Catharsis

by Duncan Shields | Sep 28, 2007 | Story

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Lieutenant Bensen’s neck snapped in my strong hands with a crack and a gurgle. Her surprised eyes goggled up at me as her body went limp. Corporal Manciewicz lay behind me in pieces already while the happy captain himself, mister high-and-mighty Captain Pankter, squatted terrified in front of me in the corner. He’d been crying and a high animal keening was squeaking out from between his clenched teeth. He had the light sweat, wild eyes, and electric stink of raw fear. I dove towards him like a wolf would jump on a rabbit. Like the others, I used my teeth and bare hands.

I look forward out of the bridge viewport and smile at the memory.

I get it all out on the holodeck. I think I may have actually killed this entire ship by now. I’ve killed the bridge crew dozens of times for sure. Probably half of the women on the ship have earned a place in my recreation at one time or another. A few of the men as well. The ones that were going out with any of the women I fancied.

I walk around with a smile on my face all the time. My lovers have told me that I even smile in my sleep. I’ll chuckle at odd times in conversations remembering the slaughter.

I don’t get in trouble. People don’t ask me questions about my behaviour. No one knows about my programs.

Any of the crew that whines ends up there, too. I can’t stand whiners. Or complainers. Or people that don’t have the sense god gave a goat to keep their own lives in order.

I’m the ship’s counselor, you see.

I need an outlet. This entire ship’s neuroses are funneled through me and my outwardly sunny disposition. I am one of the best ship’s counselors in the fleet.

Natural Progression

by featured writer | Sep 27, 2007 | Story

Author : Todd Keisling, featured writer

Jimmy lost his pinky finger today. I can’t wait ’til I lose mine. Mommy says it’s gonna happen sooner or later. Sometimes I daydream about it—what it’d be like to lose my arm, my foot, my fingers and hands.

The kids at school, Billy Zemicks and Janna Clebold and Harvey Valencia, they came in last week missing an eye, a toe, an ear. Not all at the same time, of course, but pretty darn close. It was like they were the most popular people in school. Everybody wanted to see them, touch the places where their parts had been and ask what it felt like.

Jimmy was in the bathroom, having the Oralator brush his teeth for him when his pinky fell off. I asked him if it hurt. He said it didn’t, and then he spat into the sink. A couple of his teeth went down the drain.

Our teacher Mrs. Crabtree says it’s all part of our natural progression. What scientists a hundred years ago were calling evolution. Only backwards. It’s kinda hard to explain, but it’s got something to do with how we used to be monkeys, and how we grew into humans. We made wheels and fire and then we made computers and cars. Then we figured out a way for machines and inventions to do everything for us.

So I asked Jimmy if he was gonna celebrate, and he said, “Nah, I’m just gonna chill out in front of the tube.” I followed him to the living room where he sat down next to Mommy and Daddy. They were watching TV while the SofAid fed them. Jimmy told Mommy and Daddy about his pinky.

Mrs. Crabtree said, “Over millions of years, creatures can gain or lose abilities and appendages based on necessity and survival.” She told us all this while holding up a stump where her hand used to be.

When Jimmy told Mommy and Daddy about his finger, the SofAid connected him to the Network. Then it inserted a needle into his arm and began to feed him breakfast. Daddy said, “That’s great, son! You’re on your way to becoming a man.”

On TV, the news reporters said it was happening everywhere, and that it boggled all the scientists in the world. Evolution was supposed to happen after a long time, not right away. Not like this.

They said we should embrace this new wonder of humanity. They said, “Imagine, no longer feeling the need to sleep! Or eat! Or copulate!” We still needed to sleep and eat, of course, but they said it was always a possibility. That was one of the great things about evolution.

I still don’t know what copulate means, though. Maybe I won’t have to. It sounds gross.

Time Enough for a Wedding

by submission | Sep 26, 2007 | Story

Author : Grady Hendrix

…and he suddenly wakes up with a start. The light was all wrong, a brief nap shouldn’t have taken this – 5:45! Oh, god. Oh, no. Why hadn’t his alarm clock gone off? Eric squeezed his forehead in his hands and made a high-pitched sound: he had slept through his own wedding. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have a secret laboratory underneath your house and you muck about with time travel.

“I’ll fix it,” he said out loud. “I’ll fix it.”

He leapt up and adjusted the time vest for just one more trip. He cinched the straps and hit the button and he was instantly unmoored in the Chronoverse, suddenly reduced to a unique set of free floating personality traits rushing backwards to…

Just a few hours ago! He looked at himself sleeping at his desk, head nestled in the crook of his elbow. He’d done it! He carefully set the alarm on his clock and got ready for his return trip. Is that what he looked like from behind? Well he certainly needed to shave the back of his neck more often. Then he was looking down the barrel of a gun. Several guns, in fact. Several guns being held by uniformed strangers.

