by submission | May 8, 2009 | Story
Author : Jennifer C. Brown aka Laieanna
“I can’t believe we’re referencing pop culture to actually get a look at the universe,” said Megan. She flipped another page of her palm size book. “I mean anything we anticipate coming down is probably in this thing.” Her purple painted nail chipped when she smacked her fingers against the hard surface of the cover.
Ryan heard all the important words but ignored the frustration. He was people watching only the term had to be extended with the arrival of a new neighbor. An Excalbian was ambling around the yard, touching rocks that decorated the outer edges while a group of guys moved large boxes in the small home sitting a distance from the street. Ryan poked Megan in the side of her arm.
“Ow, you prick!” She called out looking at him. Her eyes shifted to where he was pointing. “At least you know what you’re getting,” she said watching the rock monster for awhile then looking back into her book. “Not like those Elaseans that pretty much look like us. Did you hear the females are put on some kind of house arrest by the government to make sure they don’t really have a mind controlling drug in their body? The guys are a bit dickish, but fine.”
“Not everything in that old show is true. The creator had visions but made some embellishments for entertainment purposes. Like them.” Ryan nodded back towards the Excalbian as they passed it’s house. “They don’t shape shift. I think everything could shape shift in that series, but that just seems impossible.”
“And you don’t think that thing itself is impossible?” She looked at him incredulously. “Minarans proved their powers and now they all have high paying jobs in hospitals. I think they’re more important than a doctor.”
“Yeah, but some base their whole lives here on what the tv show said about them. Look at the Orion women. They’re all dancing in strip clubs cause of one thing in the show.”
Megan snorted and closed her book. “They’re probably making more than the Minarans.”
Glancing back at the Excalbian, Roger said, “It’s still amazing that a man could see into the far off future and create a tv show about it, filling in the blanks as he pleased.”
“Now they’re all finding their way to our world instead of us finding theirs. I wonder what the appeal is about Earth. They all seem to settle here, at least for a little while.”
“I think we’ve been pretty gracious and things have gone very smoothly. Well, except for the Tribbles incident.”
“Iconic episode and we couldn’t learn from it,” huffed Megan.
Roger rubbed his hands together, grinning. “I’m excited to see who…err what else moved in around here. I heard it might be a Tellarite or even an Andorian.”
“Of all the aliens in this book, why aren’t the most known ones coming to our planet?” Subconsciously, Megan reopened her book.
“Ask and ye shall receive,” Roger whispered. He jabbed her again. “Look who’s coming out of the building over there.”
She looked, annoyed despite the prospect. Stepping outside the main entrance of a three story, brick apartment complex was a six foot three, half bald, brow ridged male with a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and a pair of black sandals. He tossed his car keys into the air while whistling and strolling to a shiny blue El Camino. Megan sighed. “That’s not a Klingon. John works at the surfboard shop on the beach. He’s all about surfing. Nice guy, but has a real bad birth defect going on there.”
by submission | May 7, 2009 | Story
Author : Rosa King
It’s the fifth day and she still hasn’t given up. She sits just outside the range of the station defenses and she watches.
I look out of the window and shiver despite the warm fug of the laboratory. “She knows.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tom says. “It has no way of knowing what’s in here. You’re imagining things.” He catches sight of my hand where it cradles my still flat belly and sneers, and I wonder what I ever saw in him. “You’re anthropomorphizing. It’s a low level life form and there’s no way it will miss one egg from fifteen.”
“She knows,” I insist. “Look at her. She knows we have it.”
Tom throws down his data module and stalks away, leaving me to stare out of the window and face her.
The creature gets up in a ripple of iridescent scale and walks away, graceful on her six delicate legs. She disappears into the cover of the yellow bushes, so similar to our own but subtly different.
My other hand steals to my abdomen unbidden, and I stare at the space where she was and wait.
The alarm buzzes and Tom runs to the main console and swears. “Something just hit the back wall. How did it get past the defenses?” He moves to the airlock and the suits and guns, preparing to check the damage.
