by submission | Oct 30, 2008 | Story
Author : Phillip English
Once the guests had arrived and were seated in the confines of the oak-panelled meeting room, the host for the evening rose to the lecturn, introduced himself, and began to speak.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you may be aware of the theory that the people that look the most like us are the people that we tend to be attracted to. Men find women who have similar facial construction to themselves more attractive. I think there was even a Crime Drama episode that featured this as a plot device once.”
The gathering chuckled, more at the assumption that they watched public webdramas than the reference.
“What is not well known is that the same theory applies not only to sexual preferences, but social preferences as well. Statistically speaking, you are more likely to have the same tastes in music as someone who has the same facial features as yourself.”
A few people in the room scoffed slightly at this, but the speaker put up his hands imploringly and continued. “I know, I know, it sounds crazy. How can these factors possibly be correlated? We thought the same thing when we first started our surveys. But the strange coincidence of guys with jug-ears and blunt noses loving Led Zeppelin was just the beginning. We cross-referenced any number of parameters and had them come up with the same facial influence. Eating habits, exercise, your religion being influenced by whether your eyes are spaced evenly or not. We never expected to find anything like this, and we still aren’t sure if it’s something hidden in our genes, or a very subtle social ripple effect. But to be honest, the origins aren’t something we care about.”
The crowd was amused, but obviously waiting for the point. The speaker sensed this. “I can see we’ve got a very discerning crowd here, so let’s cut to the chase. What does this mean to you? Well, as some of you might have guessed given the administrative alumni that are present, the principle extends to political views as well. People are more likely to vote, believe in the principles of, and follow unbendingly someone who shares facial characteristics with themselves.” The speaker smiled at the mixture of bored and impatient nods in the crowd. He rose and moved to stand next to a door on the opposite side of the room, whispering to one of his security aides on the way.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have been working non-stop with the world’s most skilled plastic surgeons, facial recognition software specialists, genetic therapists, and data miners for the past five years on a top-secret project. The project was code-named ‘Narkissos’, and tonight I have the pleasure to introduce you to the result of that project.”
The speaker reached forward and opened the door to let a man through. The new man was wearing an exquisitely tailored suit, polished shoes, and dark glasses. As he removed the glasses with two manicured fingers, the crowd gasped.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the man who is everyone.”
by submission | Oct 27, 2008 | Story
Author : William Tracy
A luxurious coat of trees springs from the earth’s skin. The morning’s clouds have burned off, and the jungle canopy stretches to the horizon in every direction. A single towering industrial complex pierces the rolling sea of leaves.
The structures are girded by a labyrinth of pipes of myriad sizes and hues, crisscrossing and splitting and joining. The maze is punctuated by dire chemical hazard placards. The steel monoliths sparkle in the afternoon sun, altars to unknown gods.
A solitary robot trundles along a catwalk high above the forest floor. A twisting vine struggling to reclaim the structure for nature is crushed unseen by the lumbering machine.
Methodically following the radio beacons studding its path, the robot turns a bend and travels toward the center of the complex. It leaves the living forest for one of metal, where constellations of colored lights blink on and off. Ubiquitous embedded microcontrollers read their instructions from solid-state wafers, then sleep until their next jobs arrive.
Solenoids twitch open and shut, and a gasp of steam escapes a vent. The cloud is swept away by a tug of wind that sets the trees to whispering amongst themselves. The robot notes the change in atmospheric pressure with its internal barometer, but feels nothing.
It reaches its destination, and stops. Guided by barcodes burned into the structure, it mates a canister to a socket, forms a seal, and flushes fluid into the system. The pipes scream as precipitates dissolve and reagents flow again.
Its job done, the robot turns and descends a zig-zagging ramp spidering down from the sky. The sun slips away to roost in distant mountains. Its glow floods the jungle, and sets the sterile machinery alight. The robot’s infrared unit recalibrates to compensate, and it continues forward.
The robot reaches the ground, and returns the spent solvent canister to its hopper. The machine moves on. The feeble twilight—so fleeting in the tropics—comes and goes. Gleaming sequins appear in the sky, shy and self-conscious. They are drowned out by the abrupt onslaught of nauseous sodium vapor lamps sprouting from the buildings at regular intervals.
A jaguar leaps into the robot’s path. The machine stops, its infrared camera tracking the animal’s body heat. The cat snarls at the robot, but the robot cannot hear. The creature glides into the night, and the machine resumes its dogged march.
Now the jungle is alive with sound. Unseen beasts roar, scream, call, chirp, and sing. Oblivious, the robot moves to a tool bin. Servos whine as it peruses the implements one at a time, digesting the information from RFID tags. Finally, the robot mates a repair attachment to its arm. It turns to continue, then hesitates.
For a moment, the machine wishes it could see the sunset.
by submission | Oct 26, 2008 | Story
Author : Phillip Gawlowski
The glitter of hyperspace was replaced with stars, as we crashed through the light barrier. Sensor input filled the screens, and the computer placed markers on the transparent steel.
“There.” Mike pointed at a small blip. “That looks promising.”
I nodded. “Yeah, we’ll start there, and then look at the two closest planets. The green first, the red one last. But first this blue ball.”
A strong storm tore at our ship’s wings as we made our way to the surface at a spot where we might find what we were looking for.
“Isn’t it strange, that the computer picked a place in the middle of ruins?”, said Mike.
“Yeah. But no matter what parameters we feed that thing, it always points us to that location. So, we’ll take a look.”
