by submission | Aug 28, 2022 | Story |
Author: Frances Koziar
My whole body felt warm as I closed the door to the bullet-proof training room—warmth like I hadn’t felt since my wife had died. It had only been tried unofficially—though successfully—in the field, but the new drug should sharpen my senses, they had said, and make me a better soldier.
I didn’t know about the sharpening my senses part—dulling my senses had been my goal for four months now—but I did want to be a better soldier. One who could take loss and keep going. One who didn’t talk to ghosts for her only comfort. One who wasn’t useless now that the love of her life was dead.
The targets appeared in a neat line at first, and then on the ceiling, the walls, the floor. I shot them faster than I ever had, a thrill coursing through my blood. My body, at least, remembered a life before my wife’s death. A life where I had been a rising star in the peacekeeping military. A life where I knew emotions other than devastation and heartbreak, loneliness and void.
Obstacles were added. I rolled behind a smashed truck and took out three more targets. Despite the weakness in my body from the ruin of the past few months, I could feel my old strength there too. I could feel the burn in muscles that not so long ago I had trained as hard and as carefully as the new recruits. I remembered when the questions of what I wanted and why I lived had had simple answers. I remembered even farther back, to a time—impossibly, incomprehensibly—when I had been happy without my wife.
I yanked some scrap metal out of the way, twisting it and pulling it to the side, surprised that the simulation was complex enough to make it feel smooth and solid in my hand. Behind it were moving targets: some frozen, some whizzing away from me into a tunnel. I followed, a humming energy a cross between desperation and joy spurring me on, and I threw debris out of my path as if throwing aside my past. My body felt feverish—was that a symptom of the drug they’d forgotten to mention, or the feverish touch of my own madness? The feverish release of too much crying, too much staring into memories, too much waiting for someone who would never come home?
My vision flickered—one, two—and the drug wore off.
My wild grin faded uncertainly. I was no longer in the room I had started in.
…Another phase of the simulation? I wondered at first, hoped, for a single inhale and exhale. Because what I saw now was what I had felt since my wife had died in the crash. Too much horror. Too much loss. Enough pain to drive me mad.
All around me, the people of the training facility lay dead.
by submission | Aug 27, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Honking, the geese fly overhead in a giant V as the sky reddens in the late September dawn. Tralley watches them for a moment before continuing to unload the pickup truck outside the transmission tower high on the hill. Rucker fixating on his smartphone in the cab looks up for a moment tracking the impressively precise formation.
Rucker turns his attention back to his phone. Tralley sighs. Who knows what Rucker is doing in there. Gaming. Texting. Posting. Shopping. Streaming. Or maybe all of them. The screen’s the thing.
Tralley bangs on the bed of the truck with his toolbox and Rucker nods holding up a finger. Not the middle one. It’s his be-with-you-in-a-sec signal. Surprisingly, he is gently natured and loosely cerebral for a guy wedded to his smartphone.
Rucker finally joins Tralley at the back of the pickup. “Beautiful morning,” Rucker says taking a deep breath.
“Get that information from Google?”
Not acknowledging the sarcasm, Rucker replies, “Naw, direct from the photons on yonder horizon transmitting that info. You gotta get the soup wherever it’s dished, my man.”
In spite of his earlier irritation, Tralley laughs. “You are a philosopher-king, Rucker. The world is your oyster—or at least your trail mix.”
“I’ll take whatever is in my line of sight. Front and center.”
“Never look back?”
“Got to at times. Safety, ya know.” Rucker starts taking the equipment to the squat, bunker-like building next to the tower. “You think these new relays are going to dampen the noise?”
“They’ll do some good,” Tralley answers. “But, they’ll always be noise. We just want it far in the background. Keep things as harmonious as possible. Folks don’t want to hear their own blood circulating.”
Rucker nods. “Got no problems with that. But noise is information too. Everything is information. Sometimes listening to the noise reminds us that reality is just a strange mix of uncertainty, randomness and probability. Position, time and energy. Source, medium and destination. It’s all about the bit. We are the signal, my man, and it’s a beautiful morning.”