I stay where I am and, sure enough, she comes back and sits right where she was before and stares at me.
My chest tightens as I face her golden slotted eyes and I try to force down the lump rising in my chest. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper, and I know that she wouldn’t care if she knew. Not as long as we have her baby. Something flutters under my heart and it feels as though my own child knows my shame.
I turn and look at the yellow egg, nestled in its bed of native sand sealed within a protective atmosphere. It glows red-gold in the warmth of the heat lamps and I watch it shift under my gaze as the baby tests its tiny world, waiting to see its mother when it wakes. Except it won’t, because we stole it. I wrap my arms around my abdomen and hate myself a little bit more.
She’ll be back tomorrow, and I’ll have to face her again, the same way that I have to face her every day until Tom decides that we have enough samples and we return to Earth with our stolen treasure.
I don’t think I can do this job anymore.
by submission | May 5, 2009 | Story
Author : Rob Burton
I watch Kamille comb her beautiful dark hair, and I can’t help but wonder what horror now grows inside her. She’s from a fine family, well respected travelling merchants, with enough money to have selected the best from amongst many possible children, with some low-level inconspicuous enhancements thrown in for good measure. Her eyes are a shade of blue found deep within a glacier. But, honestly, it is her normality that charms me most.
The merchants sometimes encounter distrust, most often ill-deserved. Travellers survive only by maintaining a reputation for honest dealing; it is the business that necessitates constant travel, not any need for anonymity. Low-energy transportation, dirigible air ‘barges’ (a history lesson few realise), are slow – merchant families must travel together. This is less true of those of us who follow.
Perhaps, then, it’s the presence of freaks like me that fosters distrust. Freaks were rarities once; sometimes simple aberrations, sometimes the result of inbreeding. The situation could not now be more antithetical. Births are never accidental, but part of a carefully planned contract, contraception ubiquitous, sex a recreational activity utterly unrelated to child-rearing. Now it happens only because one of the parents has reached the borders of speciation.
Even the poorest usually carry some form of gene modification – perfect eyesight and an enhanced immune system, if nothing else. But the very rich are something else entirely – a people apart, decadent and wasteful of their potential. If they fall upon hard times, the very code that lives inside them becomes their last source of wealth. Those amongst the lower orders who aspire to greater things will give everything they own to forge a parental contract with these glorious beings, and, thereby, a child. Without the careful attentions of the best doctors, however, such children sometimes arrive in unexpected forms.
It’s often uncomfortable for those of us whom appear so obviously different. People cannot help but stare. Hair where it should not be. Fingers fused, diminished or multiplied. Unusual height or build. The variety is endless, the result always the same.
It’s not unusual for us to attach ourselves to these travelling groups. We fit in well with others who feel they don’t fit in. Nothing so distasteful as a freakshow, you understand. I do not sit whist gasping onlookers stare at my patterned fur or my fierce yellow eyes. They come to see the musicians and players, similarly attracted to the nomadic life. Perhaps we add a little intrigue – a glimpsed strangeness amongst the milling troop. I clean the solar collectors atop the canopy, a dangerous task, and tend to electronic systems and engines. Nobody asks how I acquired the skills.
Most of the other ‘eccentrics’ (the polite term, I’m told) don’t even have the education to understand exactly what they are. Not me, though. Because I am a fake, no freak at all. I hide my grace with false mistakes. I pretend to see less well than I do. I keep my silence though I hear everything. I was designed, many years ago, carefully crafted. My family own a quarter of the western continent. I am quite old. I have many children other than the uncertain thing growing in the belly of my love. Her father, recently informed of my status, thinks that the child will be wondrous. I fear he may be right.
I could survive a famine. I have written symphonies. I can run for three days without rest. I was once considered a great beauty.
I just went out of fashion.
by submission | May 3, 2009 | Story
Author : Ken McGrath
Her name was Julia 13.
There had been twelve others before her, all exactly the same. The only thing that was meant to be unique about her, about them, was the number after the name.
But she started to act differently.
