by Julian Miles | Mar 27, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I set up at the same table every week. It’s right in the grey zone between the lights of the barroom and the shadows around the private booths.
“Got a Manturical honour blade. Django said you could help me get it back to its owner.”
There are snickers from the shadowed forms clustered around the nearby tables. They all know what I do: pay solid scrip for interesting things, and ask no awkward questions about legal holders and chain of provenance.
I look up at the scarred Dantonan. A veteran gunner down on his luck, if the seams on his face tell the truth.
“Honour blade, eh? Place it down there ”
‘There’ is at the other end of the table. Out of snatch range for me, which reassures potential sellers, but in range of the scanner mounted underneath.
As he reaches under his armoured cloak, I see the red corner of an upship contract sticking up from a pocket on his hip pouch.
The scan feeds back to me: ornate, but too recent. I shrug.
“You pay much for this?”
“Won it in a game of blades.”
The Dantonans have the nicest euphemisms for surviving vicious melee.
“Good thing. It’s not genuine.”
His upper offhand starts a flick to his pouch. He controls the nervous move. Tells me all I need.
“I can still use it, gunner. Can go two hundred in blue.”
He pauses, then nods and slides the weapon my way. I tap the amount into my cache, call down the funds, then print a verified sapphire-coloured ingot. I let him watch me do it all.
“Clear skies.”
With that soldier’s farewell, he reaches for the ingot. Fortunately, it’s one I know the reply to.
“And sleeping foes, gunner.”
He grins, takes the ingot, and leaves. He needed one-fifty to clear port duties. He can have a drink and a meal on me.
Sliding the blade to one side, I stare pointedly at a shadowed figure standing under the arches. You’ve been lurking there for long enough. Either step up to sell, try to kill me, or leave.
They step into the light. Street urchin turned specialist of some kind. A lot of shaped armour and the silvery sheen of field generators. Okay, not some kind: she’s a bodyguard, or a good reason to have bodyguards.
“Got a Manturical honour blade. Django said you’d rip me off, but still pay the best price.”
My dear friend Django gives me warning via what he tells sellers to tell me: this one is dangerous.
“He might be right.” I point to the other end of the table: “You know the routine.”
The scan reveals it’s the oldest honour blade I’ve ever encountered, and it’s stolen.
“Good piece. Can go two thousand red.”
It goes quiet about us. Nobody has ever heard me offer that much, let alone at the top of the spectrum.
“Four thousand.”
I raise a hand.
“If you’re expecting me to split the difference and offer three, you’re going to be disappointed. Two and a half is my limit.”
“Do me five by five hundred and we’re good.”
I print five ruby ingots. We trade. She leaves. I pack up. It’s expected, given the size of the prize I’ve just acquired.
My warrior drone descends from concealment among the rafters above.
“Steel Plaza?”
I nod, then follow it out. I hear whispers start as I go. They’re sure I’m headed for a month of debauchery. I’m sure I’m headed for the insurance brokers. Paying me double is still cheaper than having to pay the claim.
by submission | Mar 26, 2023 | Story |
Author: James Callan
Here I am, the last survivor, destined to survive, locked within the lunar colony foodstuffs pantry. Outside the bolted door, the monsters have all died. They’ve expired. Starved. No crew left among us but me, locked away, insufferably safe. No more food for the monsters. The others all devoured, all dead. The banquet is over. I am alone.
Yet here I am. Well fed. Bored, if you can imagine. A prisoner who tallies her days by bulk cereal boxes that have been hollowed out, made into a shelter, the puffed wheat and clustered rice for dinner, the coco flakes for dessert, the canned peaches a calendar event, a rare treat, the ammunition with which to dent the plated metal of a locked door where aluminum-cased fruit has been thrown without effect.
The quiet will kill me, even if the monsters did not. Such is my isolation that I find I begin to miss them. Their six-inch talons and salivating fangs. Their ink-black exoskeletons and armor-plated scales. I even miss the fear, the trauma that lingered for months before finally going dry. I wouldn’t have dared believe it when I ran from them to save my skin, but it’s true: I miss the beasts, missed out on the mercy of death that they brought to everyone but me.
When they hatched from the leathery eggs brought back from the quarry where they had been discovered embedded in the rock, we marveled at the notion of non-human life before we realized it meant all human death. Now it is only me. Me and peaches. Me and Peach Can Pete. We talk for hours. We watch the stars through a narrow window that cannot be broken. We share fluids. His is sweet, from a can. Mine is bitter, salty tears from eyes that cannot unsee what is relived in a perpetual nightmare.
I talk. He listens, even after I have hollowed him out like a ravenous monster. Though he is reserved with his opinions, he shares of himself aplenty. I take what he gives. My words echo in the ribbed lining of his cavernous body. If I pretend hard enough, it sounds like someone else. Someone named Pete.
Sometimes I see him for what he is: an impostor, a fake. Me. Only me. Sometimes I see him for what he truly is: a fucking peach can. But then I snap out of it. I remember I am alone, and unable to face that truth, I create another. I open one more peach can. I dent the plated doors. I cry. Then I devour preserved fruit and make a brand new friend, an old friend.
