by submission | Apr 11, 2010 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
In Guiyu, Kwan sits on a small concrete slab in an e-waste facility. Cascading piles of displaced circuit boards, ash-encrusted plastic hulks of outmoded tower computers, and ratnest tangles of cables, harnesses and plugs deposited haphazardly over a dioxin-laced mud surround him. He’s only eight years old but you wouldn’t know it — his eyes are squinting red-rimmed slots framed in a grimy face, his thin wrists creased and sharply tendoned. He has a constant sharp bloom of pain in his abdomen and unknown to him a small but well-formed tumor —an astrocytoma— growing in his brain, but we won’t tell him.
Kwan reaches behind him and pulls another board off the pile. He holds the end of it flat-down on a small metal sheet which is heated from beneath by a grid of flame from a natural gas manifold. His glove-covered hand holds a pair of cheap pliers, and as the board heats and the solder loosens he pries off transistors, capacitors and micro-switches and sorts them into an arrangement of Styrofoam cups. He warily watches for the owner of the yard, Mr Yueh.
While Kwan’s hands methodically do the work his mind wanders, but soon the board is clear of components and he flips it onto a pile across the yard and reaches behind him for another. This new board is different —it calls to him— and he examines it then places it on a clear space on the slab, the side of the board aligned with the impact-spalled concrete edge. He rises, slowly because he hasn’t moved in hours, and rummages through the board-pile until he finds another component that appeals to him and he places it on the slab next to the first.
He moves surreptitiously across the yard, collecting an armload of familiar components, and returns to his slab. There’s an I/O board from a once-beloved MacBook, a power supply from your old Dell, a flyback anode from a decrepit NEC CRT, and a small matt-green canister with an embedded lens. He arranges the parts in a grid just so, knowing semi-instinctively where to place each, and then links the whole with ribbon connectors and cables. He plugs the first board into the power supply and flips the switch.
Up from the center of the assembly springs something never before seen in the world —a small blue-bright field, columnar and robust. Kwan is delighted and he reaches in and pushes at it with his gloved hand. It yields slightly and then gives, bending to the pressure of his hand and then rebounding. When he strikes the field with his fist it moves not at all.
Kwan doesn’t know, doesn’t understand the import of what he has created. When he dies in a few years he’ll take this with him, but now he smiles and believes the small blue miracle to be the work of someone else, facilitated with just a few of the parts he spends his life dismantling. He thinks, oh these western wonders, and plays with the field for a moment before he hears Mr. Yueh approaching.
Kwan quickly unplugs the components, scatters them with his gloved hand. When Mr. Yueh appears between the piles of discarded electronics Kwan is back at work, prying tiny bits of ceramic and precious metal off a circuit board he knows too well.
by submission | Apr 10, 2010 | Story
Author : Edward Morris
This is actually me then, writing now. I looked into my own eyes in the Instamatic snapshot I found, and switched places. The man that was sitting here has gone back then, just for a few hours this morning.
Oh, he’ll return, don’t get me wrong. So will I. But this is what we both needed, hungered for. When I was him, I wanted to see this far ahead. I said it would sow the seeds of faith in the fallow, fertile soil of my endless head that just wanted to be up and gone.
When he was me, he scoffed in my ear, “This here bag I’m holding now is just full of seeds. Stems, too. And very little else. I wish you the best, but I hate to tell ya the planting’s gonna be a disappointment this spring, Farmer John… But have a good time at it.” His snaggle-toothed smile looked sick. “Have a good time trying.”
Yet he’s just as naïve as me! I could tell he wanted to walk out into that green world that was, where Hope had yet to twist and grow bitter on the tree. There were many who cared and had gone from his When, but not mine.
