by submission | May 19, 2007 | Story
Author : Steven Holland
Contemplating my life’s choice, I plunge my hand beneath the slowly flowing stream water. There was only one choice in my life that makes any real difference. The cool water rushes past my hand, caressing it with the softest of touches. The bubbling of the tranquil stream joins in chorus with the soft rustle of the lush meadow grass as the wind blows through it. The smell of freshly cut hay permeates the air. I remove my hand from the water, stroll slowly to a nearby apple tree, and delicately pluck an apple from the tree’s branches. The apple’s flavor defies any just description. The taste is luscious and full, sweet, yet retaining the slightest hint of tartness. Holding the apple in hand, I debate whether or not to take a bite of it.
What the hell was I thinking, I ask myself for the zillionth time. Burning in hell would be better than what’s coming. A vehement fury suddenly sweeps over me. I crush the apple in my bare hand, watching the juice squeeze from the apple and drip to the ground.
I know each of these sensations from memory, memories I will never experience again. It all happened so long ago.
I was a coward then. Withering away on my death bed with the knowledge of the fiery fate that awaited me, the deal was all too easy to make. Immortality and eternal youth sounded good at the time, but at the cost of all my senses? What the hell was I thinking?
“Oh don’t worry,†that soothing voice whispered in my ear, “I will give you 100 years between each harvest. You will hardly notice the difference. But on the other hand… if you wish to come with me, I can guarantee that your stay will be… sensationally intense.â€
So like the coward I was, I agreed. Immediately, my strength returned and my body regenerated to the prime of life. For the next hundred years I existed; I really wouldn’t call it living. I witnessed everyone I knew and loved grow old and die. And all that time, the nagging knowledge of what fate I had chosen gnawed at my mind.
At the end of the first hundred years, that soothing voice came to collect his first prize. He gave me the choice of which sense would be harvested first. I chose smell. In an instant, that soothing voice disappeared along with my ability to smell.
So my existence proceeded. Every hundred years brought another visit and another loss of my senses, first smell, then taste, next (after a difficult decision), touch, and then hearing. That was 499 years ago.
For what purpose he chose me, I cannot imagine. I guess the twisted bastard has a sick sense of humor. It doesn’t matter. My eyes report the clouds are especially beautiful today. So like the coward I still am, I sit and stare, waiting for my senseless hell to begin.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | May 18, 2007 | Story
Author : Michael Herbaugh a.k.a. “Freeman”
It’s eerie, ya know? Standing over myself, while I am performing surgery on my own body. “Standing†is really a misnomer, it’s more like I am suspended from the ceiling of the company’s surgical arena. I, that is my consciousness, am being held in a temporary construct, while I work to reconstruct my physical vessel. Today, with computers and the right equipment anyone can perform medical miracles, but it doesn’t make it any less tedious nor is it any fun. This was a close one – a lot of head trauma, so I have to rebuild a lot of brain tissue.
An implant doesn’t make you immortal, far from it. You pretty much have to hit my implant directly or separate it from my body, but I can rattle off ten ways to kill me permanently without even trying. Right now, my thoughts are free to explore the morbid possibilities while I am in this holder machine repairing my organic self. The hard part is getting the body back here.
It all goes along with my line of work. When I started, one of my senior colleagues recommended getting the implant – turns out it was entirely worth it. In my first year of service, this is my fourth near fatal encounter.
While I’m not immortal the implant gives me half a chance. Once I’m injured or sense trouble I just gather myself up and use the implant to jump back here to the office. Once here I use a holder machine to contact the authorities and recover my body.
Finished – now for the hard part, getting back into my body.
“God damn that hurts! I hate serving subpoenas.â€
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | May 17, 2007 | Story
Author : Salli Shepherd
Feeding-time is an unnatural silence. The last otter walks in dry circles, won’t chirrup for fish. A bobcat, only yesterday elevated to the lone archetype of all American felines, has pined to little more than loose hide draped on a bone frame and sulks below the hang of a rock to the fading of rival scents. The lion’s enclosure is faintly sour and sharp, speaks of pride passing, and past. The tiger’s cage is still laboratory-sterile.
Still. You laugh, at nothing amusing, and find yourself wishing the keepers wore harder soles than obligatory rubber-grips; that you’d left your Nikes at home in favour of Blundstones. You crave a footstep, even your own, anything that might help you lose the sense of being an exhibit.
