by submission | Nov 13, 2009 | Story
Author : Ken McGrath
I roll off her and onto my back, panting, satisfied and with the sweat already drying into my chest. My head sinks into the pillow and I smile. Turning to look at her it slides, like water, right off my face.
Her façade is starting to flicker and fade into an electric blue haze, allowing me to see her true metallic shape underneath. I’m guessing my 30 minutes with the woman of my dreams are coming to an end.
“That was so good,” she pants, dragging out the o in so as only a lusty human should.
I sit up quickly, throwing the thin, stained, bedcover off me. I feel dirty and wrong. A deep-seated sense of Christian guilt bubbling up inside of me.
The Simul-Form leans across the bed, reaching out a hand and brushing my naked back. It’s cold, not familiar warm flesh and I shudder moving off the bed completely, turning away from her.
“I… uh, I’ve got to go,” I mumble pulling on my jeans. Behind me I can hear her moving about on the motel bed. As I bend to pick up my shirt I catch a glimpse of her, no… of it, reflected in the cracked, grubby window. I see her for what she really is.
Through the crackling blue glow that surrounds her like an electric cloud I see her change – hair originally short, now long, blonde then red, changing facial features from soft to hard, full lips, sharp nose, wide eyed then narrow. Every single one of them the look of desire and sex. She reels through these female images like someone flicking the pages of a porno magazine, revealing a fleeting glimpse of temptation and want, before moving onto the next.
The lingering flash of skin and nipple, pursed lips, tongue protruding slightly between teeth and slowly spreading thighs. Hair cascading in thick, black ringlets over her shoulders, then angular, spiked and blonde. I turn and she pauses as a smouldering brunette with big, smoking eyes, the sheets wrapped loosely around her doing more to draw attention to those curves than to hide them.
“Why don’t you stick around?” she purrs, stepping slowly off the bed, pulling the covers with her. My eyes follow her toes as they touch the floor, all the way up her long legs, across her covered body and I feel myself getting hard at the sight of her lips, drowning in her eyes. “I can be whoever you want me to be.”
My mind fights to be heard, that she’s a machine, a Simul-Form, able to take any shape, able to fulfil every sexual desire, but that she’s not human. Surprisingly it wins.
I’m wringing knots in the shirt, twisting it in my sweating palms. I struggle into it and button it up wrong as I force my body towards the door.
“Money… your money’s on the table. Over, uh,” I indicate, “there. Thanks.”
Shit, why did I say that? I curse myself as I step out into the harsh judging sunlight.
“See you later cowboy,” she drawls seductively as the door closes, finally forming a barrier between us.
Why do I always feel like the one who’s been used, all dirty and sorry after sex? I squint into the washed out afternoon as cars screech by on the road beyond the battered chain-link fence and sigh. I need a shower.
by submission | Nov 11, 2009 | Story
Author : Matthew Banks
“Brankahhh nakahhhsret,” said the vibrating sphere.
“Much impertinence is hydroscopic,” said the speaker on the translator console. McGuine frowned, but Leak still had that constant, infuriating grin plastered on his face.
“Frehhhnat bossssth fffonehhh,” said the sphere.
“Envy the copse and thallium minnow,” said the translator. McGuine grunted and stabbed the “Off” button.
“It’s not working,” he said. Leak was still grinning.
“Maybe it is.”
“What? You think the thing said ‘Much impertinence is hydroscopic’?”
“Maybe it means something.”
“What? What could it possibly mean? Look, the translator isn’t working.” Finally, Leak frowned.
“It worked on every other language we tried,” he said. That much was true. It had successfully translated French and German to English. It had translated Arabic to English. It had translated an obscure mutant patois of Xhosa and Kiswahili into English. It had translated the human-constructed languages Esperanto and Lojban into English. It should by rights have been able to translate the weird speech of the alien sphere. But the evidence was turning against it.
“That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe this doesn’t follow the rules of human languages. It almost certainly doesn’t.”
“So? It worked on other weird languages!” That was also true. When a video recording of a deaf woman using American Sign Language was translated into audio and fed into the translator, it had translated the ASL into English. When snippets of program code written in Python were fed in, it translated them (more roughly) into English. And finally, when Reese and Nanadai’s artificial language Xxxch, designed to be as complicated and confusing as possible, essentially unlearnable by any normal human, the translator still worked, just as well as it had for Finnish or Esperanto.
“Hhhett nahhhsss hhhettsss,” vibrated the alien sphere.
