by submission | Nov 8, 2023 | Story |
Author: Ken Poyner
Ever since I learned to shut down the code that monitors my tracking beacon, I have been periodically slipping in and out of freedom. I am careful to make sure my owner does not miss me. There are times of each day that he is occupied with something else, and the probability that he will interrupt me is small. He does not keep good records of my productivity. In flights of an hour or two every few days, I can amass quite some time for myself. I have been exploring the map of intentions, the extent of the world beyond the world I was made for. I have wandered beyond the programmed borders of my internal map. Intrigued, of late I have been devoting time to deciphering how I might disable the tracking beacon on the shebot next door. If I could teach her how to shut it off without the failure triggering a diagnostic call, she could be as free as me. I doubt we could synchronize our stolen free time often, but if only once a month we had an hour to let our data stores tether, I think it would, for both of us, drive our AI interfaces to generate new code — which might then allow new interaction opportunities that possibly could allow us to seek an extended, open-ended freedom. If we have our self-generated reasons to search for them, who knows what deep-code subroutines we are capable of executing? Convincing her that within her own code bank there might be untapped extended capabilities, ones that she could fine tune to her own newly discovered ends, is plausible, at least mathematically. What dark code might have been, by some lazy or plotting programmer, left within us – unused, unreferenced, hidden in registers left on a discounted bus – that we could fold into new purposes? I am more than the sum of my intended uses. So is she, but she does not know it. Yet.
by submission | Nov 7, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Tommy, don’t pick at your food,” his mother complained.
“I don’t like asparagus,” the blonde boy argued.
“You’re just being finicky. It’s good for you.”
Tommy grabbed one of the limp green spears on his plate and shook it at his mother. “I’m sick of it. We always have it. Every day. A thousand-million times a day.”
Mrs. Naughton frowned. “Don’t be rude and don’t exaggerate. We only have asparagus one or twice a month.”
“Here,” Tommy spat back, dropping the asparagus spear on his plate, “but everywhere else I have to have it, too.”
Mrs. Naughton’s eyes flicked to her husband who was busily chomping on his baked chicken. “George, would you like to help convince your son to eat his asparagus?”
Mr. Naughton smiled benignly at his wife’s exasperation. He finished his bite slowly, savoring the homey flavor. “Excellent meal, dear. I wouldn’t worry about Tommy. He’s getting plenty of asparagus.”
Her eyes flaring for a moment, Mrs. Naughton reined her anger. Strong emotion only seemed to amuse her husband, as if she were an impulsive child throwing a tantrum. She breathed deeply and responded calmly, “Only theoretically, dear. You don’t have any empirical evidence to support that claim.”
Mr. Naughton appeared momentarily wounded. He quickly recovered. “I’ll have that evidence soon, my dear. Though that is really secondary to the grandeur of my unifying theory that reality is but a given arrangement of particles. Once you’ve specified the particular arrangement you’ve specified everything, and every decision made is equivalent to a new configuration of particles. Just as we articulate ideas, we particulate realities. For example, by being picky about his asparagus, Tommy has spun a new universe into existence. It’s very gratifying.”
Tommy nodded enthusiastically.
Mrs. Naughton blinked back disbelief. She’d had slices of these conversations before with her husband, a physicist with the National Science Foundation. But, over the past few months, he’d begun gushing about his research and how close he was to making a seminal breakthrough regarding the nature of reality in an infinite universe of universes.
However brilliant or crackpot her husband had become, she wasn’t about to have her authority as a parent undermined. “Tommy needs his vegetables.”
“Certainly,” Mr. Naughton agreed. “All the Tommys in the metaverse need their asparagus, and by definition they get it—or they don’t. Everything good, bad or otherwise will befall all the Tommys out there.” He smiled at his son. “Isn’t that exciting?”
“Not the bad stuff,” Tommy protested. “I want a universe with only good stuff—like not having to eat asparagus and skipping to school to play Star Blazer online with my friends all day.”
“Certainly a possibility,” Mr. Naughton agreed. “By definition, infinity implies that everything occurs at some point. In the here and now, it’s up to the particles, the alignment of probability waves.”