“This esoteric before 7AM, Rucker? Even for you that’s early.”
Rucker sets his load down by the heavy metal door and holds his phone to the entry pad. From inside, locks click and unlatch. Rucker pulls the door slightly ajar. “Might as well tell you,” he says. “I just found out that I’ve been approved for encoding.”
Tralley eyes widen momentarily and then quickly narrow. “You’re not going to do that!” It comes out like a command.
“Course I am.”
“Become a walking relay station? A human piece of infrastructure?” Tralley almost yells.
“Why not? The company hires folks to do it with external hardware. This is just embedded. To my way of thinking it’s building a network no one can take down. Relay towers like this are outdated targets fast becoming relics.” Rucker fully faces Tralley, grinning. “We’re already the information. Now we become the channel.”
“You mean a cog in the machine, a chip on the circuit board,” Tralley pleads. “Don’t you know you’ll always be connected. Always locatable.”
“Yeah, I’ll be integral. Information that can’t be lost. I kinda of like that. The hive doesn’t scare me. Mutual dependence is not a bad thing. Openness and transparency are the way forward. I’m more wary of lone wolves. Isolation and secrets create miscreants.”
Tralley looks to the east where the sun is peeping over the top of the distant peaks, some already tipped with snow. “I just don’t get it, Rucker. You’re so easy going. So grounded and damn smart. Why would you let your person be compromised to become part of the company machine?”
“Really, Tralley? You think this is compromise? You think this is unexamined? Impetuous? Childish?”
Tralley does not answer.
“This is transcendence. This is how it starts. You saw that flock of geese. Someone has to take the point. Maybe it won’t work out like I thought. Maybe I’ll rue the day I got encoded, but I’m thinking of a very different tomorrow from you. Information is all about position, and I’m putting myself front and center. In a decade, this transmission tower will be obsolete, but I will be sitting like a lotus on a mountaintop and what makes humanity hum will be passing directly through me. I dig that idea.”
“Could be you’re digging your own grave.”
“Could be. It’s all heat death to me.”
The two men face each other, across a load of electronics, a gulf of uncertainty. “Let’s get our job done,” Tralley finally says.
“That’s what we do,” Rucker agrees and holds the thick metal door open for Tralley. “After you.”
by submission | Aug 26, 2022 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
I know this probably isn’t the best time from your point of view, but if I didn’t tell someone every now and again then I think I would lose it altogether.
Anyway, if you’re a gamer like me, then you know how it goes. You get to a particular point in the game and you just can’t get past it. Maybe it’s a platform game where you can’t beat a particular boss, or perhaps a first-person shooter where the enemies always overwhelm you. Obviously, there is a solution but you just can’t find it. Frustration builds as attempt after attempt ends in failure and you find yourself in the wee small hours screaming obscenities and throwing the controller at the TV set.
So that’s where I am; unable to discover the way forward, resetting to a new life each time. I know you’re probably too busy trying to stem the flow of blood to listen to me, but you shouldn’t try too hard. I’m going to die anyway. And so, I’m sorry to inform you, are you.
How, you ask? Well, you eggheads at CERN have managed to design an experiment that will, unintentionally, condense the Higgs field into an anti-matter black hole that simultaneously explodes and implodes the whole planet, ripping the obligatory hole in the Space-Time continuum. This, in turn, creates a time loop where, due to an unenviable case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I’m the one that collapses the wave function. In layman’s terms, I’m the guy that gets to look inside Schrödinger’s box to see if the cat is alive or dead. Except the cat is the Earth and it always goes suckity-boom.
Now, I know that as far as you are concerned, I’m just the janitor here, but I’ve had a serious amount of time to investigate and understand the esoteric physics of the event – time loop, remember? At this point I’m probably the smartest person at CERN. And I also know how to unblock a toilet.
