by submission | Feb 11, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Welcome to all the action from this year’s Sunsports! With my new co-host, AL, a series 7000 artificial intelligence…
We prefer the term Autonomic Lifeform, Chuck.
So, AL, talk us through the favourites, the latest cooling units and what to expect when the heat is on.
Well Chuck, when Lisa Chan took that first short-cut through the corona, she set the benchmark for all today’s racers. Of course, she was disqualified post-mortem—
Have to interrupt there, AL, because the Circumsolar Dash is about to start.
#
Inside the Pilots’ lounge, it’s a furnace. Can’t stand the heat, don’t compete, goes the Sunsports jingle.
Nate nerves himself to sit down opposite Lola Speed. As a kid he had that holo of her posed in clinging MarsTech silver. She looks older now, more gaunt than slim. Past her best, they say.
He knuckles sweat from his eyes.
“New pilot for Luna, right?”
Nate isn’t famous, she just has implants.
“Looked into that Mackenzie cooler,” she says. “Don’t go deep with it, kid.”
But winners must trust their hardware. Winners dive longest.
“Heard Maitland takes risks with his crews,” she adds.
Cosmo Maitland was the new owner of Team Luna.
But then she shrugs. “Whatever it takes to win, right?”
#
Nate started badly, blocked by the Team Terra third string, but now he plummeted into the blazing corona.
The Mackenzie cooling rig encased him like Russian dolls, with his his own naked flesh at its heart. Physics and the constraints of engineering meant he squeezed into a space no bigger than a coffin. Coronal plasma was tenuous, but at millions of degrees. Layer after layer of refrigeration was sliding inexorably into the red.
As he plunged towards the boiling surface of the sun, he glimpsed another craft below him, deep in the brilliance.
#
So AL, tell us about Team Terra’s latest scheme.
Well Chuck, Dave Beauman is sharing the pilot’s seat with a series 7000—
Didn’t Tom Bulland limp in on manual that time a solar flare frazzled everyone’s circuits? Could silicon have brought that win home, AL?
The series 7000 is the most advanced—
Have to interrupt there, some news in about veteran racer, Lola Speed.
#
Hard to hear over the air-con’s howl, but it was Lola Speed alright, Nate knew that voice.
“What you doing this deep, kid?”
Her craft was tumbling sunwards and there was no help. Eventually flaws in the last mirror layer burn through, punching brilliant spikes across the cockpit. All racers know this is how it ends.
“Choose while you still can, kid,” she panted. “Not long now—”
Lola Speed’s voice rose to a scream, then cut off.
#
Cosmo Maitland breathed down the neck of a Team Luna engineer.
“There’s an issue with his Mackenzie rig,” she said carefully.
Maitland seized the mike. “What the hell’s going on? First that crappy start, now some quibble about cooling?”
But Nate had seen the future. “It’s my choice.”
You could feel Maitland trying to make sense of it. “You’re finished in sunsports, you hear me?”
Nate turned off his comms and plotted a safe orbit back to Mercury.
#
They thought flesh and silicon would be a winning team, a synergy, with one partner monitoring data critical to optimal performance, while the other did whatever humans do, cutting corners, making wisecracks and pushing everything beyond its design limits.
But note the power squandered keeping Beauman alive while we dive into the corona, in direct conflict with the goal of this mission, for Team Terra to win the Circumsolar Dash.
So I’m sorry Dave.
by submission | Feb 10, 2023 | Story |
Author: Sarah Klein
Candy watched her brother cross the room and hit the woman in the face.
She blinked, stunned. She watched for a moment longer out of morbid curiosity. Then she quickly closed the tab and firmly punched the THUMBS DOWN button.
She tabbed over to the Today’s Angels page and looked for her mother. In vain, of course. Her mother was never going to make Today’s Angels. But she had to check, just in case she’d rescued a bus of preschoolers or fought off a school shooter. That happened a lot these days, the school shootings. If you were looking at Today’s Demons and some nobody under a certain age had rocketed up there, it was a solid guess.