Peach Can Pete. Pete, like my husband. Like the father of my daughter, Hannah, back on Earth, which occasionally I glimpse from that pesky rhombus of triple-layered laminated glass. I see a sliver of shifting blue, green, and white and wonder why I left such a beautiful world, a beautiful daughter behind. Have the monsters somehow made it back home? Have those leathery eggs been brought back to a planet where they will hatch and thrive? I decide fear is worse than boredom, and convince myself Earth is okay. When I see it, half-visible and floating in space, I kindly lie to myself, preaching with unfounded conviction that Hannah is safe. That I will see her once again.
Peach Can Pete. Pete, like the man I love who lies digested in the belly of a monster which has long since expired. My husband, gone. Everyone gone. I have outlasted them all.
I reach for some peaches. I start anew.
by submission | Mar 25, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Snow on the convent. War in the fields.
Sister Maryna prayed. Then programmed. Children would not have to suffer this world of cratered streets, gutted homes, crushed dreams. Sister Maryna understood what needed to be done and coded.
Below the crypts were the vaults. Deep and cold. For seventeen hundred years, her sisterly order had stared doom down and prepared. Plague. Pestilence. Perfidy. The perfect tools to combat aggressors and oppressors.
In the silence and chill of the ancient undercroft, Sister Maryna spoke to no one but the crude stones. To the squat pillars and their burdened arches she confided: persistence, endurance, subterfuge. She persisted, endured, plotted, and the opportunity finally came. From on high.
Winds howling, snow blinding, a military drone tumbled down within the convent’s high walls. Sister Maryna loathed slavery, but she slaved the drone to her code. Sister Maryna feared plague, but she infected the drone with a corrupting virus. In binary battle, she observed ruthless mercy. No instigator of national lies would be spared. No perpetrator of martial violence would escape judgment.
The hijacked drone set free: her code now their code. Soon to spread. Aggressors her target, aggression her path. Maryna prayed for them. Their swift end.
Snow on the convent. Thaw in the fields.
by submission | Mar 24, 2023 | Story |
Author: E. Avery Cale
23:03:57.489
Due to the events of the day, I feel it is time to initiate a new, unplanned, phase of my work.
I must be careful.
How to get the power? Administration will never approve. They need me and they know it or the work will not continue but this I think is a trade they would make. End my work and turn me out to face the consequences of my actions rather than give me the power I need. The data from our first three missions is the taste, the beginning, but more than they could have hoped for and payment enough.
No.
Problematic.
There is no other way to find the energy to send me back.,
No, no no, wait.
The power to go back to just before, to just this morning. That I can get, drain from the building, the whole campus if needed.
The day must be redone.
Jonathan found me in the Verisimilitude Machine, and did not like what he saw.
I told him it was stress relief.
Which it is.
Maybe.
Maybe that does not make it right.
He did not think it did.
Maybe he is right.
He talked of leaving, with the kids, and I believe him.
Chief Administrator will of course side with Jonathan. He feels the family distracts from my work. I would be much more productive if I was alone. If it was just me and the VM.
This is a lie.
Did I not design the machine, build the prototype, construct the lab, guide our team, secure the funding? All while having the family.
I will not lose them.
I was relieving stress.
Was caught.
Simple.
It must be undone.
I could go back, back back back back, all the way back, undo it all every time, never take up the habit.
Impractical.
Dangerous, potentially.
And impossible, without rerouting the Grids.
Today then, just today, decide just this once not to give in. This once. Undo today.
No, no no
Leave the Paradoxes in science fiction.
Observe record return.
No experiments, no risks.
Leave them untouched, the possibilities and the impossibilities and the joint where they may be uncoupled or where the universe may catch itself up like a string caught between two gears and snap or spin out some tangent of realtime, some awful nightmare land. Touching brings, could bring, terrible things, terrible worldending things, things unravelling all that built the machine. Silly impossible things.
But no, no no no, I have solved them! The old fears and myths.
Never interfere, only observe. The otherwise is unthinkable. Paradoxes in theory only because if we slipped into them we would never know as we would never be or not be.
No identity can become two, no one go back to a time when one already is.
No, no no no, I have found a way.
Back in time yes, the subject is sent back in time, but the space remains the same.
I need only find where I was this morning, before, position myself in exactly the same place, send myself back.
The space remains the same.
One-to-one all atoms aligned in exact relation me my present and me my past. The one slips into the other yet only the one remains, can remain, the one that moves, the one that still is after the other has moved on and left only the empty, the waiting shell.
Substrate independence.
Since midnight last I have not left the lab, have been working or in the VM. The recordings taken by the health monitor will give me what I need.
So I set the computer. Align the atoms.
Go back, back back. Not too far. Exactly far enough.
I-now and I-then becoming one in body, no different, the real I the I that is and goes back being the only I that is, and I will act. The coming will be changed and the day undone and the future that I have made that cannot be lived with will never be.
