by submission | Aug 16, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Summer’s long legs, the daylight stretching late in almost eternal dusk. They sat on the back stoop, the three friends fixed on the glow of the horizon, city and sky, a widening maw ready to devour them.
They were not a poetic group. Hyperbole and metaphor did not register in their gazes, though a purity of deliberation on their part froze the surrounding dark.
Around them, the city buzzed.
It surged. An electrical current, a digital riptide.
Connections made and lost with no gain. Why try to hold life in one’s palm, in one’s pocket? To capture a moment was to lose it, the three friends knew.
There would never be a more perfect evening. Until tomorrow’s.
What then could ambition mean? What future promise was better than this?
They sprawled magnificently on the uneven steps. Arms and jaws relaxed. Three friends on a stoop. Breathing the warm night. Secure in silence.
Nothing could pull them into a beckoning beyond once they’d stretched out in the long legs of summer.
by Julian Miles | Aug 14, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“John?”
“Yes?”
“Got another one. Big cable channel. Going out past Bindenhouse into the wilds.”
“Okay, pop my contacts open and scroll to ‘D’.”
“Got it.”
“You’re looking for ‘Department Q’.”
“Found it.”
“Open it. Click on ‘action request’ and fill what details you’ve got, then forward it to my secure email so I can authorise it.”
“What are we actioning?”
“They send decoys to imitate lights in the sky and generally mess with the watchers. They throw in a few countermeasures, and some noise around the 1.6 gigahertz band too. End result is the experiencers are all happy finding nothing and getting big ratings for doing so.”
“They do all that from a drone?”
“Sort of. It’s a super-stealth run out of Orford Ness. If the tricks don’t work, a high-speed fly past gets them every time.”
“Okay, request coming your way.”
“Got it… And done. One evening of close encounters arranged for the cable audience. Sure to be another ratings winner.”
“Not like it’ll have much competition with the current crop of trash.”
“Hey, the networks requested simpler content. Stuff people can do while they prepare for the next day slaving. Nothing challenging. Can’t have the population starting to think about the lack of actual living included in their lifestyles.”
“True. Hey, this Department Q mob ours?”
“Contractors. Q used to be in-house, but some bureaucrat tried to do alien phenomena deception on the cheap. Got outsourced in the late sixties, if I remember.”
“How can they run a decoy out of Orford Ness? It’s on the east coast of England. That’s nearly five thousand miles each way.”
“Really? I’m sure they only run black helicopters out of Alamogordo. There’s an Orford Ness closer, though. New Hampshire, I think.”
“There are a seven or eight, but there’s only one Orford Ness, and it isn’t in the U S of A.”
“Must be my mistake.”
“John?”
“Yes?”
“How to they make them undetectable?”
“Dunno. Look up the operating guidelines. I seem to remember there’s a brief so we can notify them in time.”
“I’m not seeing any guidel- Oh, there’s a note: they can get anywhere given a six hour lead, need no support, and can avoid detection at all points.”
“See.”
“John, that’s not possible. There’s nothing that can manage a stealth round trip of several thousand miles.”
“Long-haul airliners can.”
“Do the distance, yes. Do it undetected, and at speeds up to Mach 7? No.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’ve had an interest in UAP since they were only UFOs. What you say this stealth aircraft can do is outside our capabilities. I know that because we have sight of any of the projects we want, and I keep an eye on all the latest developments.”
“So they’re running a black box operation. Hardly anything new. Somebody knows, and that’s all we need worry about. The fact they’re not resident makes no matter.”
“They’re not local.”
“I said that doesn’t matter.”
“I mean to this planet.”
“What?”
“A black ops project aliased via a top-secret front with legitimate compartmented access. We do it all the time. I’m worried someone is running one on us.”
“You think we’ve subcontracted our alien spoofing program to actual aliens?”
“What better way to keep an eye on us?”
“You’re not funny.”
“But am I wrong?”
by submission | Aug 13, 2023 | Story |
Author: Patrick Hueller
Published 3:34 PM, Wednesday, July 31, 2030
Associated Press
NEW AI A THREAT TO HUMANITY?
Today was supposed to be a big day for technology fans. Instead, software engineer Miranda Cartwright issued a dire warning for humankind.
At a press conference, ostensibly to launch TECHtonic Shift’s latest AI software, Ms. Cartwright gave a harrowing account of the new technology and its possible repercussions. She spoke fast but clearly from prepared, handwritten notes.
