by submission | Dec 8, 2007 | Story
Author : Laura E. Bradford
“Merging down.â€
He pulled the joystick and the car started its swift descent, tugging him along like on a roller coaster. “Whooo!†he yelled, pushing the pedal down and merging onto the invisible highway at two hundred miles an hour. He swerved around skyscrapers, flying across the street made of air, completely exhilarated. He was born for this.
“Car approaching, left side,†came the calm, female voice of the navigation system.
“Way ahead of you,†said the young man. He pulled the joystick back and the car went up, giving the other–a yellow car in the shape of a bee–plenty of space to go by. He watched it pass beneath him on the monitor, which showed a 360-degree view of his surroundings.
“Light ahead. Projected signal: stop.â€
“Aw, man.†He hit the brakes and slowed, noticing how smoothly the machine responded. With some disappointment he watched the floating signal ahead change from magenta (northbound travel go) to blue (northbound travel warning) and then red (universal color for stop). So he stopped, which meant floating in the air six hundred feet above the ground, as traffic in other directions began to move. He glimpsed a few ladybug-styled 2018 models, but mostly saw older cars, shaped somewhat like yesterday’s ground-movers but sleeker, with an aerodynamic design better suited for cruising through the air.
A soft “beep†sounded in his car, and the light changed back to magenta. He pulled a lever and darted forward, maneuvering like a fish through the sea, swimming in an ocean of blue sky. The pedestrians below appeared tiny, like pebbles tumbling in sand.
“Turn left now,†the navigator said pleasantly.
Done. At the sight of an office building, he lowered his car to its space one foot off the ground, and paused a moment before taking off his seat belt. What a ride! Safe, fast, and thrilling. Finally, with a sigh from having to give up something so wonderful, he pressed a button to lift the eagle-wing doors, and stepped out. He stood in the showroom of a car dealership, having completed his virtual test drive.
“Well?†asked the salesperson.
He grinned. “I’ll take it.â€
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by submission | Dec 7, 2007 | Story
Author : Michael Herbaugh a.k.a. “Freeman”
Ten years. That’s what the Fri-l’r sting had cost him. Craig had been on safari on Lankus XIII when the accident happened. His friends didn’t realize until a few days later that his personality had been completely superseded, but for Craig the transition was immediate. For Craig, it was like he’d been locked in a dark box with small lights racing all around him, locked in his own mind for ten years. Ten years of complete sensory deprivation while the Fri-l’r had control of his brain and by extension his body.
Ten years seemed both impossibly long and incredibly short while trapped in his own mind, learning the language of the neurons firing around him. Craig had been fighting intensely to regain control of the pieces of him that previously had taken little or no effort at all. Fortunately for Craig, he wasn’t the first case. While he spent ten years trying to fight his way out, there was a team of psychiatrists wrestling with the Fri-l’r personality, convincing it to let go of the body it had grabbed merely by instinct, fighting to allow Craig to regain control.
Craig finally emerged to the body of a thirty-nine year old having been locked inside since he was twenty-nine. While his body had aged and the Fri-l’r had kept it in good shape, Craig retained the maturity of man now ten years his junior. It wasn’t long until he began to feel disconnected from his old life. All his pre-Fri-l’r friends were living their lives, with the loves and families of middle age, while he retained the wild personality of their youth. He made new friends, sure, ones that felt more appropriate of age, but having the body of a forty year old, he was always an outsider amongst them as well. Dated. While he shared the same goals and interests as his new younger counterparts, he was more of a relic in his knowledge of this new time he had awoken in. Craig was more of a token in his new circle, an object of interest and entertainment.
A side effect of the accident and his rehabilitation was that he had a strikingly acute awareness of his own mind. When he closed his eyes he could see his own thoughts as they raced around his brain in the form of neural energy. Craig felt as though he had a more accurate sense of his emotions, however those around him felt that he had lost the emotional expression that they felt was ‘normal’. People found him to be insincere; he knew he had feelings, he just had lost the ability to express them to others.
After a few months of being back in society, Craig’s disconnect from those around him grew to be too much to handle. He could see only one solution. He would turn his body back over to the Fri-l’r personality which had been subjugated to the deepest parts of his sub-conscious, and return to the depths of his own mind.
On the night he sat down and decided with finality that he would relinquish himself back to his neural prison, he wrote a note to the world he would leave behind.
It read, “Don’t concern yourself with me, I died ten years ago. Help the man I leave behind.”
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by submission | Dec 6, 2007 | Story
Author : Andy Bolt
The dripping residue of some poor bastard’s elbow explodes against my shoulder.
“Goo fight!†Jayav shouts, handfuls of dead man oozing through his fingers. My synthskin registers the contact with unstable biomaterial and sterilizes my left arm.
“You have serious problems,†I say. “Now, what do you think?â€
“That you’re no fun, Meggie.†Jay is chuckling as he builds a grotesque little snowman out of human flesh and liquefied innards.
“About the body.â€
“Oh.†He draws a little smile with his index finger. “Normal. Churn it and burn it.â€
“Agreed.â€
We stand. While Jay nudges his snowman’s head off with the toe of his boot, I drop a gene blender into the puddle. There is a momentary whirlpool effect, followed by a bubbling human stew, and finally, the scooper shoots clear with a sample and the afterburners reduce the whole mess to a few dried out protein strands.
“Your villainous disrespect for the dead has earned you the position of bad news barer,†I say as we turn and exit the bedroom.
“Your mother villainously disrespects the dead,†Jay replies, clicking over to symp-auto.