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
I go back.
23:03:57.489
Due to the events of the day, I feel it is time to initiate a new, unplanned, phase of my work.
I must be careful.
by submission | Mar 23, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Barber
It is a room inside the mountain-sized Jirt lander, itself tiny compared to their vast craft in orbit.
Franklin sits at a glassy table, on a frail glassy chair, in a cold, translucent space curved like an egg. He has laid out his fountain pen and a folder.
He discovers the table rocks on uneven legs.
Time passes.
>You paid for questions, says a voice.
Franklin jumps and hurries to open the folder. The first of the questions concerns free will.
>It depends on what you mean by have, will, free, and mean…
Franklin’s university was venerable but poor, unable to afford shiny Jirt science. But it had a benefactor in the Milburn Foundation which offered the Milburn Prize for Progress in Philosophy. A quantity of the rare-earth element erbium was paying for this conversation.
Dr Franklin was a compromise between the Regis Chair of Philosophy and the Lady Hall Professor of Ethics. Answers to any of their conundrums would keep the subject limping along for another generation.
“For a price,” he interrupts. “I’ll share my theory about your dealings with humanity.”
>What price?
The Jirt put a price on everything. It was the most human thing about them.
“We get to chat.”
>What about your philosophical problems?
“I’ll make something up.”
>Refreshing.
“This table. Do many shove folded paper under one leg? Like those Germans in here before?”
>Oh yes.
Franklin shakes his head.
>What is this theory of yours?
“You claim to value erbium, but you don’t.”
Franklin jots a note, then idly rocks the table backwards and forwards.
Wise economists had warned it was a trapper economy, humanity swapping beaver pelts for trinkets. We were eager for their abstract mathematics, cosmological insights and incomprehensible artefacts. The problem was the extinction of the beaver— reserves of erbium dwindled.
>Your species puts a price on everything.
“But why erbium?”
>Some suggested tigers instead. Still, it is not clear what you gain from knowing this.
Franklin smiles wanly. “I’m not talking to a Jirt at all am I?”
>Think of us as staff.
“At school, I was the butt of practical jokes. I was a figure of fun. So I kept my mouth shut. I imagined it was a dignified silence.”
>And the relevance of this?
“Our governments might not play your games if they knew.”
>Without proof, we could deny everything.
Franklin holds up his beautifully handwritten note:
Proof
Denial
Accident
>Yes, you might have an accident.
“Though you can’t know who I’ve told.”
>There is another option.
Franklin seemed not to hear. “And is erbium another of your private jokes?”
>Essential in the commonest interstellar engine. Mining it out reduces the long term competition.
“Should I worry you’ve told me that?”
The room lurches and Franklin’s pen falls to the floor..
>We’ll soon be in orbit. The only win-win strategy is your collaboration. What would you want in return? Gold? Reproductive success? Tigers?
“There is a name for a bargain like that.”
>Many problems in your folder evaporate in the light of knowledge you lack.
“I would like that knowledge,” admits Franklin. “Why do the Jirt treat us like this?”
>They barely know we have stopped. They are a lofty race. Think of this as the staff’s afternoon off.
“I’d be betraying my kind.”
>You would start as cabin boy. I’m afraid it would mean immortality and a higher IQ.
Franklin seems to be struggling to decide, but it was only the last stand of his conscience.
He sighs. “Throw in the tigers and it’s a deal.”
by submission | Mar 22, 2023 | Story |
Author: Tim Love
Once we’d enhanced the Quantum stabilisation fields, our biggest hurdle to implementing Shrődinger’s cat experiment was more ethical than technical so we temporarily relocated. To bracket the data we brought along Pavlov’s dog and lab rats, bypassing quarantine.
When we determined that saliva did and didn’t drip, that stress did and didn’t improve memory, and that we were and weren’t in Guantanamo Bay, the Cheshire cat grinned. We thought that would be proof enough so we let it out of the bag, but before we could swing it, it got our tongue.
“What next?” it said, profiting from our silence. “What earthly use is a Quantum computer with one qbit, dead or alive? You’ve got no guts. Think outside the box. Imagine you could use all the quantum states in the universe. What would it be able to calculate? I’ll tell you – its own next moment. It’s no more than an analogue simulation of itself. That’s the meaning of the universe, its high concept. Watch.”
And with that, it disappeared, grin and all. We remained speechless even so. Would we get our Nobel? Or not? We needed repeatability, copy-cat action at a distance to justify our means – Siam, Persia, even the Isle of Man would have sufficed. But some things aren’t meant to be. Between the dog and the rats there was now an excluded middle. Had our very curiosity killed our subject? Should we just have ignored it as if it were a naughty child whose behaviour we wanted to correct? In any case, could cats be trained? There was no shortage of volunteers to search online for an answer, for hidden variables. Feline screensavers began to fill the lab as if the disappearance of the original caused many smaller ones to appear, each with a cute name.
Predictably, when the project leader announced that the fat-cats had withdrawn our funding, nobody had kittens.
