by submission | May 1, 2008 | Story
Author : Jim Wisniewski
At first I thought it was the viewscreen. The tiny, flickery viewscreen from a public matterfax at the Sont Mikaal gate station, with its scratched plastic case and the smudged dust of a dozen systems. A dozen systems’ cargo terminals, anyway. Free patterns are public-domain and ancient, made with semicon electronics big enough to see instead of rod logic or something sensible. Sometimes there’s a faint electric whine, just barely detectable if you put your ear up to it.
But this one was clean. I turned it off regardless; one less thing to worry about. The hum must be coming from something else. Not too many candidates left. Cyclers travel light. I cast about our dingy compartment, giving each battered piece of equipment and dirty sock and empty half-crushed drinking bulb a good long look, as if one might stand up and admit its guilt if I stared hard enough.
Hab must’ve noticed me looking twitchy, because he sat up and looked at me funny. I’d have to keep an eye on him, I thought. My thoughts were racing now, had been for days. He asked me what I was looking for, the words raucously loud to my straining ears. “That hum,” I said, distractedly, begrudging every echoing syllable. “Can’t you hear it?”
He shrugged and lay back in his hammock. We had gravity on this run, a rare luxury on the long fall upwards to the distant gate metric. Our room was a maintenance node on a helium-3 tanker which rotated slowly to even out solar heating on its hull. A tenth of a gravity won’t keep your soup in the bowl, but it’s enough to tell up from down.
It also meant that the machinery of the ship was shut down dead cold to save energy, passive radiators keeping the helium liquefied. The more I looked around, the more the hum seemed to come from all around me. It was like… oh, like the flickering pinpoint lights you see when you close your eyes. They’re always there, hiding underneath the lower edge of perception.
Now it was the sonic quality of the hum that drew my fascination. It was an infinite basso profundo note, penetrating every corner of my mind. I crouched down to look out the tiny porthole set into the floor. Was this the music of the spheres? Or maybe I was hearing the cosmic background radiation, the echoing rumble of the Big Bang.
Every other noise seemed a defilement now. I tore at the casing of our airmaker, desperate to shut off its clattering fans. Hab shouted and jumped at me, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t think in such a racket. A tenth gee isn’t enough to hold a man down against the deck and crush his throat with your knee, but I managed to brace myself against the low ceiling. When I hit the airlock emergency cycle button, the escaping puff of air gave Hab’s body a little extra boost. He’d reach the gate ahead of me.
It was still too much. Even with Hab gone and the airmaker and heating unit off, I could hear my breathing and my heartbeat and the blood roaring in my ears. I stripped off my heat blanket and shipsuit. No need for them anymore. The outer door of the airlock was cold on my feet as I hit the cycle button and gritted teeth through the alarms. Finally the hatch irised open and I dropped out into that cool silent blackness, with nothing left between me and the hum.
by submission | Apr 28, 2008 | Story
Author : James Smith
The girl out of the tank before lunch is Lila. Trip around the network shows the last of her bloodline petered out twenty years ago. Cryos are all from before the Patent Wars, so their sequences are in the public domain. The company turns a nice side profit selling the royalty-free DNA of such orphans through its GeneStock site.
I clean up the cancer that put her into storage, and dump the standard Mandarin package down her language stack, which I had to re-build because the cancer had slowly eaten through it over the centuries. I’m supposed to sequence her now, and she is absolutely beautiful, so I turn to our department’s unofficial protocol. I put her sequence in the system, but also pipe it to my phone. To the phone we give her, I beam a map to the job bank, my contact info, plus a bot that deletes any co-workers’ info. She’ll likely call me. We’ll make a date, and with her sequence I can key my pheromones, the food, the shade of my eyes, to her tastes. You can’t get too specific, but ballpark’s enough to get some ass once or twice, which is all anyone has time for anyway.
With one eye on the tank, I eat a sandwich and surf the city’s cam-net on my phone, tracking Lila’s progress. I watch her get buzzed by a flying cop. It blinds her with a quick retinal scan, reads our logo there, and shouts at her to get along to where she was already headed. The sound’s off, but I’m sure she’s got glossolalia by now.
Fuck. Skaters. I see them before she does. I speed-dial her phone, but she can’t hear it over the traffic and billboards. They come from her 10 o’clock, and all I can do is watch as the first one circles her, drawing her attention, while a second passes a scanner over her hand, yanking the ID out of her chip. He’ll probably have the start-up credit emptied out of her account before her onboard can lock it down. There’s a third. They travel in threes. She comes in low, spins behind Lila’s legs and pops up to slap a patch on the back of her neck. All the wiring we grew there before sending her out has now been hijacked for some American gangster wanting tariff free real-time number-crunching.