“Just to shut her up, eh?” Mike chuckled.
“Just to shut her up.” I grinned.
It must have been a city, once. A large one, too. There were towering ruins everywhere, making the approach more difficult than I liked. Especially with the wind, and now rain, too. Good thing that we could rely on the computer to guide us. I only needed to think about where I wanted to go, and the computer brought us there, correcting for atmospheric eddies.
I picked a nice, wide spot in the middle of the open place. “Larger than I thought,” I said.
“True. 850 acres, I guess. What do you think?”
“Give or take. C’mon, grab your suit. We are going out.”
Mike and I waited for the airlock’s cycle to complete. The atmosphere was breathable, but we hadn’t come this far to risk the mission on some fungus or bacterium in the air that’d kill us. And while the computers aboard the ship were sophisticated, they weren’t fully autonomous yet. I heard the hiss of the airlock through the membrane of my suit, and waited for the lock to open. A desolate, deserted spot vista greeted us, the ruins looming over us in all direction, like some memorial for a long forgotten people. I hesitated, and stepped outside, looking at the grey and brown soil. I doubted we’d find what we needed, but Mike carried the cryo-unit nonetheless.
We searched for an hour or two, until we found what we were looking for. With care we packed it into the cryo-unit, and watched until the unit’s diagnostic lights changed from red, to amber, to a comforting green. “Okay, let’s take off again.”
I nodded, and turned to follow Mike, until a sign caught my eyes. I could barely make out the script. It was old, and the alphabet was archaic. “Centr.l Park”, it read.
I looked back at the dying tree, whose leaves we were sent to gather, and hastened back to the ship.
by submission | Oct 25, 2008 | Story
Author : Mark Ingram
Seeeee? Timmy thought self-importantly, I told them he was real, and I was right.
His smile was ear-to-ear as he held the proof of the night’s happenings before his eyes. In his hands, he wielded an iron poker like a baseball bat; a viscous, black liquid—Timmy had never heard the term “ichor” before—now coated the metal shaft. He admired the oily shimmer of all the colors reflecting off the fluid from the lights on the tree—he pushed the girly word, “pretty,” out of his mind.
They told me he was just make-believe—they told me there wasn’t any monster. Timmy mentally rehearsed the story he was going to tell his parents: I knew he was going to look for me, so I hid behind the couch, he paused to cognitively pat himself on the back for being so smart, and then, when he wasn’t looking, I got the poker, and I hit him in the back of the leg, and then I hit him in the head, and then I poked him in the back, and then . . .
He stopped and realized he was beaming just like he was imagining he would be in the morning; this was, in his opinion, the most amazing story of courage and cunning he would ever divulge. His gaze returned to the crumpled mass near the chimney, and he knew the monster would plague him no more.
He has a stupid, fat face, Timmy mused, and stupid, red clothes, and a stupid, ugly beard. And he’s so fat and gross. He stared disdainfully at the corpse—too young to recognize that spitting on the body would accurately symbolize how he felt. For a moment longer, he watched the thick ooze seep out of the monster, turning the fuzzy ball on the tip of its conical hat—knocked to the floor in the scuffle—from white to black.
Timmy had been a good boy this year.
by submission | Oct 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Mark Ingram
He toyed with the hunting knife as he daydreamed; it gave his hands something to do. He was not much of a thinker, but tonight, he allowed his eyes to shift out of focus and his mind to wander . . .
What would we do if aliens came to Earth? Would they come in peace or war; would they already know all that we could teach them; would they want to help us advance our technology; would they get us off this mediocre, blue-green rock . . . ? Start at the beginning: war or peace? The result of war is obvious. We have barely set foot on the moon; they have traveled a gagillion miles to get here. Their technology is far superior to ours.
We would be crushed.
Depressing thought.
He lit another cigarette. He was on his third pack since sitting down, and his five-o’clock-shadow had turned into a three-in-the-morning-overcast. He scratched it and went back to his musings.
Suppose they come in peace? That would be astounding—and very un-humanlike of them. Let’s assume that—after all the formal greetings between the human and alien nations—no one side offended the other. Highly unlikely, but that too would be a breath of fresh air. If they did insult each other (which would be almost a certainty due to both parties’ ignorance of the other’s probably radically different culture), there would be bad blood. Bad blood leads to distrust, leads to prejudice, leads to discrimination, leads to bloodshed . . .
We would be crushed.
Right, anyway, so if they came in peace and we didn’t piss them off, there might be talks . . . or something akin. The world would know of them. Some people would welcome our allies, some would stay at a cautious distance, some would be afraid; it’s inevitable. But there would never be uniformity of opinions among humans. Some groups would always fear the aliens. Even among humans, hatred has lasted between nations so long that they fight each other because they always have. Palestinians versus Israelis. Chinese versus Japanese versus Koreans. Northern Irish versus Britons. No matter how tolerant a culture claims to be, someone—some nation, some state, some planet—will hold prejudice against what’s different. And some subset of that will act on it. Whether the reason is that they don’t like the way the newcomers look or dress, are upset by the visitors’ ignorant disrespect of a specific human culture, feel threatened by them, or have their own way of thinking—perhaps even their own theology—challenged by the aliens’ presence, some people will act out. It might be minutes or days or years after contact. Hard to pacify the entire world’s concerns forever. Violence will ensue. And violence leads to bad blood . . . leads to bloodshed . . .
We would be crushed.
May they never know.
And with that, he thrust his knife deep into the writhing mass on the table in front of him until it went limp.