So, to summarise, your admirable efforts at first aid are not going to save me but you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. Obviously trying to disrupt the initiation laser wasn’t a good idea, as this large hole in my torso demonstrates. Note to self – try something else next time!
Ah well, back to the drawing board. Looking past your concerned faces, I can see the gravitational distortions starting to take effect. Shortly we’ll all be introduced to the business end of a mini black hole, which tends to be a bit of a crushing experience. Then everything will reset once more. I’m going to keep at it though. There has to be a solution that breaks the time loop and saves the planet. There must be a way!
There must be a…
by submission | Aug 25, 2022 | Story |
Author: Steven French
“Professor? If you’d just like to press the button, that’ll initiate the experiment.”
Professor Sarah Roberts looked around the control room, with satisfaction and pride. It had taken so long to put all this together, starting from that first idea, only roughly sketched in conversation with a graduate student as they barrelled down the motorway to some conference or other. She remembered those long days in the office, drafting and redrafting grant applications, only to have them rejected in turn by all the major funding agencies.
“Unintended consequences my arse!” she thought.
And so, in desperation she had turned to the one funder she had always said she wouldn’t apply to, the one supported by someone who described himself as a ‘cosmology buff’ but who was also the owner of a nationwide chain of stores selling powertools named, amusingly enough, ‘The Will to Power’. She remembered her anxiety before the interview but also how the questions didn’t seem that hard, the concerns about safety protocols not that deep, the worry about possible consequences so slight she felt all the calm reassurances she had lined up were actually wasted.
She also remembered that surge of elation when she got the call and the feeling that now, finally, she stood above her erstwhile peers. She knew what they thought of her, those old men who had dismissed her work and laughed at her behind her back.
Construction stretched over months and into years, with setbacks and challenges, some expected, others not so much. And then it was done. Her device, her great machine, ready to be switched on and create something that had never been created before, something that would usher in a new understanding of the universe, with all the attendant plaudits and prizes.
‘Professor? Are you ready?’
Sarah shook herself from her reverie and cleared her throat.
“This will be the first manmade, or should I say, woman-made black hole ever created,” she announced and her team of scientists and technicians chuckled along with her.
“There were some who opposed my dream, our dream”, she continued, “who threw up objections, who said it was too expensive, who even declared that space-time itself would be disrupted by what we’re about to create.” There was more laughter, some of it a little nervous this time.
“Well,” she finished, “we shall show them how wrong they were as we draw back the curtain on a bright new future!”
And with a flourish, she firmly pressed the button on the panel in front of her. There was no flash, no ominous rumbling, just a lurching sense of reality being twisted into a new shape. Sarah grabbed at the edge of the panel and for a brief moment, closed her eyes.
…
“Professor? If you’d just like to press the button, that’ll initiate the experiment.”
by submission | Aug 24, 2022 | Story |
Author: Kevin S
The magtrain is running 2 minutes late, someone held it up the last stop, go figure. The day I need it, and it’s late. Jones didn’t show with my neomorph hit, and as I start to shake the irony of jonesing for Jones isn’t lost on me.
Wherever he is, it’s off grid, but hell, he knows whatever he does, it’s forgiven by those of us that need him.
The train pulls in silent and I step on, assaulted by adverts and half the passengers are selling something, food, flesh and other less savory options. A neon punk stares at me as my sweating palm fails to grip the pole as we pull out, I stumble, and right myself. Judged by a freak.
8 stops, 12 minutes and 37 seconds and I step from the chaos of the train. The street is mercifully quiet and the darkness is growing, I walk past shops, the wares and prices assaulting my hurting brain, but it’s less down here than in the main drag.
The curse of the wetware feed, inescapable, irreversible, intrusive adverts, news and mental assaults.
Turning up the alley I see the telltale litter of users. Clear vials litter the edges, phets, psychs, euphorics and sweet opiates, a skinny kid leaning against a dumpster presses a vial up to his nose, and the sharp hiss of compressed gas peels off the walls. Looking up he sizes me up then, his eyes widen and a grin splits his face, fingers drumming on his thighs. A phet flyer chasing the city, as he runs out, the energy carrying him.