By the time the patch dissolves Lila won’t even be able to use her phone, much less remember to call me. She won’t get enough time to acclimate to the zeitgeist– which will change in a month or so anyway– and she’ll come up out of it crazy and useless. She’ll be on the street, begging me for credit, inside of six months.
I sigh, close my phone and reach for my coffee. The tank beeps, and the next idiot tumbles out onto the tile. He’s kind of cute.
by submission | Apr 27, 2008 | Story
Author : Michael Varian Daly
The musky odor hit Tanith the moment she stepped through the portal; man smell. It always got her queasy and excited, made her yoni tingle and moisten.
She marched with purpose down the wide debris strewn avenues, lined with derelict warehouses converted into rat warrens of cubicles called ‘apartment’ or ‘club’ depending upon their usage, the huge facades covered with brightly colored artwork, its techniques crude to sublime, and often violent and sexual in nature.
This was Semefour, a sector of the abandoned dirtside space facility of Bessport and original ghetto of The Men.
The Men were not actual males. True Men were extinct, outlawed for centuries, their heritage diffused and divided into the myriad Mandroids; Y-chromosome cyborgs, a vast genetically engineered servitor class that ranged from the ubiquitous simple minded AgroDroids, patiently tilling fields on a thousand worlds, through the slim graceful Harlequins, serving the personal needs of Sisters everywhere, to the brilliant star spanning Sliders, The Sisterhood’s living spaceships who merged with their pilots, Mind, Body and Soul.
No, The Men were really Sisters. They wore Bitch Rods all the time – detachable bioform phallus’s…big, thick ones, too. They took hormones to shrink breasts and grow hair, lots of hair. They lived The Man’s Way, a throwback cult of ‘masculinity’. They steeped themselves in intoxicants, wrote nihilistic poetry, had bare knuckle brawls, and sodomized each other. They were The Men.
For most, it was a phase. They would Live The Life for a while, then put their Bitch Rod back in its Fake Box and go live as a Solitary in the woods or the hills or the desert on some world for a Solannum or two until their minds and bodies settled.
But some Lived The Life as their Life with total commitment. Like Frank, who had been one of The Men for well over a century now. That is who Tanith had come to see.
Tanith was a Jane, a Sister who sought out The Men for pleasure. She couldn’t call Frank a ‘lover’. Sex among The Men was ritualized consensual rape.
She turned, went into a shadowed door, up narrow stairs. Frank was waiting for her, ‘his’ wiry black hair, beard, chest, legs, making her body vibrate with an atavistic thrill. Frank took her straight away, brutally, with a cruel smile that no Harlequin pleasure server would ever match.
Time passed too quickly.
They smoked and drank, coupled with fury and languor. Frank sang her songs. Two friends came over, got drunk, had a fist fight, then all three of them ‘raped’ her for hours.
On the afternoon of the third day, Tanith stumbled down the stairs, bruised, sore, and wholly sated. On her way out the door, Frank had smacked her on the ass. “Say hello to your husband,†‘he’ laughed.
“My husband,†she thought smiling. Her darling Maddox, thirty six thousand tons of Slider floating serenely in orbit. She knew he would relish every single detail.
by submission | Apr 25, 2008 | Story
Author : Sharoda
Jerry and I stood in the locked room looking through a large window at the woman in the hospital bed. The door next to the window led into the room, it had a green light over it showing it was unlocked.
“I’m not going in there”, Jerry said. “Becka’s gone! That’s not her in there; I buried her 6 months ago”.
“I know. I was with you at the hospital after the accident†I said.
“Screw this Ken†he was shaking; seeing the clone with Becka’s face lying on the bed in the lab’s hospital ward was pushing him to the edge.
The accident had been horrible. Jerry still had terrible scars but with Becka gone he didn’t care.
“Call security so they can let me the hell out of here†he was starting to get really angry. Getting into or out of this part of the lab complex was difficult and required a lot of security access that Jerry no longer had. He hadn’t been able to work in 6 months but I had to bring him in today because we were going to wake her. Jerry started pacing back and forth in front of the window staring at the Becka clone.
She was cutting edge science. She was literally a perfect physical copy of Becka and her mind was everything we could salvage before she’d died.