Unlike the others Julia 13 began to get curious. It had never happened before. The others had just accepted what they’d been told. Julia 13 had begun by asking questions. The sort of questions that made those around her uncomfortable and silent, the ones nobody wanted to answer or was even sure how to answer.
First there were the queries about her name, about the number which followed it. She then tried to find out about her forerunners, about the original Julia, if in fact there was one, or if she, Julia 13, was just a composite of many women. She was trying to find out about a past she’d never had, that those in charge believed didn’t belong to her.
Someone, one of the technicians on the lower rungs of the ladder that made up the Facility probably, let slip to her about the vat where the previous Julia’s, where she, had been bred. She learned where she’d been born, in a lab, in an artificial womb, deep below the Facility Building.
It had confirmed some of her fears, but she wanted to know more. She needed to find out about her ancestors, if indeed they could be called that, the other Julia’s and what had happened to them.
Her persistent questions had brought her the unwanted attention of the Facility Director though.
He’d let it run on for a while. He was curious too. He was always interested to see how his girls would develop and up until this one they’d all been a success. They’d all conformed. But Julia 13 was different to the others. She was much more inquisitive. In the end he decided that thirteen was probably just unlucky for some, especially since none of the others had shown this trait. In the end he had her removed.
Julia 13 did have a legacy though. After her they stopped giving the girls numbers, after her they were just Julia. Plain and simple, a name with no number, nothing to distinguish one from the one before or the one that came after.
There were certain elements of the past after all which the Facility didn’t want to keep on repeating.
by submission | May 2, 2009 | Story
Author : Debbie Mac Rory
One doesn’t earn the title of the system’s greatest escape artist without effort. I’ve broken out of all of them, and in record time. Well, except for that one time they placed me in an archaic brick and mortar cell. I think the first hour I simply stared at the walls in disbelief and spent the next laughing so hard I couldn’t even pick myself up from the floor. But this time they’re really outdone themselves.
You see, in my day and age, scientists have tried almost everything. And one of the things they’ve tested exhaustively is time-travel. I can understand the fascination; after all, who wouldn’t want to be able to travel back and, perhaps, find out just who it was who stole the Mona Lisa? No, it wasn’t me. That was well before my time, but I admire their style.
Alas, much to their frustration they found out very quickly that it is impossible to move back in time. Let me explain. Take a book, anyone you like, though one printed on paper. Jules Verne is one of my particular favourites, though for the purpose of this demonstration, it makes no odds who the author is. Now, if you were to take a page from another book, you’ll find it is not possible to simply place the page within the book to yield a new version of the book. The page does not of its own will assimilate itself with the existing book, and will not without some significant external influence.
Just so regarding time travel. All their studies found that though they could look, they could never touch. But an idea, a thought has no mass at all. It leaves no imprint on the world, even if the subject interrupted by their testing brings “their” new idea into practice; providing of course that if doesn’t radically alter history. And so they found a way to transfer an entire consciousness into a past being. A one way trip of course, specially reserved for extremely dedicated historians. And people like me.
I’ve spent hours starting at these fingertips, all etched with curls and whorls and completely organic. When I touch something now, the only information I receive is that from this body’s own sensory system. To be fair, they did show a little mercy in that they left me in a period that has ready access to alcohol and recreational drugs. I suppose they hoped that I’d just drink myself into oblivion.
Unfortunately, being the kind souls they are, they handed me their undoing in their mercy. Far enough forward in time so some basic technologies would be available, though severely limiting my ability to tamper yes, but also far enough that this culture has already mastered the science of genetic manipulation. And being the technological expert that I am, it was a simple matter to hack their systems and set up a preservation order for my family line. It’s the latest craze of this age. They removed most of my hardwire modifications, but not the ones I’d had coded down to cell level. And so I’ve planned a nice little surprise for my would-be captors.
Cryogenics is still beyond this time, and will be for some time if my recollection is correct. And that’s a shame; I would have loved to have seen the looks on the faces of my judge and jury for myself when they see mine over and over and over…