We meet the family in the hallway, and I try my best to look contrite as Jay’s pre-recorded condolences speech starts emanating from the microdigitizer in the back of his throat. My mind wanders as the MD starts to explain how decades of genetic modification and enhancement have completely destabilized the average person’s genome. The droning but natural-sounding voice then assures that the boost in the general quality of life has been worth the sacrifice. The wife asks about toxicity. It’s one of the more common questions, and one the MD is programmed to answer. It calmly tells her that the WHO is still looking into the details, but the protein remains have never been shown to be harmful. They’ve never been shown to be harmless, either, but the MD leaves that part out. The fact is no one knows what triggers a genetic meltdown. But every extant human has some altered DNA at this point, so we’re all potential victims of a seemingly random killer that strikes without warning. The MD leaves that part out, too. I nod sympathetically as Jay’s arms execute a series of pre-programmed shoulder pats.
“We’re all going to die,†Jay tells me, back in our bullet and zipping towards our next case in Osaka.
“You should add that to your condolences speech. That sets the right mood, I think.†I push my seat back and let my eyelids droop. It’ll take the bullet about ninety minutes to get to Japan from Winnipeg, and I could use some sleep.
“You laugh,†Jay continues, lighting up a pipe full of the new strain of combat marijuana. “But my buddy Jukks is on the research team. We’re all going to get this. Faster and faster, as it starts to spread. You can’t fix what’s broken if broken is what you are.†He stares at me, self-satisfied, his eyes the same reddish color as the artificially prolonged sunset we’re speeding into.
“We’re all going to die!†he giggles.
“Yeah,†I agree, drifting off.
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by submission | Dec 5, 2007 | Story
Author : Beth Mathison
The thin slice of the moon slipped past her window frame, into the night sky waiting for it.
There were people there on the moon, they told her, although some days she doubted their stories. Her parents told her many things – that human beings had built space ships to travel to distant stars. That there were rooms, buried deep underground, that held all sorts of miracle cures for diseases. They told her that at one time you could talk to another person across the planet in an instant, by picking up a piece of machinery. People used to live on the moon, they said, living together in tight groups called colonies. Her parent’s expressions turned sad, when they spoke of such things. Emily didn’t ask about them often.
She thought about it, though, especially at night. What the world had been like. At ten, she was old enough to know the difference between fairy tales and reality. That past, when the world supposedly sparkled with magical things, seemed too much like a fairy tale.
Emily lay on her bed, a down comforter tucked under her chin, and watched the sky through her bedroom window. Her mother allowed her to keep the thick shutters open every so often, when Emily had that trapped feeling. During the day, she loved the colors of winter, the sharp scent of curing meat as her father worked outside, helping her mother can fruits and vegetables from the hothouse to store in their pantry. At night, however, her thoughts turned to the long days ahead of them. Having to stay indoors in some days if the thermometer told them they’d get instant frostbite if they went outside. Rationing wood and food and everything else.
Her father had taken her to a city once. He said he wanted her to see what lay under the snow and ice. Standing at the edge of a cliff, holding his mitten-covered hand, he pointed out the lumps and dips in the landscape. People used to live there, he told her. In cities filled with people and animals and machines that moved.
Looking out her window, she wondered if a journey to the stars were as cold as the world. The blackness of space surrounding those people traveling to the moon, the earth falling behind them like a dream.
Snaking a hand out from underneath the covers, she pressed her palm against the frosty glass. She would close the window soon, as the night pressed in against her. But for now, she felt the cold filling her warm hand and imagined another girl, laying in her own bed on the moon. Pressing her hand against the cold window of glass, watching the earth slide past her window.
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by submission | Dec 2, 2007 | Story
Author : Laura Bradford
He chased her even as her ship touched the stars.
At night he gazed through the glass of his telescope, feeling tiny compared to the evening sky, but his days were all routine: get up, go to work, watch the flying cars crisscross and block his chance to catch the faintest patch of gold in the sky. The streets of the city felt empty, even if a thousand people passed by him every day.
He waited in her favorite café, ignoring the news reports flashing on the screen behind the counter. The world continued on without her–how could it, and how could it not? Now he could only count the remaining days until she returned. She had blasted away in her golden ship during the first snow of October, as he stood in a sea of snowflakes for one last goodbye. How she loved the winter, always dressing in a hat and scarf to laugh at the face of frost and chill. What was happening now to amuse her in the dark and swirling expanse of space?
To distract himself he kept busy, tinkering on gadgets or mapping the stars. She would have taken him if she could, he knew that, but his land-locked heart couldn’t survive the journey. Besides, he had a job, clients, commitments. The world had roped him in while she sprang free, not even halted by gravity. So he waited, one fixed point in a shuffling world.
One day nearing spring, a crackly message sounded on his inter-stellar radio, bringing a sentence that gave him an unsafe amount of hope and longing: “I wish you could see the sunset on Mars.â€
So she’d be home soon. He collected every scrap of paper he could find and added detail to his navigational charts: color, texture, a red planet, a path with a yellow dot reaching home. A tiny hologram of the ship spun over his desk, and he sighed and slipped a sky-blue map beneath it, the ship’s shadow quivering over the surface of the world.
Her ship touched down as the last of the snows melted, and the first buds twinkled under half-frozen dew. The hatch opened and there stood his pilot, all honey-colored hair and blue eyes.
“You won’t believe what I’ve found,†she said. “The contributions this mission made to science–â€
He swept her in his arms and kissed her. “I’ve missed you.â€
She smiled. “I brought a photo. Now you can see it.â€
It showed a dusty red sky with light filtering through, the sunset on Mars: an image he had guessed at in his dreams, a souvenir from space. He hugged her and said, “It’s lovely, Zoe, but how long are you staying?â€
“Forever.†But even as she said it, she raised her eyes to the sky.
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