for another 10 years? His mother would live much longer. Much longer then everything that wasn’t, or hadn’t been, rebuilt. She wouldn’t ever be like that. His arms looked small, bony, and he wondered what it would be like to wake in the morning tall and strong. What would it feel like to move with the fluid motion of the skinless? What would it be like to never feel his bones grow frail and worn by time and to never again feel the sun.
“Make me like you.” He tasted the air again. His mother pulled him into an embrace before she opened the door and they turned to leave.