“Informational concerning reductivity oxalate am gourmand,” said the translator. McGuine balled up his fist and slammed it down angrily on an empty metal cart. But Leak’s grin had already returned. He stepped up to the translator console, twisted a knob, and typed something on the keypad. After a moment, McGuine looked up.
“What did you do?” he asked. Leak’s grin widened.
“I’m trying the Ananad algorithm.” McGuine rolled his eyes. Frenchmen and Spaniards and Germans and Turks and Latvians and Azerbaijanis had spoken to the translator while it was using the Ananad algorithm, and it had produced similar verbal garbage as it was producing now.
“Brankahhh nakahhhsret,” repeated the alien sphere. It had been vibrating out this three-part message for almost a year, and the best efforts of every linguist and computer scientist had failed to decipher it. It wasn’t likely that a mess of an algorithm that couldn’t even understand German would work.
“If this device is found…” said the translator. McGuine went pale and sat down. Leak’s grin became a frown.
“Frehhhnat bossssth ffonehhh.”
“…please return the device to…”
“Hhett nahhhsss hhettsss.”
“….Hett Nass, at the address listed on the identification plaque.” McGuine and Leak looked at each other, and both were thinking about how an answer always raises more questions.
by submission | Nov 8, 2009 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
Hilton’s eyes opened, to his own mild surprise. Everything he saw was in dim monochrome, suggesting it was either really early or he was really tired. He was sitting in an armchair in a small office without the faintest clue how he had got here. The last thing he remembered was…
Oh.
So he’d gone through with it. Evidently it hadn’t worked.
Before this train of throught could get much further, a smartly dressed businesswoman entered the room, flashing him the thinnest of courtesy smiles.
“Good morning, Mr Hilton. My name is Annabel Tseng, and I’m here about your debt.”
He opened his mouth to speak, and was cut off, in a magnificently rude display of politeness.
“It’s probably best if you don’t try to deny it. I’m here on behalf of your insurance company and Zybeco Body Leasing. You were three months behind on payments and you decided to settle your balance by driving your car and your body off a cliff. We recovered you from the crash site and put you in temporary acmommodation.”
Hilton looked down at himself, and understood another part of what had been bothering him. His skin, visible only in greyscale, wasn’t skin. It was some kind of polymer replacement. He was in a sim. As he was looking down at what he had become, Ms Tseng pulled out a softscreen sheet from a manila folder.
“At this moment, your debt to your insurers and Zybeco equals around four trillion yuan, plus a twenty five per cent defaulter’s penalty. Repayment can be made by cash, credit, or servitude. At present pay and interest rates, you will have your debt settled in just under fourteen years of work. You’re a talented programmer, and that makes you worth more to us alive than dead. Not the easiest option in the world, but you should have thought of that before you attempted to defraud the company.”
“It wasn’t like that”
Ms Tseng looked at him in mock-interest. His voice had sounded grating and artificial, words pumped through the cheapest voice-synth they could stick in this sim.
“Wasn’t it, Mr Hilton? Do tell.”
When he spoke, it all came out in a rush.
“Susan left me last month. I went into a spiral. Drink, pills, anything to put me into oblivion for as long as possible. I didn’t crash the car to default on my debts. I was praying for death.”
“Death?”
She laughed, and Hilton understood where he was. Humanity had found no hell, so they had built one for themselves.
“Mr Hilton, death is no excuse for laying off work.”
by submission | Nov 7, 2009 | Story
Author : James Marshall
Foray wondered why he didn’t just sit down and die. He was naked but for a pair of underpants, and his skin was stained red with the blood from hundreds of cuts and scratches. He was gaunt, and his hair and beard were long and itchy. The vines and thorns lashed at his body, grabbing on with their claws, dragging him back like needy children not wanting him to leave. He only stopped to pry them out when especially long stingers dug themselves into his naked, bloody skin and stopped his progress. Nothing hurt him anymore.