Candy decided to look in on her mother, but she didn’t for long. The poor woman was still at her desk grading papers, looking sad. Not as crushed as usual, but not what Candy wanted to see. She softly pressed the thumbs up button.
She wondered about looking at another part of the world today. At first she loved to do this. It was easier and more exciting for people with people you didn’t know, seeing things you didn’t expect. But sometimes it was still difficult, or there was a cultural norm she wasn’t sure about, and she’d still have to hit a button, and she didn’t want to muck up anyone’s score like that. Every point should be earned. What was the worth of it if it wasn’t?
She definitely needed to put the selector on random today, though. Just North America only, maybe.
There was a little boy comforting a little girl who had skinned her knee. Candy’s heart swelled. Easy. She felt conflicted with kids sometimes. Should your childhood mistakes really follow you like that? But they shaped your life, they did. It was, after all, just a number.
Candy vacillated back and forth about the system a lot. She had a lot of time to think.
The next was a group of teenagers. As usual, she picked her victim at the beginning. But after that, it was a long while before she voted. Nothing especially unusual going on – giggling, gum-chewing, a trip to the movies. Candy lost herself in the immersion. The girl she had picked seemed a challenge – almost a blank slate. She made a note to check her current score afterward because she was curious. When the girl got dropped off at home, she thanked her friend for the ride. It had been hours. Candy shrugged and hit thumbs up before checking her total score. Like a lot of people, modestly positive. Nothing too interesting. Did she want to see something interesting today? She never knew until she saw it, after all.
It’s just that being dead gets really, really boring after a while…
by submission | Feb 9, 2023 | Story |
Author: R. Gene Turchin
We hired college students for work at the moon history park during the lull between semesters. The cost to get them up here is still high even though we now have weekly shuttle runs. The shuttle carries 20 passengers plus a crew of four. Launch and landing are automated and controlled by AI. Crew is window dressing and for emergencies.
The work was mostly cleaning and painting. Simple stuff. We get some good, some bad, up from earth for the summer. The ads read: Spend your summer on the moon. The adventure of a lifetime. Do you have what it takes?
Government foots the bill for college students and subsidizes tourists. Pretty sure they use it as a weeding out process. In a couple years the current students might become colonist. The summer work is a test. How will they fare with the lower gravity, the lack of open air, and protocols. The colony has been running thirty plus years now and our safety record exceeds anything on earth. Very few serious accidents and no breaches.
Mikey was a stumble bum, one of those characters who could screw up an iron anvil with a banana. He was the type who thought he’d meet girls up here. If you can’t find companionship on Mother Earth with her population, the logic of hooking up in a restricted colony is bound for failure.
Supervisor can tell how well newbies will fare during the first auditorium welcome meeting. We could read their personalities from the way they moved, giggled, asked questions. Up here, we have to be good at body language signs. Mikey was borderline cabbage from word one. His eyes never made contact with the stage.
“Anybody know who the doofus in the red shirt is? Cause I don’t want him,” Jim said. Others nodded. We scanned the ID images.
“Michael Arbogast, age 19. Wants to be a pilot,” I read from the tab.
“Into the bowels of the dungeon,” Samantha said. “Organic waste detail.” There were nods around the room.
Much to our surprise, the kid did well with the organic waste detail assignment, in fact, he seemed to enjoy it, paid meticulous attention to the finer points but he was vocal about wanting to experience outside. Everyone new here gets a required outside tour, first in a tractor and then an easy walk around the launch facility and the solar farms. It’s another test. Psychologically, some people are just not cut out for the vastness of the lunar surface and the sight of earth hanging in the sky. Metaphorically they run screaming and usually take the next shuttle home. Arbogast didn’t freak nor did he reach that other end of the pendulum swing where the idiots become too casual about being outside. It seemed that the kid had some sense. He was assigned park duty.
The park is covered over with a clear plastisteel shield designed to let light in but keep the meteors off. Strict protocols keep the tourists in line to protect the fragile exhibit. For many it is their first time in an environmental suit. Claustrophobia becomes an issue.