“Park your ass at home,” I told him wearily. “It won’t be there long. You and Joe Matko… Yes, stop looking at me like that, call him… You can figure out someplace else to vent that dryer. This is an old house, and that vent could go up like a rocket, the way it’s made.Then you apply to Columbia. Then you’ve got some *real* work to do…”
I moved away and let him jump back into our past. And now I sit, and wait, and wait for the change. In the other room, a woman I don’t know hits the snooze button for the alarm on a tiny computer-phone thing I don’t understand.
#
For Harlan Ellison
by submission | Apr 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Helstrom
God damn that young face in the mirror. Square jaw, strong cheekbones, full head of hair. Even the eyes have their youthful shine – they’ve never seen the things I’ve seen.
The walls are closing in on me again. I grab a crumpled pack of Luckies off the table and make my way outside. Derek is sitting in the lounge, for whatever the hell that means, it’s just a bigger cell with some sofas. Playing his solitaire on the floor like some god-damned retard, day in, day out. I told him to knock it off once and he jumped me. Kicked a couple of teeth out of my skull before the tazers came.
The courtyard is open to a patch of dismal sky. I don’t look at the sky anymore, really – to me, “outside” is just yet another fucking cell. But one where you can smoke. The lighter clicks impotently under my thumb. Something wells up inside me but I keep it down, see the tazer across the courtyard eyeballing me. Last week’s burns are still sore on my kidneys.
“Neil. Got a light?”
Neil doesn’t look at me – folks in here rarely do. Hands me a lighter that works. The cigarette catches. Have you ever seen a man burning in napalm? The blistering, blackening rim crawling up his untouched skin, looks just like the tip of a cigarette. Of course the end result is messier. I draw the smoke in deep, hand Neil the lighter back – still no look, don’t expect one – and take a few aimless steps toward the center of the courtyard. Goddamn tazer still eyeballing me.
My body is twenty-three years old if you don’t count the cryo time, which you really shouldn’t – almost perfect stasis. It’s in its prime. Excellent heart rate, powerful lungs, toned musculature, strong erections every morning. They’ve handed it back just the way they took it, exactly like they promised. No blaming them in that regard.
What would you have done? Turned them down, probably, because you’re a sensible civilian with a mortgage and decent fucking dental coverage. But I took them up on it. I was a Marine, and they told me I could be one of the jolliest green giants around. For forty-five years I weighed eighty tonnes, had twelve inches of layered-reactive armor for skin, four arms full of spitting death and a flamethrower for a dick.
It all went wrong when they started bringing us back. War’s over, no use keeping you on fifty thousand dollar a day life support – back in your old body. Your old body that hasn’t aged like you have, but which is still a clumsy little piece of limp meat compared to the one you come from. We’ll take care of you for the rest of your days, they said. The money was good. No blame there either.
Rape isn’t a sex crime, really. You may wanna write that down. Sex has nothing to do with it. It’s about power. Women usually don’t understand it. Men do, but they won’t admit it. When you’ve tasted that much power and lost it, you’ve got to get it back somehow. All it took was to find something weak, something this sack of bones could overpower. And now I’m in here, like most of the others, if they haven’t locked themselves up someplace else, or eaten a gun, or jumped off something high onto something hard.
You think you figured out what’s wrong with this brain of mine yet?
by submission | Apr 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Nate Swanson
Guns are truly simple things.
Think about it. More then a hundred years before we were airtyping away while being ferried about in tracks with no drivers, people were happily butchering each other with fully automatic firearms. No electric lights, but belt fed machines that spat hot death
Pistols are even simpler. Metal, maybe a little wood or plastic, a little propellant, a little lubricant to make sure everything doesn’t seize up, and bang.
Now getting a gun, that is a bit tougher. You can get one from a fabber, of course, provided you have the permits, don’t mind a built-in recorder, and get a bluetouch lock. Doable.
Getting one that isn’t traceable to you, that doesn’t have a safety recorder, while somebody is hunting you, now that is difficult.
Ducking in to a office on the 12th floor, I hoped the dazzle I tossed into the surveillance system is still working. It should have glitched everything after McGooen unloaded on my team so I could escape, but who knew what he was doing to scrub the system.
