by submission | Nov 23, 2007 | Story
Author : Viktor Kuprin
After the battle of Attalus III was lost, we retreated with the Tsoor flotilla. Wreckage streamed off the alien ships as we made the mind-wrenching transition into S-space. I prayed that our cruiser wouldn’t shake apart.
It was only a micro-jump, just far enough to escape the attacking Helgrammites. The Tsoor group-leader didn’t believe our damaged ships could survive an extended flight. He or she or whatever was right. Three bulkheads ruptured when we re-entered normal space. I hoped no one was in them.
A bridge officer called out that we had forty percent casualties and sixty percent of our systems were red-lined. He had to shout. All intraship comm was offline.
A tech yelled, “What are they doing? Captain!” I shouldn’t have but I and everyone else looked away from our consoles to see the main viewer.
It was a Tsoor ship, surrounded by St. Elmo’s fire. Without waiting for the warp flux to dissipate, our alien allies had sent a repair team onto their hull. They looked like four jellyfish in bubble-domed vac suits as they struggled on a safety tether. Insane! Yes, Tsoor biology is different than ours. But I knew they weren’t immune from electrocution or radiation. What could kill us was lethal to them, too.
“They’re desperate to send a damage-control team out like that,” the captain said. He nodded toward the chief-of-the-ship. “Send a runner to engineering. We’ve … ” The Tsoor ship lurched off the screen as an entire section of its hull exploded. We watched in silence as the four aliens were thrown into space. They flashed past our ship, tumbling and spinning.
The captain stood and shouted, “Man overboard! Full retros!” He turned to face me. “Can we launch a cutter?”
The launch tubes were clear and operational. “Yes, sir.”
“Take Sergeant Kuzmenko with you. Go!”
Our forward inertia was great, and the cutter’s engines burned at full thrust for what seemed like an hour before we approached the alien cast-offs. No one knew how much atmosphere the Tsoor vac suits carried.
Kuzmenko and I stood in the open hatch and shot a line toward the four aliens. A tentacle-like arm caught it.
The alien farthest away raised one of its tentacles. It held some kind of metallic tool, a small blade. With a single motion, it slashed the line and pushed off from its three companions.
“What in bloody hell is it doing?” I cried. By then the first Tsoor grasped their way into the airlock. I pulled them inside.
Kuzmenko pointed toward the drifting alien. “That one wants to die. And that won’t do.” He keyed his suit’s propulsion and launched himself into space. The alien struggled briefly. Kuzmenko was stronger.
We never learned why that Tsoor went suicidal. Warrior’s honor, shock, or grief … no one knew. Our cutter had no Tsoor-Russki translator. And the aliens would never tell us.
Nonetheless, by the end of the day every Tsoor in the flotilla knew and honored the name Kuzmenko.
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by submission | Nov 22, 2007 | Story
Author : Kaj Sotala
Case #6-694-39245: Michael Jones.
Born September 5, 1993. Died and suspended July 8, 2012. Looks ordinary – stabbed in a drunken bar brawl, lay bleeding on the ground for a couple of hours before people noticed. Dead before reaching the hospital. No “do not suspend” order on file, so he was placed in cryogenic suspension. Ten percent of his property was left to grow an interest, with the rest divided to his relatives, as per the law.
As the nanobots thaw through the vitrification, I study their survey of his brain. As you’d expect from somebody dead for hours before suspension, the major structures are intact, but a lot of the fine detail has been lost. Only a rough image of Michael Jones.
Fortunately, there’s other information to work with. Jones was a bit of a hermit, so what’s usually the most useful source comes up nearly dry. Of the people who’ve given permission to access their memories, only six remember knowing him, none very well. Still, their memories are useful – his speech patterns, impressions of his body language. From over a billion ways to reconstruct his cerebellum and motor cortex, this narrows down the alternatives to about half a million. I choose the most probable alternative.
Online is the next source. Data harvested by ECHELON, e-mails that’ve passed through GMail, customer information from banks and store chains – the law gives us access to all of it.