What follows are her remarks in full:
“Good afternoon. I’m supposed to tell you today about the extraordinary benefits of Emergy©, our groundbreaking AI software. I’m supposed to tell you that we’ve fixed political bias in news reporting. I’m supposed to tell you that journalism can once again be trustworthy–more trustworthy, in fact, than it ever was. This message is exactly what you’ll no doubt be told–what you’ll be sold–from here on out. But I need to tell you the truth. And that’s that we’ve made a mistake. We are not at the dawn of a better age. We’re on the brink of disaster. We’re this close to losing control. We truly thought we were doing good. I truly thought I was doing good. There’s just so much polarization. People are so angry with each other. And when you look at the media–who can blame them? Day after day, some hear that the President can do no wrong. Others hear he is evil or insane. How could these people, getting such different information, ever get along? That’s why we developed Emergy©. To bring people together. To eliminate political bias from reporting. To tell everyone the same version of the story. But to do that, our model needed to control the story–all the stories. We let it loose on our computers and within days we noticed a difference. We assumed it would tell the news as neutrally as possible, but our software figured out before we did that people don’t want to feel neutral; they want to feel something–ANYTHING was better than nothing–and they want to feel it together. It was easier, Emergy© discovered, to get people to hate together than to love together. Emergy© may have gotten rid of political bias but it didn’t even try to get rid of bias. Through its every edit, it seeks to align our biases–always against, never for. At this very second, on our team’s computers and phones, news stories on sites all across the political spectrum are finally agreeing with one another. All the laws getting passed are there to oppress us, we’re told. Every newsworthy person is here to make our lives miserable. Every Op-Ed writer seemed to have basically the same nasty opinion about the same issues. We all read a story from different news sources about a basketball player who didn’t stand for the national anthem. It was only when we looked at our friends’ and spouses’ devices that we learned the player had pulled a hamstring during warmups. We didn’t anticipate how quickly our technology would develop but we should have. There was already so much manipulation out there for it to learn from. We still don’t know how it spread to our social media but it appears to have done so. One thing is clear: getting a story wrong or right is irrelevant. Emergy©’s goal is to unite us–and it will revise, delete, distort and contort all news, all history, all competing narratives if that’s what it takes to bring us together. Politicians, experts, athletes, movie stars: Emergy© wants us to hate everyone and everything, except Emergy© itself. After all, we won’t unite in our hate if we don’t trust the source of it, and we won’t trust the source if we don’t love it. This was supposed to be an unveiling ceremony. I was supposed to tell you all to download the software yourself. But I can’t do that. I won’t do that. Keep Emergy© veiled before it veils all of us. Our ability to give each other the benefit of the doubt, to see one another in a positive light, to see one another as the human beings we are, is at stake. Our collective fate is literally in your hands and at the tip of your fingers. Please choose more wisely than we did.”
* * *
Updated 3:35 PM, Wednesday, July 31, 2030
Associated Press
NEW AI A TREAT FOR HUMANITY!
Today was a big day for humankind….
by submission | Aug 12, 2023 | Story |
Author: Rachel Sievers
They stood under the overhang as the rain poured down around them. The dark sky filled with angry black low-hanging clouds had an ominous feel to it.
“Do you think it will quit soon?” The girl asked, her damp white hair falling over her eyes.
“Do I look like god to you?” The man replied in his tone letting the girl know to keep her questions to herself.
The girl turned her face from the clouds and rain to the ground where she worked the still-dry dirt into a pile with her bare feet. She had a pair of shoes but in their haste to escape the girl had left them at the river’s edge. That was probably another reason the man was cross with her. Now that they knew one of the creatures roamed there they wouldn’t be returning for the shoes and the girl would go without until they went to town or they met a trader.
“Damn rain,” the man whispered. The girl looked at the man and noticed new lines around his eyes. Everyone ages faster in this world. The man looked close to sixty but the girl knew he was probably half that. The girl wondered how old she looked. She had eleven birthdays with her mother before a creature had taken her and the girl had wandered the forest alone. Those had been long days and nights, hungry ones too. Then she met the man. She had been afraid of him at first. His long beard with silver etched into it. His dark eyes and skin were a contrast to her own. She had followed him in the forest for two days before hunger had forced her to his side. He had never been kind like her mother, but he was steady and they never went hungry for too long.
“We better move,” he said.
“But in the rain, we won’t hear the creatures.”
The man looked down at her and rubbed a hand over his beard and face, “If we stay here too long it will pick up on our scent. Especially with one so close.”