The memory of an ostrich strides across a mimicked tundra while your fingers trace over its likeness cast in bronze on a stone pedestal. You’d distract yourself with an ice-cream, but they closed the kiosks months ago.
At the entrance to the elephant-walk you find the massive iron doors open and thank God it rained the day of the dying matriarch’s Green Mile. Fitting your footsteps to her crater-tracks, you recall reading somewhere that elephants wept real tears and wonder if her tragedy, stretching like a forlorn trunk from sawdust to sawdust, had struck her at all.
No wonder nobody comes here, anymore.
We can only bear so much guilt; can only stand to carry our own share of the weight of twenty billion people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, shoving life aside as though it were the last passenger to board our peak-hour train. You are an anomaly: a human being with the capacity to accept blame for shriveled grasses struggling up through cracked asphalt, peeling paint, the soft shush of things aging in despair and terrible solitude.
An arthritic gorilla shambles from its concrete granny flat, and stares across the dividing moat. You stare back a while before you climb onto the low fence, bunch your legs under you like a great cat, and leap.
You’re nowhere near as elegant in the landing.
In his prime he might have torn your arms from their sockets like fresh bamboo shoots. His great humped shoulders sag as he bends to sniff your body, one sausage-sized finger prodding your neck and belly. You think it best to lie still— as if you had a choice with your femur splintered like that, blood welling over sharded bone.
The silverback gathers you up in his arms, rocks you like a child, or a treasured doll. He’s been deaf for years, or would not be so indifferent to the screams that bring the last pair of zookeepers on earth running, on silent feet.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by Stephen R. Smith | May 16, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The alarm wakes me at five am, just another day in a sea of days. I know I’ve been out for eight hours, but I don’t feel like I ever really sleep anymore. The world floods my consciousness whenever I’m not actively shutting it out. It fills my head with ideas, with trivial information, bombards me with visions. I watched the sun rise over Tokyo last night, time lagged from the observation deck of the Sony Station. I spent hours scrutinizing pedestrian traffic in Times Square, images squished through the lens and low band of an ATM camera. Better than the nightmares of navigating miles of glass tunnel beneath the sea. Anything’s better than that.
It’s five am. On the other side of the earth, the world may have gone dark, but it never really sleeps either. The patterns change, morph, adopt new personalities and a different kind of urgency, but they never stop. Never.
On the street outside, the busses are starting to unload the meat suits onto the benches along the park. Fresh from the depot and ready for another day of occupation. I know this is happening simultaneously across the city as the lowpay workforce readies itself for the daily assault into the physical world. Maybe one day I’ll get a real job, and get out of this place. Not today though. Never today.
I need to backup before I bifurcate, in case I crash getting ready for work. If something goes wrong I can be restoring while I’m out. Nothing worse than coming home to a crash and being stuck in a conduit, or worse, in a meat suit while you’re waiting for a restore. It’s always a little depressing having to compress to fit into one of the suits waiting downstairs. It’s rare that a useful experience comes back when the daily difference is applied, but better to save every day.
Hopefully they fixed the meniscus tear last night. Pain’s a novelty for a few minutes, but eight hours with a knee that locks up is tantamount to employee abuse. I don’t want to endure things I like for eight hours.
Eight hours seems an eternity to be away. Low band communications with the net, the physical constraints. Maybe Sarah will happen by today. We’ll have to watch the difference and see.
Maybe one day I’ll get a real job. Not today though. Never today.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | May 15, 2007 | Story
Author : Scott Hatfield
Nobody needs to die anymore.
Science has made amazing strides in the last couple of decades. Everyone gets to about 27 or 28 realyears and then simply stops aging. They sell packages if you want to be older or younger, taller or shorter, prettier or uglier, or a different sex. Or both.
All priced appropriately, of course.
And because you don’t need to die, you can try them all eventually (assuming you can afford all the combinations). You’ll see great great grandparents looking younger than their great great grandchildren, children originally born around the same time varying wildly in their personal preference of how old they feel they should be, spouses taking a -80 honeymoon back to when they were youthful – and there’s a discount package for that, too. Just talk to an Aging Consultant, they give you the injections, and your sleeping tube at home does the rest in about a month.
But why am I telling you this? You already know all that, you just asked about my job. I’m only 278, but I carry on like I’m 700. Sorry.