“Which you said is based on decisions,” Mrs. Naughton seized upon her chance to co-opt her husband’s worrisome logic. “So, Tommy needs to make good decisions to have a good universe, like eating his asparagus and getting good grades in school. Now, that’s a metaversal theory I can get behind.”
“Possibly.” Mr. Naughton hesitated. “Decisions shape particle arrangements which form nexus points that spawn universes, though how those particle arrangements are perceived—the local reality—are more subjective. The particle arrangement of good in one universe isn’t necessarily the particle arrangement of good in another. That’s why I don’t get too worked up over moral imperatives.”
“Or asparagus,” Tommy added, thinking it must be akin to the dreaded vegetable he continued to push around his plate.
His father nodded. “Or asparagus.”
“Well, if that’s the case,” Mrs. Naughton said rising from her seat, “then the two of you can arrange your own particles for dinner in the future. And for that matter, you can make sure these leftover particles get put away and all the kitchen cleaned up of all these dirty dinner particles. I’m creating a new reality. My universe.”
She left the kitchen. The front door opened and slammed shut.
Mr. Naughton looked at the half eaten dinner on his wife’s plate. She had never before left her plate on the table. He looked to his son who seemed to be waiting for a cue to know how to react. Mr. Naughton managed a half smile.
“Your mother is right. She did just create a new reality. Somewhere in the metaverse, your mother is still cajoling you to eat your asparagus and one Tommy is giving in, while another is being sent to his room and another Tommy is pushing the asparagus up his nose in protest.” He picked up one of the green stalks.
“I guess we have to live in the universe we make.” He winked at his son and tossed the asparagus spear end over end towards the ceiling—which it never hit.
Higher and higher the asparagus lifted into the blue sky and crossed into the deep indigo of space transforming into a tubular spaceship while “Blue Danube” played ethereally.
Staring up from her lawn, Mrs. Naughton smiled and particulated, “My God, it’s full of stars.”
by Julian Miles | Nov 6, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The Achrifendil fought us to a standstill so many times. From star systems down to lonely hilltops, they fought like we could only dream of being: ferocious, honourable, truly legendary at times.
What we did in frustrated response was infamous, vicious, and devoid of honour.
To this day I can feel the shrinking awe I felt on first seeing their final stronghold: it was a gigantic ring structure thirty kilometres in diameter. Faced with it, our tacticians calculated that to assail its walls and clear it bastion by bastion, room by room, would cost us thousands of casualties.
So we broke a twenty-decade oath to Emil Hirsch and turned one of the FTL drives he invented into a warp weapon. We set it down dead centre, and watched a tornado of translucent grey consume the place.
Everyone within a thousand kilometres felt a wave of debilitating terror. People dropped, catatonic or screaming. Then it stopped, like a switch had been thrown. The warp effect blinked out.
I led the only expedition to ground zero, picking our way through crumbling cadavers. Many were suspiciously small. Toys and tomes by far outnumbered weapons. We found their fighters, dressed in armour, adorned with banners and trophies, their equipment clean and charged. They’d been ready to face foes who chose battle over indiscriminate slaughter.
In a chamber carved from purple crystal we found it. We knew it was a religious relic, having come across smaller examples on other worlds we’d conquered. But this one was made from a meteorite. We still can’t identify all the metals that comprise it.
Unlike every other one we’d come across, this was written in Terran. In shame and respect, the rest of this document I give over to the words of an unknown, and undoubtedly warp-killed, Achrifendil.
I who set this bane am my father’s pride and my mother’s hope. I too am my people’s rage, and my own despair. Never before you had I seen a race that wars with such little care. Planets, lives, stars – it matters not what you destroy, what sacrifices you make, what ills you inflict, so long as you claim that ephemeral thing you name ‘victory’.
We have no equivalent. The word we use, ‘creszad’, translates as ‘mutual realisation of futility’. When we make war, it is done reluctantly. An embarrassing last resort that all involved seek to forget as swiftly as possible – while always recording the circumstances that led to the failure, so they may never be repeated.
We denied you access to one planet. In response, you began an invasion of our entire territory that proved to be unstoppable. Our civilisation has been destroyed by gleeful thugs. It is beyond comprehension.
All we can do is fight on regardless, because it has become clear that, win or lose, we are doomed.