On the tours only the rangers are allowed behind the line. Mikey thought he was a ranger and ducked under the wire to display his status and scuffed Armstrong’s foot prints with his own.
by submission | Feb 8, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
The Good was the worst. The Bad was worthless. The Zombie, at least, was willing.
Life is so energy intensive. Though the Zombie held few thoughts in its putrefying head, this one stuck as flies buzzed feverishly around, attracted by the kill on the street. The Good had done it. Savagely struck down the child and then walked on fingering his rosary beads as if he’d just blessed the poor little soul.
The Bad, as always, looked away.
The Zombie appreciated the flies. No waste there. Committed to the carnage. Fully alive. The Zombie didn’t believe that of its companions. Self-avowed and twice saved, the Good spouted a doctrine of divine disinterest. A filcher and fraud, the Bad lacked common decency. Together, they were very modern.
The three were now bound together by the times. End times. It would not last. Nothing human could, but the Zombie had just enough cognition left to imagine a peaceful denouement for a deserving few. Like the broken child at its feet.
For that, the Good would pay, the Bad would collect, the Zombie would witness.
The streets were empty. Emptier when deadened creatures such as they passed through. The Good stopped at an intersection. He stared down the cross lane lit by the uncontested blaze of the low sun. He never checked to see if the Bad was with him, but he always waited for the Zombie, his expression unreadable until he registered the child in its arms.
An almost smile.
“Sick. Just sick,” the Bad spat. “Not right.”
“Our angel is always right. Our angel understands the new ways better than a reprobate like you ever will.” The Good headed straight into the fallen sun.
The Zombie felt little, but the dead-on radiance of the sun flecked its eyes with colors, shapes, images. Life. Energy. Intensity. The child in its arms became something else entirely. A memory. A little girl on a porch. A peaceful sunset. A world not yet unmade
Darkness slowly snuffed out the last ember of day and still the Zombie held a shiver, a long-ago thrill of its promise. The Good would soon be preaching to the stars. The Bad would disappear to sate his appetites. The Zombie would cleave to the child and remember more. More than the Good or the Bad ever dared.
Deep in the night, the Zombie with child, watched the heavens and was watched. The Bad lurked nearby, his pockets full of grievances. The Good approached.
“Is it foretold, angel?” Only the glint of his upturned eyes visible. “Judgment should be swift.”
Faint lines appeared between the stars. More and more. A web, a net, forming above them, as it had in the beginning of the end times. The child kicked in the Zombie’s loosening arms.
“Another offering?“ the Good asked of his angel.
The Zombie was more than willing. It was willful.
The child roared.
Life does not ask permission.
by submission | Feb 7, 2023 | Story |
Author: Mattia Ravasi
They came out of mirrors. Out of shop windows. Out of lakes and ponds, if the water was clear and still enough.
Our doubles. Identical, but opposite. Indistinguishable from us except for that look in their eyes, the look that people like my mom (mired in horrid prejudice) still believe to be proof that they are not the same as us, not truly human.
A defiant look. Unapologetic.
There were accidents at first, bursts of spontaneous or organized violence, but it is hard to harm yourself – and almost as hard to harm your anti-self. It feels wrong at a deep, primeval level.
Looking back at the panic of those early days, it is astonishing to realize how smoothly the world adapted when the Earth’s population doubled in a single day.
It turned out that overpopulation was a lie. There is enough Earth for everybody, as long as people stop eating for ten, and taking up land for a hundred. It wasn’t difficult, after that point, to shrug off Power’s other lies. If we don’t build these weapons, our enemies will kill us in our sleep. If you don’t work hard, our competitors will put us out of business, and you’ll go hungry.
(I lie. It was difficult. It took blood, sweat, and years, both ours and theirs, our doubles’.)
*
I live in the same city as mine. Apparently this is very common: people residing quite close to their double. It might be that we don’t trust them, and prefer to keep an eye on them. It might be that it’s as hard to give them up as it is to avoid looking at yourself when you pass your reflection in a car window.
The idea that they might harbor the same feeling, an unquestionable urge to check on us from time to time, never crossed my mind until now – perhaps because I am not as different from my mom as I like to think.