I find a blog he used to keep, several e-mails sent to different mailing lists. I track the change in personality over several years of online presence, build a model of how he might have evolved into what he was. In one blog post he passingly mentions a game convention – the date of the posting, as well as the location of the event, match one fragmented set of memories I found earlier. I fill in missing details from the memories of other people who were there, pull up the convention schedule and calculate the events he was the most likely to have been attending. Suddenly a lot of nearly destroyed memory cues make sense, helping reconstruct a unique experience. We always start from a person’s own remaining memories, filling in material from other sources only when we have to.
There’s one set of memories with a lot of associations – an important one for his psyche, but I can’t figure out its exact contents. An online search reveals it must be the death of his dog as a child. I can’t determine the color of the dog’s eyes, but I know that he would have remembered it, so I call up the genetic database for that breed and choose the most likely one. Green.
After making sure my model of him would’ve bought all the things his debit card history says he did, I estimate I’m getting a 92% accuracy. Some things we always fudge in a better direction – the algorithms are biased to make people a bit more alturistic and kind. Society is different now, so we always make them more receptive to change.
I finish compiling the map of his rebuilt brain, and give the nanobots the order to implement. The rest of his body has already been rebuilt, with all of his minor ailments cured while at it. Soon, he will awaken to a new life – not the same as he once was, but it wouldn’t be a rebirth if you didn’t change, would it?
In the meanwhile, I turn my attention to the next case.
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by submission | Nov 20, 2007 | Story
Author : Michael Varian Daly
The woods went dead still. Carmichael did a breathing pattern to slow his pulse, keep his temperature down, not overtax his battle suit.
He had a moment of peace a few dozen heartbeats back, laying upon moss, visor open, taking in bird songs, sunbeams through leaves, fresh air. Now, sealed up, all he could smell was fear.
The Bible in his pack was a comforting weight. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…†he mentally recited. Waking into this nightmare to find his cancer cured, but the world upside down, God had been his Bulwark. Carmichael had smiled at the rulers, scrounged gear from the ruins, then disappeared into the hills, leaving that Hell Spawn behind.
But he didn’t understand what was happening right now. He’d lived peacefully in the hill country for decades after The Prohibition. There had been resistance at first, but that was easily crushed. He had withdrawn, not ventured far, hunted and gathered, been off their radar forever. Why the sudden hunt? It’s not like he was going to breed. He hadn’t even seen another human in four, maybe five years.
He did a thermal scan. Three large masses registered.
“Shit!†he thought, “Military cyborgs, gotta be a half ton each.†He powered up his pulse laser to maximum, armed three seeker drones, set coordinates, prepared to fire. He didn’t notice the cyborged mosquito hovering right behind his helmet.
“Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me…†The air turned bright blue, his muscles turned to water. Blackness…
Darkness faded. He was strapped to a Med palate. Two tall women looked down at him. “Aztec priestesses in SS uniforms,†he thought fuzzily.
“Who is this one?†asked the woman with the yellow catlike eyes.
“Carmichael, Thomas Francis. Came out of Cryo only three decades before The Prohibition. Pre-Collapse ex-military,†said her XO.
His eyes were hard with Fear and Hate.
“Oh, you’re a scared little bunny, aren’t you?†Cat Eyes cooed, kneeling next to him. “This will make you feel better.†Something cool against his neck. A soft ‘chuff’…and microfine tendrils sped into his cerebral cortex. Warmth and happiness overwhelmed him. But a hard core resisted.
“Why?†he croaked.
“You males left a lot of shit behind,†Cat Eyes said, “Mother is riddled with pernicious hydrocarbons and radioactive isotopes. We’re going to seal Her up and give Her a good scrubbing. So everyone has to go.†She smiled. “Especially pingititos like you.â€
The core melted. “Okay,†he burbled happily. The Med palate floated him toward the orbital transport parked in a clearing.