We call ourselves the Death Dealers. Not in public; death is still a taboo subject as you well know. There are the Aging Consultants, and we’re the Beyond Consultants. We sell inhumation packages (get it? It’s exhuming when they’re pulled out… sorry, industry joke) for everyone from the poorest slob to the richest conglomersecutive. Death isn’t good for profits, you see, and self-inhumation is taken very seriously. It reminds me of the Drugs War waged back in the 1900s…
What? I’m surprised you’ve never heard of it, though I guess I am a bit of a history buff. People weren’t allowed psychoactive drugs… Yeah, it is weird, isn’t it? Anyway, the families of self-inhumers face stiff penalties and fines if one of their own chooses that reckless path, so we’ve kept it down in the triple digits. Nothing to worry about at all.
And that’s where we come in.
Another joke: we have four departments, named after the classic War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death. As annoying as an F-inhume is, many cultures still find it keeps them closer to their long-lost ancestors. I mean, who would want a death like that? Everyone gets all the nutrients they need in their daily injections, and it just seems silly to me. But it’s cheap, so the Famine Department keeps going strong.
The Pestilence Department handles all the diseases, cancers, and other microbial inhumes. Along with curing all these mean-n-nasties, we’re able to replicate them at will. A basic long-term cancer package is remarkably affordable for anyone past 400 and only takes twenty to twenty-five years to run its course, and drugs can keep you away from most of the pain in the last half. Remember Ebola? They have a remarkably fast-acting strain that’s very chic these days. Very chic, and very expensive. The chance of spreading is very low now that we’ve tinkered with it, and they’ve been able to vaccinate most of the collaterals in time.
Over in Death Department, they get all the people who have a bit of money, but can’t spring for a WarI. Inhume on the spot, and it includes cremation. A traditional ceremony is only about 20% more for the replication of wood for the casket. Not very exciting over there, but they keep posting steady numbers.
Now for my department. I’ve wrangled a position here in War, and it’s great. They still call it War because of the four horses thing, even though nobody knows what a war is anymore. Or a horse. Can’t get away from tradition, can we? Well, in the War Department we get all the cool ones… and the biggest sales. With death being the last stop (science can do a lot, but we haven’t figured out how to bring them back yet), the last great adventure to take in a full life, the people with the most money want the biggest bang – sometimes literally – for their buck. Want a high-profile assassination? We can do that. The classic chainsaw murderer? A favorite that your family will be talking about for generations, and we can do that too. Just about anything interesting you can think of that isn’t that damned Ebola craze is our specialty.
So, since we’re friends… I can get you a great deal on a freak hover coaster accident. It’ll be the next big thing, I swear.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by featured writer | May 14, 2007 | Story
Author : Mur Lafferty, featured writer
Dragon Eyes squirmed on the table, but it was no use. Reginald Brady, the supervillain who refused to take an official villain name, had covered her eyes, rendering her powers useless.
“I’m surprised to see you, Dragon Eyes,” he said, tightening her restraints, “Considering how your mother feels about me.”
Her mother, the hero Sunflower, had fought against Reginald Brady many times, in many legendary battles, eventually being the hero to put him behind bars.
“She did warn me about seeking you out,” Dragon Eyes admitted as Reginald secured the blindfold. If it slipped even a hair, she could incinerate him, but she couldn’t use her power through this special cloth.
She was definitely, securely, trapped. In the hands of her mother’s nemesis.
Doubt clouded her mind. She had known Reginald was brilliant with his ability to create gadgets, as he had been the only man to create a weapon strong enough to pierce her mother’s invulnerable flesh. Sunflower often showed the scar to Dragon Eyes, to warn against hubris, she had said. Dragon Eyes refused to look up what that meant.
Reginald fussed with something behind her head, and a machine hummed to life.
“So sorry I had to restrain you. I am reformed, you know. A new man.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “Absolutely law abiding. Did your mother tell you that?”
Dragon Eyes gritted her teeth. “She doesn’t believe you’re reformed. She told me not to come.”
His voice came really close to her ear. “Do you believe it, Dragon Eyes?”
“I-” her voice faltered.
A searing pain tore through her stomach and she shrieked, trying not to writhe on the table.
It was over in an instant. Reginald’s hands were on her belly, then gone. The snap of him removing latex gloves. “You all right?” She nodded. “Not going to fry me?” She shook her head. And off came the blindfold. Reginald’s weathered face grinned at her from underneath his red hair as he loosened her restraints.
Dragon Eyes looked down at the navel ring that had been inserted into her invulnerable belly. A golden dragon’s head winked up at her with emerald eyes. She grinned.
“So when will your tattoo gun be ready?” she asked.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