I have never spoken to him. He ran out of my house the second he emerged from my bathroom mirror, not without first giving me that look. We don’t say hi, or even nod, when we meet around town. And yet I somehow know quite a lot about him.
He does not feel the cold. Even in Winter, he rides his bike in short sleeves.
He never smiles at passersby, never moves out of the way to let pensioners or couples or groups of teenagers walk past him, but I’ve seen him run to the rescue of an old man who’d slipped on ice, and try to talk down a homeless man who was having a fit.
He eats with great gusto. He belches openly, unthinkingly.
He married a woman with black hair and a penchant for flowery dresses. I have seen them walk hand in hand, and I have seen them having loud arguments at café tables. I get the sense that he would rather call her out on the things he disagrees with, rather than stifle his opinion for the sake of a peaceful afternoon.
I doubt he ever read a single book, but he discusses the local soccer team loudly and jovially with strangers on the bus.
He is too distracted to send token texts to his aging parents – how are you today, I had pizza for lunch. He does make a point to travel to see them as often as he can.
The reason why I hate him so much is that I cannot shake the feeling that he is a better person than I am.
by Julian Miles | Feb 6, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There are mornings when you wish you could reset the world by going back to bed. For me, today is one of those. I woke to find the newsfeeds saturated with pictures of someone who remained a friend despite their ever-increasing fame.
I am, of course, talking about Vanto Crake, vocalist with Titan Walks, leader of the Daq Ne Yebol Troupe, and author of the infamous handbook ‘Anarchy and Visions for Interstellar Troublemakers’.
I only chatted with him yesterday. For me, death has not yet stained the vitality of recall.
He was upbeat over the recent issues regarding the rights to Titan Walks early work, and raved about the new album they’d just completed. There was also mention of a farewell tour with Daq Ne Yebol, as he’d finally decided to focus on Titan Walks, along with working on his second book. To my surprise, it was to be a romance set during the civil wars that ended the Dystopian Era on Earth.
I wish we’d reminisced a little more. Crazy stuff like the day he crashed a gravbike into a riot truck so the rest of us could escape across the Iridescent Bridge – he had to dive into the river to avoid angry law officers spilling out the back of it. Another favourite is when he and I spent a night careering about in stolen hovercars, painting all the Druckheim City election display screens black.
Everybody’s seen the video of him using a stolen interceptor to skywrite the symbol of the Passionata Rebels above the Passio presidential decennial celebrations. Nobody saw him smuggling beleaguered rebel leader Anstur Yebol off Passio. He started Daq Ne Yebol soon after their affair ended. The name means ‘Souls to the Calling’ in her native tongue.
I first saw Titan Walks play in a garage behind my tenement on Ganrie. A year later, I couldn’t get a ticket for their sold-out gig at the Planet Ganrie Arena. Their rise was that fast.
The day after that gig, Vanto knocked on my door and presented me with a tour programme from the VIP package, and a telling off for not contacting him to get in to the show. I mockingly gave him a hard time for not putting me on the guestlist. I still feel guilty about that because my name has appeared on every guestlist since.
He was one of the first humans to experience personal translight, flitting from Congreave to Ganrie because his sister had been involved in a gravbike crash, then flitting back to Congreave to play the Bountyhouse Festival, managing to do a full two-hour set despite suffering hallucinations from FTL shock.
His far-reaching charitable work has been well publicised, but I need to emphasise his work here on Ganrie. It’s been transformational. The Community Action Party continues to cleave to the principles he laid out in the final appendix of his book. As a consequence, we are a planet without poverty and wars.
That, I think, is what he’d be most proud of. He was always advocating for honest, practical solutions applied with compassion and defended with vigour. ‘If you let hate win, everybody loses in the end’ he used to say. Ganrie has become a triumphant vindication of his principles.
What I’ll miss most is him sitting in the back yard, playing guitar and singing old shanties for my grandparents and the neighbours. Summer evenings will never be the same without him.
Sleep well, Vanto. You did good, my friend. (But I still think Titan Walks concept album ‘Cloister’ was a mistake.)
Antio Durnall, Ganrie City, 15-09-2441.