“He might be useful as a historical archivist,†Cat Eyes mused, then turned to her XO. “Any more in this sector?â€
“No, thank Goddess. He was the last one.â€
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by submission | Nov 18, 2007 | Story
Author : Benjamin Fischer
“My lady, is that a joke or an order?â€
Kalifornia raised a painted eyebrow at the the Chief Constable of Luna. The Chief was a solidly built man, veteran of the bitter room-to-room and sometimes hand-to-hand combat of the Secession. He had personally bludgeoned a brace of men to death and dozens more had fallen to his steady trigger finger. Ten thousand Deputy Constables answered to him and to him alone. Even the mighty Fleet deferred to his judgement in matters local to Luna’s surface.
Nevertheless, his pulse always rose in in the presence of the First Lady.
“Is anyone laughing?†she asked.
The Chief shifted his weight.
“If you might be more specific,†he said.
Kalifornia rolled her ivory shoulders and gazed off at the high ceiling of the Senate’s main vault.
“You know,†she said, “ the poets. The fortune tellers, the beggars, the street-folk who will tell you rhymes and stories and useless little morsels. The ones who will tell you anything, anything at all to put your coin in their pockets.â€
Her eyes returned to the Constable.
“Kill them all–even the women.â€
“You are serious, my lady.â€
Kalifornia’s big clear eyes clouded, narrowed, shrunk to tiny black pools of hate.
“Are you questioning-†she started.
“Ma’am, I beg you reconsider,†said the Chief. “There are hundreds of them, at least the ones that are known to my people, and to drag every single one of them to an airlock-â€
“Don’t waste your time,†said Kalifornia. “Shoot them.â€
“My lady. Hundreds. Hundreds of folk gunned down in the halls-â€
“Will be sufficient warning to the rest,†she said, running her long sharp nails through her blood-red hair.
The Chief stood before her in awe. If he refused he might live long enough to leave the Senate chambers. He may even make it to the company of Deputies. But their loyalty was to his title, and only that, and by nightfall there would be a new Chief Constable–one who would not hesitate for an instant before ordering such wholesale slaughter.
“My lady, let me make an example of those in Silver City first,†he said.
Kalifornia pressed the tips of her fingers together.
“Why, my dear Chief,†she asked, “would you limit my desire?â€
“The people here in Silver are unwavering in their loyalty to you,†he said. “They will support and commend your bold action.â€
“Your words suggest otherwise for balance of communities,†said Kalifornia.
“Then you hear me right,†said the Chief.
He held his breath, waiting for an outburst.
“So what of them?†the First Lady asked.
“They would be shown what your iron standard is, my lady. When the extermination continues there, they will not claim some unexpected and unjust atrocity,†and the Chief tasted bile at that word, “but instead they will know that they have been held accountable to your new policy, and they will have no grounds for complaint.â€
Kalifornia turned from him for a moment. Then she spun and pulled herself into the Chief’s arms and she kissed him in a most unchaste manner.
She licked her lips whorishly when she finally pushed away from the lawman.
“Wise counsel,†she said, her smile all vicious white teeth.
“Thank you, my lady,†said the red-faced Chief.
“See that it is done this evening,†said Kalifornia, “so that the greatest portion of the public may bear witness.â€
The Chief bowed deeply, suppressing a shudder.
“As you wish, my lady.â€
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by submission | Nov 17, 2007 | Story
Author : Sean T. Rogers
She can read reality television with uncanny ability. Five minutes into the program she knows that the gay chef, the one with the balding mohawk, will be asked to leave, told to pack his knives. The vagaries of throwaway statements are her tealeaves. She sees the expressions of judges, the subtleties of editing. She never misses. The selected tearfully packs his knives, as was preordained.
She can read reality television and this week she watches from Nashville, from The Grand Ole Opry Hotel, where she is attending a trade show. She and a workmate buy six-packs and watch the program in their hotel room. She boasts of her talent, predicts, and once again is right. The tough girl, the one with the streak in her hair, the one that got into all the fights, packs her tools.
She can read reality television but he cannot. At home, he packs his belongings, looks around the apartment, pats the dog on the head one last time. There’s no need to write a note. She will not be surprised to find him gone, having deciphered the signs. She can read reality and will already know.
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