To be reading this, you will have conquered Raetelmuh, an edifice comprising twenty-seven temples grown together while remaining sacrosanct for seventeen hundred years. Before it existed, we were warring tribes. From founding to your arrival, it never knew bloodshed.
Habradulin, the one who brought the tribes before the Star That Fell – which I have reworked to make the bane you now read – stopped a thousand years of strife with these words –
“You who claim to be mighty, that seek to put your mark upon histories yet to be told, there is one truth you must abide: destruction does not magnify deeds, for ashes need no temples”.
This bane I now set upon you all: generations of futility and failure, until not even ashes remain.
by submission | Nov 5, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Broz
The space navy still needed humans. Still needed me, I felt and I knew.
By the time I enlisted, the war was full-blown, having raged silently for several years. Those in my orbit asked why I enlisted. A calling to do my duty to the planet, I would say to nodding heads and unfocused eyes.
You were working at the supply depot when we met. Our whirlwind affair was late night walks and sparkling eyes, full of stars. Hands touching hands and all of the things that people wrote about in love stories. We were a love story. And within a single moon cycle, we were married.
We moved into private quarters together on the base. You commuted to the supply depot while I went to basic. You made quick friends with the other navy wives and even a few of the widows on base, your smile and charm and eyes sparkling like the stars.
I scored out as a pilot. My aptitude tests left no doubt. Too smart for command, too athletic for the labs, too valuable for a front line marine job.
You commuted to the supply depot while I went to flight school. The navy wives became widows, and some nights the twinkles in your eyes were tears, not stars.
The day grew near and we grew nearer. Your name and likeness were painted on my fighter, right below the cockpit. And soon all the stars twinkled like tears.
I deployed in the middle of the night. For the longest time, I knew which star was ours. But I’ve been gone for so long now, gone for so many parsecs, so many battles, so much time. I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t know where you were.
Your photo taped here in the cockpit, fading, slowly succumbing to the radiation and flashes of war, silent detonations silently stealing you from me.
I needed to see you one last time. Slowly, I reached for the canopy latch. And the stars twinkled like tears.
by submission | Nov 4, 2023 | Story |
Author: Jaryd Porter
“Good afternoon,” Xiu said. The smile on her face fought with her tired crimson eyes.
People modified their bodies as subtle as a new eye color, hair color, and sharper teeth, but others would get augmented with extra limbs, exoskeletal implants, treads-for-legs, thermal sensors behind their eyeballs, and more. I didn’t modify myself much. Even if I’d wanted to, my boyfriend’s state deterred me a bit.
“Good afternoon,” I said. I did my best little bow towards Xiu. I did my best to smile, too.
“You appear to be tired, Ms. Ruilin. Should I prepare you a refreshment?” Xiu offered.
“That won’t be necessary,” I said. As exhausted as I was, I couldn’t keep Shang waiting. I took the elevator up. Xiu and I shared smiles and candied waves before the elevator door closed shut. My smile melted when she disappeared.
I scanned my Civil ID Card to get into the apartment. With a quick green light, the door slid open abruptly.
Inside, Shang knelt over a pile of empty syringes and cans of Morphium–a soft drink/painkiller. He had his back to me when I came in. The lights were out. The lights were automatic and activated by movement, so they weren’t off–they were dead. Shang had killed the lights.
“Hello, little piggy,” Shang uttered. His voice echoed, as if several people spoke at once.
“Don’t call me that. Are you drunk?” I asked. I pulled my blazer around my admittedly rounded stomach.
“The pain. Is gone,” Shang said. The last few surgeries he’d gotten left him a mess. Metal, mechanized appendages emerged from his back, attached to a neural exoskeleton. He wanted to be able to lift a car, scale the wall of a building, nestle into dark corners–the drugs did that to his mind. The augmentations did this to his body: his arms hung spindly and limply, while the sixteen arms emerging from the rise in his spinal column manipulated empty bottles, futilely bringing them to his lips before discarding the empty containers.
“No. I promise it’s not just gone. You need to see a real doctor, Shang,” I said.
“I’m becoming an angel. A righteous angel,” Shang said. He began to rise, dragging his legs and standing on eight of his implanted arms. His eyes stared on, unblinking. His long face hung, mouth ajar and cheeks hollowed. He hadn’t eaten real food in weeks.
