by submission | Sep 10, 2008 | Story
Author : Ryan Somma
“You’re angry.”
“I’m not angry, I’m frustrated.”
“If you’re frustrated, that usually means you’re about to learn something.”
“Don’t quote Philo to me. You know I hate it when you quote Philo.”
“I’m just trying to think this through like he would do. This was his project, and now we’re responsible for it.”
“You think you’re so smart, but you’re not.”
“Obviously, I’m still here aren’t I?”
Dodd huffed back into his chair, folding his arms across his chest. I took advantage of his impromptu pout-break to nab Philo’s old Rubik’s Cube off the desk. Dodd moaned his displeasure at this, but knew better than to say anything. I was consistently solving the puzzle in under five minutes now.
It was almost a year since Philo vanished, along with a significant minority of city-dwellers, half of University Campuses, and all of Mensa International. Where did they go? Was it the fabled “Singularity” the old websites talk about? The “Rapture for Nerds?” Who knows, the people who came up with that idea had all disappeared as well.
So here we were, Dawson, I, and the rest of humanity’s dimbulbs left on Earth, playing with the toys the smart kids had left behind, trying to figure them out. Keeping faith in the supposed plasticity of our minds. We were muddling through understanding the brainiacs’ artifacts one by one.
I put the Rubik’s Cube, solved, down on the desk, thinking toward my lunch break, when I would resume tackling chess problems, and I had an epiphany–my new word of the week, and said, “Remember Dawson? She worked on an application just like this at her new job. I remember Philo giving her phone support on it all the time. They even set up an online forum to collaborate… before they–you know–transcended. I bet we can–”
“Dawson?” Dodd cut me off. “You mean Chelsea Dawson? The girl we fired from Help Desk? She went to egghead heaven too?” Dodd’s eyes rolled up into his head, frowning, “Oh, that’s more than I can bare.’
“I know,” I shook my head ruefully, “I’m feeling a little insulted too.”
Dodd was immersed in his self-loathing again, his very existence offending him. I popped a fish-oil pill and resumed squinting at Philo’s impenetrable tomb of programming code. My head hurt, but I didn’t mind. It was all part of what the smarties endured, like working out or dieting for a better body. No pain no gain on the road to a better mind.
Maybe one day I would vanish too.
by submission | Sep 9, 2008 | Story
Author : Leslie Smith
I did just what Mommy always told me to do. I got off the bus, said goodbye to the plastic person driver, and walked straight home. I wanted to get home as soon as I could ’cause Mommy said she was gonna bring me a surprise from the ice cream store.
I was walking home when the ar-tee-fee-shall, is that how you say it? The nice ar-tee-fee-shall man came up to me. They’re all nice, but he seemed extra nice. He even smiled when he saw me, a real smile! None of the others have a real smile.
He said hello and asked me my name. I told him Jenny. I asked him his. He told me his was Brian. He asked me if he could help me carry my backpack home. I asked him how he knew where I lived. He said my Mommy told him.
When we were walking, I asked him if he worked with Mommy at the company place. He asked me who made me. I told him Mommy did. She got some stuff from the genetical place and then she made me. Then he said Mommy made him too. He said he wasn’t like the other ones, he was something new. He said he had aw-taw-no-mee.
When we got to my house, the house brain saw it was me and opened the door. Brian gave me my backpack and asked me where Mommy was. He said he had to talk to her about something real important. I told him she was at the ice cream store getting me a surprise. I asked him if he wanted to come inside and wait for her. Maybe she would bring him a surprise too. He said no and that he had a surprise for her. He told me to go inside and stay safe and not open the door except when the policemen came. I said okay and then we said goodbye.
A little while later I heard the sirens and stuff and then you came, Mr. Policeman. How did Brian know you where coming here? Did you see Mommy? I want to tell her I met Brian.
I’m so happy. I didn’t know I had a brother.
by submission | Sep 7, 2008 | Story
Author : Lokon
Richard was forty, paunchy and balding when he came home early and found Susan on the bed they shared. The thing on her and in her was a vibrating mass of warm rubberized orgasm; moving in and out of-across her, her eyes and ears were hidden behind the goggles flashing the holos of what Richard assumed to be one of her Romance novels. She neither saw him nor heard him, and Richard had a manic moment where he imagined she wouldn’t have cared either way. The discarded box it had arrived in professed it as ‘the best sex on the market’ Richard fingered the wedding band she had placed on his finger. His flesh bulged around the too tight metal. He left quietly.
Richard started taking pills. The blue pill made him hard on demand led to the brown pill to keep him going to the red pill to make him more aware of her and better. The pills brought want of the augments. They put little circuits in his head to help him remember dates and recite Shakespeare and Donne on command. At first they were to please her, and then they were just for him. The augments led to uploading, back ups, and gene therapy.
Susan aged and Richard grew to be more then he had been, muscles beginning to regrow and hair migrating from his back to the top of his head. “Darling” Susan said on her 90th birthday “Die with me. We were not meant for more then we were given. Promise me that you will be human with me in the end.” Richard was 96 and looked 28, but said “Yes” as he promised to join the dying who were not to be wooed by the seductive murmurings of technologic immortality.