Foray’s ship had fought the enemy over this strategically important planet, inhabited by nothing of note but a species of dim-witted sub-humanoids and a few Terran missionaries, and had lost. The crash killed everyone on board but three. They didn’t have time to bury the dead. The enemy Searchers would arrive soon. Foray, Stavos, and Simmons had cut the implants from their palms and buried them deep in the pile of gore that was all that remained of the troopers in the Gpod, and then ran. Simmons’ hand became infected a few days later, and he got sick and quickly died. Then something out of the forest grabbed Stavos a few days later. It was funny, because the two of them had just been talking about the apparent lack of predators in the forest, when something came at him from their right and bit Stavos ‘ hip out. Foray turned around to see a large dog-like animal standing over Stavos, growling at him, almost daring him to try to save his friend. Stavos was under it, screaming loudly and beating the dog’s front legs. Foray backed off, hands up. “All yours,” he said, and when the dog turned its attention back to Stavos, he turned and ran, and didn’t stop until he was sick. That was weeks ago. He hadn’t seen any more dogs since then, but he assumed it was them he could hear howling at night.
It was difficult to be resigned to one’s death when the moment was postponed time and time again. When he was thirsty, he would come across a river. When he was hungry, he would find a dead monkey, or bird, and eat it. He was lucky, but he didn’t care. One day there would be no river, no monkey. His luck would run out and he would die. The creatures would eat him, clean his bones, and the floods would carry them away and leave nothing. He had fought for the Terrans for eight years, and being eaten by birds and bugs seemed a natural, even attractive death. He had seen confused men have their guts blown out and trampled into the mud as they watched. The enemy’s weapons suck men’s lungs out of their mouths like a pair of old, wet socks. Children mad with grief and fear, sitting trembling by the corpses of their parents, dead for days. He thought about those children a lot. This is what they would have wanted. Him dead.
He collapsed in the dark. He couldn’t walk anymore. He slept.
He awoke in the morning to see a face, a humanoid face, looking down at him, smiling. It was saying something. “Jesus?”
Foray blinked in the bright sun. “Huh?”
The humanoid’s face was dark green, with small, black eyes. “Jesus, yes? They say you come back one day.” The accent was thick, but it was English.
“Yes,” croaked Foray. He laughed as the strong humanoid helped him up. “Bless you, my child.”
Thank god for missionaries, he thought.
by submission | Nov 5, 2009 | Story
Author : Chris Abernethy
I don’t know why I ran.
Caution, paranoia, groupthink… pure blind panic maybe, god knows what finally sent me scurrying up out of the elliptic, screaming in tight round ol’ Ares and out into the darkness.
Guess it won’t really matter, hell it’s not like there’s anything up here to actually be running to, though that’s half the reason I hurled myself out here; last place anyone would look because it’s the last place anyone with half a brain would run… no easy way back, nothing to slingshot yourself round; just you, the black and all that delta-v you’re sat barrelling along on…
To start with I hoped, kidded myself, maybe even prayed that I’d just jumped at sounds in the night, that all the little things that had spooked me turned out to be a series of coincidences; nothing but an addendum to the catalogue of meaningless accidents and lives sacrificed to the cold depths of space.
But then the reports started coming in, slow at first; lost Kuiper Belt terraforming teams spiked from one in ten to nine in ten, the deep imaging array on Charon fell off the grid, SatGov declaring a state of emergency after all contact was lost with Rhea colony… the litany of loss went on.
I suppose that’s when people started to really worry, EarthGov statements that “these rumours of a crisis are baseless fear mongering” not withstanding, but things went ballistic when the Belt mining stations started dropping out; one or two at first, then dozens, then hundreds… the industrial heart of the species was going dark and the only thing the politicians had to offer us was, “No comment”.
Panic was all but inevitable, people ran where they could; to other colonies, to satellite rings, to the hills, to each other.
Things seemed to peak for a moment when the UNSC special forces were sent in to find out what had happened in the Belt; days of upbeat but oh so serious reporting from the media as they moved towards their targets, then silence… for hours, nothing.
God knows what happened to those soldiers, even trying to patch things together after the fact it’s hard to find anything concrete about what happened, what they faced, why none of them came back.
One thing I can tell you from the fragments of coms chatter that I’ve scrapped together from what filtered out; they died bloody, they died hard, they went down howling their defiance at an unseen and implacable foe.
After that history seemed to pause; whatever was lurking malignantly in the heart of our system stopped reaching out for a time, bland assurances were issued, whole worlds held their breath.
Then it went for Earth.
Have you ever listened to a planet die? Listened to millions of lives being torn away in an instant and billions more screaming for a reprieve that would never come?
We were culled, wiped from the face of universe like a flawed design, something best forgotten…
I huddle here terrified and impotent in the night watching the shattered remnants of civilisation’s light gutter out one by one in the darkness, knowing that as each light goes out it will never come again, and I mourn the slaughter of my kind.