“Come with us, Professor Tenser,” one of them said. “We’ll make this easy on you.”

“Who are you people?”

“Copyright Enforcement. You invented time travel, but we used your invention to travel back in time and invent it before you. You’re wearing a bootleg vest so we’re going to have to kill you.”

“You can’t kill me for a copyright violation.”

“Sure we can. Our lawyers went back and put it in the Constitution.”

Eric panicked and slapped the button on his vest, flinging himself randomly into time. The Copyright Cops followed. Down the corridors of history they ran: Medieval, Mesozoic, Middle Reformation, Great Awakening. Hiding behind Thomas Becket’s robes, crouching in a Catholic hiding hole, squatting behind the battlements of a castle. Eric was good at running but then he thought, “What if…?” and he set a different path.

Now waiting on the pink shores of a prehistoric sea, Coelacanths mating merrily in the deep, he sees a tiny fish, gills straining, taking its first crawl up onto land, chased by an angry trilobite. Eric had worked this problem out, spending almost a year in a looped millisecond so that no time at all had passed. He had pinpointed this little Rhipidistia as the earliest ancestor of the Copyright Cops who were on his tail. He smushed it with a rolled up magazine.

“There,” he said. “Now to get back to my wedding.”

Yanked into the present, he’s back in his lab, exhausted after his chase through time, but exhilarated as well. He sits at his workbench to get ready for the wedding but first, just a little nap. He puts his head down on his arms, he falls soundly asleep…

Recruiters

by featured writer | Sep 24, 2007 | Story

Author : Todd Keisling, featured writer

My brother used to tell me about the glory days, when the Government was less unified and there was more than a single state. Usually what he told me went along with what they taught us at the Academy in history class, but sometimes he’d add little details here and there. Things they didn’t include in their presentations.

This was after he’d joined the Military, served a couple of tours and came back. He was different when he returned. Told me and Mama that he’d seen his nightmares come to life during that time, that we just wouldn’t understand. Not long after is when he’d start telling me about the way things used to be. About how there used to be actual television broadcasts with fictional plots. He called them “sitcoms.”

We had this car. A real zoomer. Old rust-bucket from the 20th. He bought it before he was recruited, and before he left for duty I told him we’d fix it up when he came back. I didn’t expect him to return, but he did. Sometimes I think maybe it would’ve been best if he hadn’t.

One day, while we were both on our backs underneath the old GT, my brother told me that I should stop taking the supplements.

He said, “There’s more in them than just serotonin.”

I told him we had to by law, that we’d be in big trouble if we didn’t, but he just chuckled. He told me people used to read for enjoyment. The last book I actually saw was in an antique shop downtown.

“They didn’t have to outlaw books,” he said. “Back in the day, a lot of people wrote about futures where governments banned books. They were wrong. People just stopped giving a shit. Channel Zero took care of the rest.”

He took the ratchet from my hand and looked me in the eye.

He said, “This country was built on revolution. They want you to forget that. Don’t you ever forget that.”

Two days after he killed himself I was out working on the car to clear my head. Mama came to me, her eyes all puffy from crying, and gave me a letter. No name or return address. Just had my own name scrawled across the front. The letter simply said:

“Warehouse 27. Corner of Reed and Pine. Wednesday. 11 PM.”

And then, below that, it said:

“Your brother was a good friend.”

I was told my entire life not to break curfew. Two hours of Channel Zero were mandatory. We were always supposed to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior, and I’d heard about what happened to those who were caught in the streets after hours.

What my brother told me underneath the car that day stuck with me, and I wanted to know who sent this letter, so I managed to sneak out. I took to the alleys and the old routes I used to follow when I was a kid.

Warehouse 27 wasn’t empty. There were a lot of young men like me there. There was a lot of anti-Government propaganda tacked to the walls. After a few minutes, the doors were closed, and several soldiers and patrol officers filed into the room.

One man in a black uniform stepped forward and said, “You’re all under arrest for conspiring against the Government.”

Everyone murmured. We knew we’d been had.

“High treason is punishable by execution,” he said, “or by four years of Military service. The choice is yours.”

The soldiers cocked their rifles and took aim. I realized then what my brother was talking about, and why he enlisted in the first place.

The choice was obvious. I just wish I’d had time to say goodbye to Mama, and that I’d finished that damn rust-bucket car.