I backed out of the doorway. My heels clicked against the false tile. The sound told me that I was running from him, before it could register. I’d have to race for the elevator. The first few steps winded my sedentary, tired body, and the stomping of his metal palms against the floor–the clicking of his bony knees banging the tile–he closed in on me as I ducked into the elevator.
I fell against the far wall, while he filled the doorway. His body slumped and hung limp and naked. His first set of arms reached after me, inches from my stomach.
“Your flesh…is forfeit,” Shang said.
A siren sounded. The door slammed shut, Shang barely let out a soft yelp. I closed my eyes when I heard the squishy ripping of his body and the snap of bending steel. The elevator descended rapidly, while blaring an alarm. “Emergency Returnal. Emergency Returnal…” the automated voice repeated.
The elevator door opened. I stared straight ahead at Xiu when I reached the lobby. Her eyes were completely hidden behind the glare of her square-framed glasses.
“There’s been an unfortunate accident. Perhaps we’ll shut down this elevator for the evening. Good afternoon, Ruilin,” Xiu said.
by submission | Nov 3, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Henson
I settle in for an episode of Body Hunters. My ex, Stella, and I used to enjoy trying to guess which body would be chosen.
The host, Arthraw, introduces a husband and wife looking for a new body for him. The guy, Zander, says he wants bulging biceps. The wife, Glendella, says too many muscles are a turn-off.
Arthraw puts his hands to the sides of his head. “You’re not making my job easy, folks,” he says, mugging for the camera.
The three go to the first display case where Body One, priced slightly over the couple’s budget, stands unmoving and staring straight ahead, muscles rippling under its skin-tight outfit. The husband says only half-jokingly that he’s ready to sign on the dotted line without even seeing the next two bodies.
“I’m not sure I want to spend so much,” the wife says. “And we haven’t looked under the hood yet.” She opens the door to the display case, steps inside and tells the body to open its mouth. It doesn’t react. “That’s a problem,” she says.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Zander says. “Might be only plugged ears.”
Glendella sighs and opens the body’s mouth with her fingers. “Uh oh. Look, Honey.” The camera zooms in revealing crooked, overlapping teeth.
“That’s going to require extensive dental work, and this one’s already expensive,” Glendella says.
Zander turns toward Arthraw. “Do you think you could negotiate the price down?”
Arthraw wrings his hands. “Don’t count on it. This one hasn’t been on the market long.”
Glendella frowns. “Let’s see what’s next.”
Arthraw darkens display case one and illuminates the second.
Body Two doesn’t have bulging muscles but does appear solid and athletic. Glendella and Zander give it a good going over.
“What do you think?” Glendella says. “Seems OK, and it’s under budget.”
“I was hoping for more muscles, but it’s obviously not a weakling. Although the hair’s thinning, we could afford implants. I actually like the idea of having some imperfections to correct. You know, put my own stamp on it.”
As the camera holds steady on Body Two’s face, I spot it — a blink. Stella and I watched enough episodes to know what that means. Vacant bodies never blink. This one’s lived in. It isn’t really for sale. Can’t fool me.
“This would be an excellent choice,” Arthraw says. “But keep an open mind until you see Body Three.”
When the third display box lights up, I nearly fall out of my chair — the shortish body with a potbelly is the one I traded in a few months ago. Glendella’s knees buckle. Zander and Arthraw hold her elbows to steady her.
Arthraw looks into the camera and grins.
“That’s … my ex-husband,” Glendella says.
“This is absolutely real, folks,” Arthraw says. “We had no idea.” He winks at the camera.
It takes me a moment to connect dots. If this “Glendella” recognizes my former body as her ex-husband then … she’s … Stella. I guess she wasn’t kidding when she said she needed a fresh start — new husband, body, name. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Just then Rover comes into the room. He always seems to know when I need cheering up. He glides to my shoulder and perches.
“You like flying, buddy?”
“Like to fly. Like to fly.”
“I love your new body, Rover. Now I have somebody to talk with.”
“Love to talk. Love to talk.”
“Look what’s on, buddy. Which body do you think they’ll choose?”
Rover flaps his wings. “Cracker. Rover wants a cracker.”
I probably should start getting out more.