I hammer on the door as I reach it. There’s worn paint where a thousand other fists have thumped before. A camera on the door shines red and the door buzzes, I push it open and climb the stairs, the stench of sweat, piss and desperation echoes off the walls as panting and unfocused I reach the top, I unclip my cred reader and all but throw it to Mac who tosses me the neomorph with lazy ease. Moving to the gallery I sit amongst the others, most with pokes hanging from veins, I slip down my scarf and slot the neomorph home, the junkies look at me, more fucking judgment, I have a vial drive wetwired straight into my neck, the vial clips home, and the bliss of quiet and calm clouds the feed.
I sink to the floor, luxuriating in the silence, slipping the empty vial from the socket and pulling up the scarf.
When the feed arrived, it was originally a tactical network, with hud, perfect for silent ops. 10 years out, it was mainstream net link. Civi wetwares have options to turn it off, ours was ever on. The neomorph is the only escape I get. So judge, I don’t care, just let me enjoy the silence a while longer.
by submission | Aug 23, 2022 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Another time machine.
It arrives with a clash like a drawer full of cutlery upended onto tiles.
Mostly they were entirely silent, and the first Martinez knew was when a time traveller stood at the door, latest in a carnival of visitors, eager to poke and pry, goggling at the crudity of the past and always wanting a memento, posed beside him, or in front of his own primitive apparatus.
“Do you mind?” they would ask, thrusting into his hands an incomprehensible recording device. “Just enable the interface.”
It was natural selection. Travellers from futures not obsessed with history stayed away. His visitors were academics, or gawpers convinced Martinez would be amazed by the novelty of their arrival.
Sometimes there was no machine, simply a glowing hoop in the air, or the sudden bang of displaced atoms as a traveller popped into existence. He hated these the most, startled awake or spilling his tea. There was no getting used to it.
“Leave at once,” he warned them, though it was already too late.
He recalled a pair of travellers, each as elegant and beautiful as the other, who sensed what had happened. Alerted by their device, something like a miniature glass pavilion, they repeatedly and uselessly triggered a return.
“Perhaps the physics of this alternate does not allow time travel,” the woman cried.
“In other time lines you are successful,” the man explained to Martinez, as if consoling him.
He turned to his companion and gazed into her face. “At least we are shipwrecked together.”
Over the years Martinez had observed the various manners of travellers, and even when as enigmatically remote as this couple, it seemed prudent not to mention their fate.
Less perceptive travellers would peer at his dusty workshop, at the exposed innards of his time engine spread out like a dissection on the floor. They often seemed disappointed.
“Such humble beginnings,” they would say. “To think it all began like this.”
In the early days, Martinez tried questioning the bizarrely costumed and inhumanly tall travellers from far ages, thinking they could explain, but they merely shook their heads. Not speaking of the future was one of the Rules. Whether it was the physical constants of his own timeline differing in some way to preclude time travel, he would never know.
This latest traveller slouches astride a sleek chromed machine, like the time-cycle of Captain Future.
“Band new,” he says. “Just taking it for a spin. Start of time travel is as far back as it can go. Seemed a neat idea.”
He has words tattooed around his shaved head.
“In the morning,” reads the part Martinez can see.
“Jeez,” the youth complains, glancing through the door of the workshop. “This is depressing. Like my step-dad’s garage.”
“The smell of napalm,” the rest of the tattoo says.
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
“Did I turn up before you finished it? Before your first jump?” He shrugs. “All the crap about changing the past. It’s always a different timeline.”
He flashes a knowing grin. “Paradox alert. Still, at least you know it works.”
“I gave up tinkering years ago,” Martinez murmurs.
For reasons he never understood, there is always a delay before the physics of his reality catches up with time travellers. Perhaps it depends on how many centuries they have crossed. But their existence here is impossible, and so it always proves.
Already, the grin is vanishing from the face of the youth, followed by the face, the slouching figure and finally, the time cycle itself.