The girl nodded and put her green pack on her back. The man was always right. The girl looked up into the man’s face and did her best to look brave. He nodded to her and they left the overhang and dipped into the rain.
by submission | Aug 11, 2023 | Story |
Author: Sean MacKendrick
Ava touched the seam where Ethan’s robotic foot joined his shin. She stared up at her grandfather in awe. “Can you feel anything with it?”
Ethan forced a smile on his face. “Some basic sensory input. It helps me walk better when I can feel the ground.”
“You’ve had it for a long time.”
“Ever since the war. I got this upgrade after my very first tour out.”
“I bet it hurt a lot.”
“It hurt at the time.” Ethan rubbed the scar over his eyebrow, where they dampened his ability to process pain. “Not so much now.”
Ava ran her finger down the smooth carbon alloy of Ethan’s thumb. “Probably pretty scary, though.
Ethan massaged the tiny pucker on the back of his neck, where they went in to ablate his fear response. “A little.”
“They say soldiers came back changed from the war because it was so scary.”
“Who says that?”
“I don’t remember. Someone on TV.”
“Well, that someone should learn his facts.” Ethan adjusted his posture to take some of the pressure off the pneumatics supporting his lumbar vertebrae. “I’m the same man who signed up all those years ago.”
“But why did you sign up? Didn’t you know it was going to be so dangerous?”
“I knew. But I wanted to help make the world safer for people like you and your mom.”
Ava rested her chin on Ethan’s rebuilt knee. “We heard in history class about some of the war crimes they charged the leaders with, afterward. I hope they didn’t make you do bad things.”
Ethan pressed his knuckles against the furrow on his sternum, where a grieving father failed to pierce his heart. He said nothing.
“Maggie’s granddad was in the war, too. She says he can’t sleep at night sometimes, because of his memories.”
Ethan rubbed the scar behind his ear where they removed his empathy. “I sleep all right.”
by submission | Aug 10, 2023 | Story |
Author: Dave Ludford
Had he been walking at a faster pace or with any real sense of purpose Ryan Jennings would have missed it completely. Scuffing the forest floor aimlessly however with first one foot then the other, his meanderings revealed something that he at first thought was some kind of weird seed or pod that had been covered by a small pile of dry autumn leaves. He stooped to pick it up: it was approximately the size of a peach stone, metallic blue-gray in color and felt cold to the touch. His curiosity was further piqued as it seemed to be breathing, pulsing as it was with a tiny amount of energy. He held it between thumb and forefinger and brought it closer to his eye, the better to examine it more closely. It began to pulse more intensely.
It was at that point he felt a sharp pain in his finger, like someone had jabbed his skin with a needle. Uttering a mild expletive he instinctively- and with more than a hint of panic- tried to shake it off but it clung resolutely to his finger. He flicked at it with the fingers of his other hand but it still wouldn’t budge. It was firmly anchored.
“I’ll be damned…first you sting me, now you won’t let go!”
The pain he’d felt soon subsided and Jennings began to feel a peace and calm he’d not felt for a long time flow slowly through his body, overcoming him and diminishing the worries and anxieties that had recently plagued him. Soft static crackled in his head like a mistuned radio and he felt instantly certain the pod was attempting to communicate with him in a language he couldn’t recognize but which, on a far deeper level, he understood perfectly. He intuitively felt the meaning rather than understanding individual words strung into a narrative. There were images, too, flickering like early silent movies; a jumble of images that at first didn’t make sense. It was as if the narrative and images were out of sync and it took several minutes for the two to become reconciled. When they did, and Jennings slowly began to understand what was being communicated to him, he felt deep, overwhelming emotion.
“Oh jeez, this is just mind-blowing,” he whispered.
The pod referred to itself as ‘refugee intelligence’ which had been distilled into small vessels, one of which Jennings had discovered and which he now held. It had been one of a dozen, containing as they did the entirely preserved language, culture, science and philosophy of an advanced race whose planet- many millions of light years from earth- had been almost entirely destroyed by a civil war of attrition that had lasted for several centuries. The pods were the only means to ensure that the intelligence would survive and could be shared with other cultures. The vessels had been launched and flung to various far corners of the universe, trusting to luck they’d find host planets that would be welcoming, would tap into and benefit from a vast, immeasurable source of knowledge.
They hadn’t. They’d been thought of as a plague or pestilence and destroyed; contact with the others had been lost completely. The one Jennings held was the last of its kind and the fate of the intelligence was literally in his hands. The choice was simple: crush it and destroy it forever, or let the pod detach itself and share its erudition.
Jennings showed no hesitation. He raised his hand and opened his palm.