Richard was getting used to his new legs and eyes when he found Susan there. Susan was locked in a box in her best Sunday clothes, earth forming all around her wooden walls with a tombstone like a sundae’s cherry on top. Next to it was Richard’s marker, now only signifying the shell he’d discarded just before Susan had closed her eyes for good. “I am sorry dearest, I didn’t want to if I didn’t have to.”
by submission | Sep 6, 2008 | Story
Author : Nik Gregory
The mess hall bustled around Harris; it was like a flock of vultures who had just found an overturned meat truck. Possession yields not only extended onto property but onto food too, woe betide anyone who gets the last muffin.
“All I’m saying is there’s something therapeutic about blowing up an asteroid,” stated Harris, feeling his point needed no justification.
“Spreading atomic waste throughout the entire cosmos is not what I call a therapeutic activity,” retorted Mila. She came from one of the nameless countries affected by the mass crawl into nuclear arms – it wasn’t nameless, just no one knew how to pronounce it except for Mila.
“Honey, we take the green pills for the bio’s, yellow ones for the chems, blue ones for the millisieverts and the red ones for the gammas,” said Hank; he sat scratching his sun burnt nose with the end of his spoon. “So I call bull on that.”
She conceded defeat and flickered a smile of someone half her age, “Well on that, we just got twenty moles and five scarabs in a courier this morning.”
“Twenty moles?” asked Hank.
“Yeah.”
“Shit, what do they expect us to blow up with that?”
Harris hit his head against the table, “We’re supposed to mine them, after all we are miners.”
“But how else are we supposed to split an asteroid down the fault lines? You can’t stick a prybar between two faults of nickel and push when they’re a million metric tonnes.” Hank pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket and tapped it on the table. “So Mila, what are you doing this evening?”
“I have a date with Guy Mitchells,” came her answer with an extra coy smile on the side.
“Oh, sorry,” said Harris in a mocking tone. “Are all the Walkers taken now?”
“I sure as fuck ain’t,” muttered Hank before sticking the cigar in his mouth.
“No, just they come from a small genetic pool.” She gestured toward Ed and Ted, a pair of non-related identical twins – their genetic line had stayed separate for over two millennia yet they ended up with identical fashion, beards and even the same scar gouged over their right eye.
“Okay that’s a valid point.”
“Hell yeah it is, we Walkers ain’t exactly a pretty bunch,” stated Hank to a puff of smoke, his stubbly chin seemingly more prominent through the haze.
“That’s why I picked a land lover.” She looked down the line to see Guy approach, his shoulders slenderer than hers and every other Walker.
He leant over, kissed her gently on the cheek and grabbed her muffin, “Thanks babe!”
Harris muttered, “Noob,” along with Hank.
“Oh, ‘hon’, one sec,” started Mila. She right hooked Guy, sending him toppling to the coarse regolith based concrete as she swiped back her muffin.
Mila’s attention drifted to the two guys and she said clemently, “What, it was the last one!”
by submission | Sep 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Rayne Adams
I stole a lightspeed cruiser today. Went flying.
Found Ancient Egypt.
You learn in school that time and space are the same interchangeable abstract, but no one really believes it. You walk three steps, you move forward in space and in time, but if you walk backward, you don’t go back in time. Do you? I didn’t think so.
I had to get as far away as possible—I’d stolen a very expensive, very advanced piece of machinery. I set the lightspeed engine to 2400, more than five hundred lightyears higher than is considered safe. I followed protocol—closed the airlock, strapped myself in, and inhaled the gas that would keep me in a stasis state during my trip. No one has ever traveled lightspeed while they were conscious.
I don’t know if the gas in that particular cruiser was bad, or if I just hadn’t taken it the right way, but I woke up long before I should have, nowhere near the end of my journey.
I wasn’t in space. At least, not any space I’d ever seen before. Space is black, so black it’s sickening to look at after awhile. But this was color, swirling lights and blinding color. Sounds too, which don’t belong in space. The cruiser was gone, and I seemed to be as well. I couldn’t move my arms or turn my head, I was just consciousness floating somewhere in this vast, fluctuating whirlpool.
I became aware that whatever was around me was growing very warm. This didn’t concern me—after they entered the academy, all Spacers had their epidermis upgraded to be able to withstand great heat and pressure. It was still very uncomfortable, but at least that meant my body was back.
When I swam into consciousness, I was lying on my back in something soft and pleasantly warm, not scalding. There were people standing over me, staring down and talking, arguing. Their words jumbled together as the translator in my brain wavered between several different languages. They weren’t speaking a tongue it recognized, so it had to spend a few moments cross-referencing.
It didn’t take too long.
“—Fell from the sky! How could she not be of the gods?”
“She doesn’t look like one of us.”
“Is she even alive? Gods do not die.”
“I’m not dead,” I said, sitting up, my mouth flawlessly forming the words of this strange new language.
The three people standing over me jumped back, frightened, until one of the men offered me a hand up. I was completely naked (my clothes hadn’t survived the heat) but one of my rescuers was a woman, and her loose white robe only covered one breast, so I decided not to worry too much.
“Where am I?” I asked, though I didn’t really need the answer. The white sand, wide, blue river, and clean, breathable air was enough evidence in itself.
“Welcome to the land of Kemat, great Isis.” One of the men said it, and they all bowed their heads.
“Thanks, I—.” I cleared my throat. “What did you just call me?”
“Isis,” the woman said, eyes still cast to the sand. “Goddess of the Nile. Every year you shed tears for your dead husband and the river floods.”
“I’m not a goddess,” I said, but they weren’t listening.