I slap two finger onto the bluetouch pad, establishing a link between the fabber and my phone, resting in my pocket. The list of things the fabber could make scrolls down my HUD, none of which are sidearms. None of which, in fact, are much good to me.
Now, fabbers have two types of security systems built in. Either local, where the fabber itself has the list of approved products, or external, where it checks with a server up the feed on whether it should pump out what you’re asking for. This is a GE 43K, so its got the former. This means it’s got a list of approved products, and a list of parameters, and it’ll only make something that’s on the list or meets the parameters. Pistols are decidedly not, and decidedly do not.
But it’s a machine, and machines can be hacked. I just need to modify the approved list.
I don’t have a copy of the key for the secure stack of the fabber. But I do have a copy of the maintenance suite for GE K Series Fabbers. Which includes, wonder of wonders, a password utility reset.
Which means 30 seconds of hacking, in the most rudimentary sense of the word, and two minutes of assembly, and I had a gun.
Now let’s see who does the hunting.
by submission | Apr 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Seej 500
The technician placed the oxygen tube in Walt’s mouth. “Pure oxygen will make you feel kinda high, she smiled, but we’ve found the reanimation process is a little smoother that way than if we just gave you air while we flooded and activated the tank.”
Walt knew all this. He’d read the booklet they’d given him. Walt grunted as he nodded, unable to speak now the respirator was in place. Next they’d put the sedative drip in a vein, he’d remove the paper gown, climb into the tank, they’d pump in the suspension fluid, and begin the Stop.
People got Stopped for all sorts of reasons; cheating death was just one of them. Once the process had been perfected, it had become commonplace over the past few years. People now did it to avoid the boredom of long journeys (some particularly rich people did it to avoid even short journeys), to wait for the value of investments to increase, or to wait while a distant lover made the long journey to Earth. Groups who called themselves Bears even got Stopped over winter because they didn’t like the weather.
The body-temperature fluid steadily filled his tank, tinted blue from the dissolved electrolytes, and Walt stared ahead at the opposite row of tanks, waiting for future Stoppees. Afternoon sunlight spilled into Medium Duration Tank Room 17 as he pondered what it would be like in a century when the technicians spun down the Perpetual Power Source. As the fluid finally filled the tank, he smiled. An adventure into the future. The timer counted down the last few seconds of real-time.
Then the lights began to flicker.
Some of the earliest Stoppees had complained about this when they were recently revived. Neurologists and biochemists had all concluded it was simply a quirk of the brain as it Stopped. It certainly didn’t seem to have done any harm, and they said it only lasted a few minutes. Walt had meant to shut his eyes, forgetting in the excitement.
And then someone appeared in one of the previously empty tanks opposite Walt.
And then another person in the next one along.
And the next.
And next.
Walt wondered if he was hallucinating.
He tried to move, but was paralysed; the sedative keeping him still during the activation of the Stop.
The flickering grew dimmer over the course of a couple of minutes, but just when he was hoping it would end and the Stop would be complete, it began to get brighter. And it cycled like this, brighter, dimmer, then brighter again every few minutes.
He hung there, suspended, as time dragged on. After what must have been at least an hour and a half, the opposite row of tanks jumped a metre backwards. Then two dark rails appeared in the floor and, over to the right, by the wall, was… something. It was sat on the rails and looked like some kind of lifting equipment, but, somehow, it kept going out of focus. Blurring.
Suddenly, the opposite tanks disappeared. Red light briefly filled the room, then darkness for a few moments. Walt would have sighed if he could. This was finally the Stop.
And then the room disappeared, replaced by blinding light. As Walt looked out, he finally understood. He watched the tattered remains of Medium Duration Tank Room 17 in front of him, and the war-torn landscape beyond, being steadily repopulated in stop-motion by plants as the years flashed by. Saw the flickering was the Sun rising and setting. And he wondered if there was anyone left to set him free.