“Please Jerryâ€, I begged, “A lot of people, a lot of your friends, went to a lot of trouble, for you. Please at least wait until she wakes upâ€.
He stopped pacing and turned to look at me. His face was red and he was shaking. He turned back to the window and started pacing again.
I looked at the security camera in the corner and shrugged. We waited, no one came. “I’ll go find out what’s keeping security†I said and badged myself through the opposite door.
One more door and I was in the observation room. Johansen stood there with his expensive suit and slick hair staring at the monitors and speaking softly to the techs. I’d made a deal with this particular Devil to make this happen for my best friend.
“How come…†I started to say.
“It’s waking up†Johansen said, cutting me off. Everyone looked at the monitors.
The Becka clone opened her eyes and slowly looked around. She couldn’t see through the large window, it was tinted glass on her side.
Jerry stopped pacing.
She sat up.
Jerry leaned close to the glass. There was still tension in his face.
She put her face in her hands and rubbed her eyes the way she always did when the lights were too bright.
Jerry stood with his hands on the glass. His head slowly shook back and forth but the tension was gone.
Becka stretched her neck and flicked back her hair. I’d seen her do it a thousand times.
Jerry’s hands fell slowly to his side, his mouth was open. He moved to the door and turned the knob.
“Jerry?â€, she said, head still in her hands.
“Becka?†he said softly.
“Oh honey, I had the worst dream†she said and raised her head. He stopped at the bed and sat down; she started to cry when she saw his sad scarred face. She pulled him to her breast and wrapped her arms around him and held him while he cried.
“We’re going make a fortuneâ€, Johansen said.
“Yaâ€, I said wiping my cheek. “probablyâ€.
by submission | Apr 20, 2008 | Story
Author : Grady Hendrix
Fear gripped his guts! Fear turned his spine to water! Fear packed his bowels with ice and made his fingers tremble! That’s what Jim thought he should be feeling, but instead his mind was a blank white eternity with a billboard in the middle and written on the billboard in mile high letters:
I’m scared.
I’m scared.
I’m scared.
“You scared?” the grizzled grunt next to him asked.
Jim nodded weakly.
“Good man. First thing, don’t hold yer assault cannon like that. S’not a crotch warmer. Second, just think about the mission. Clears yer head.”
“Is it true that when the landing ramp drops the first 20 soldiers get their heads blown off?”
A mechanical voice sang out.
“Attention: negotiated settlement talks have closed inconclusively. Prepare for full military deployment.”
“That’ll be us, then,” the grizzled grunt grinned.
Jim threw up in his mouth and let it run down his chin. Didn’t matter. He’d be dead soon, anyways.
“There, there, son,” the grunt said. “Focus on the mission. We’re here because we have to be. Earth needs resources she don’t have, so we go to our friends and ask them to share, and when they don’t share we don’t got a choice. We have to take.”
“But why?”
“Take or die, son. It’s the way of the universe. Survival of the fittest.”
“Pardon me,” a grunt on the other side of Jim said. “I think applying social Darwinism to our situation is entirely uncalled for.”
“What? Yew advocating some kind of Ricardian system of comparative advantage?”
“I’m merely suggesting that rather than fulfilling a pre-existing survival instinct, our species is demonstrating choice.”
“Naw, naw, naw. You’re saying that we’ve become predators. S’what I’m saying too.”
“No, I’m suggesting we’re practicing a style of economic expansionism rather than pure species survival.”
“Yeah, but ultimately it doesn’t matter does it? As the great Mr. D said, “˜It’s the most adaptable to change that survives.’ They got it, we need it, they won’t give it, so we take it. Economics is personal.”
“Touche’. A bit reductionist but I yield to your aggressive reasoning.”
“Aw, think nothing of it. Incidentally, yer point of view is interestin’ but simply not appropriate to the field of battle.”
Jim’s head was spinning. The drop ship hit the dirt.
“Why thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
The warning klaxon went off and the grunt grabbed Jim by the combat armor.
“Come on, kid. Up and at “˜em.”
The landing ramp warning light started flashing. Outside, the sound of multiple missile impacts.
“Think of the mission,” the grunt shouted.
The landing ramp crashed down, the sound of a planet at war rushed in, and they came out shooting in the middle of the Ablixian town square, burning office towers falling before their eyes.
Jim heard them give the Marine warcry and he screamed it too as he blasted away in all directions and prayed that his head wouldn’t get blown off. It was a warcry, a mission statement, it was everything the Earth needed now that it had exhausted its own supply.
“Give us your celebrities!” he screamed.
