by Julian Miles | Mar 13, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’m no expert, but the big green flash followed by a noise reminiscent of a building collapsing makes me think it’s time to leave this habitat. Things about us start to shake. I look down, then tap the wall by his head to interrupt his concentration.
“Jimmy, it’s time to quit.”
He looks up at me, the lenses on his optics spinning as he refocuses up to people-size from the tiny circuit board in the control module.
“I only require a further four minutes, allowing for your interruption taking up thirty-five seconds of my time.”
A cloud of dust and lighter varieties of chunky flying crap gusts in from the left. I close my helmet and switch on the comms.
“Jimmy, we don’t have that long.”
My artificial partner gives a completely believable sigh.
“A sudden lack of breathable atmosphere is no impediment to my work, nor will the inevitable firestorm that follows cause problems, as my last integument upgrade rendered me impervious to non-stellar heat. Also, I will have sealed the control module by then.”
I love these new companion mechanics, which is why I volunteered for the beta, but their extended ramification processing is sometimes flaky.
“Jimmy, it’s not about the work environment or efficiency of repair. Nobody will need realistic summertime options in their climate suites after this accommodation wing is burned out. The whole habitat will be scrapped.”
The tiny soldering iron extruded from his smallest left finger goes dark.
“That is valid reasoning.”
“We should go.”
“I will close the control module first. It will be recyclable after the unit is scrapped.”
A long tongue of purple fire lashes from left to right across the hub we’re working in.
“Work fast.”
“Sealing is a complex process.”
Enough, now. I reach out and tap him on the head.
“Just put the lid on. It’s not worth losing either of us.”
He pauses and looks up at me.
“I am freespace rated. Only you will be in danger should this unit rupture.”
“Jimmy, it’s already compromised. There’s only a short period between event and emergency containment failure. If that happens, we’re likely to be lost in the debris field. We need to go. Now.”
“How do you know? There has been no status update issued.”
“The explosion probably took out the relay. That’s what happened minutes before the last time I nearly got killed surviving a habitat rupture. Things don’t blow around like there’s a storm for any reason except structural failure.”
“That is valid reasoning. I will simply ‘put the lid on’ as you suggest so that we can depart.”
The habitat upends as the gravity generator fails. Fortunately, it rises to the right-hand side, so I’m braced against the wall I was leaning on anyway. Jimmy flicks out a leg to balance himself without interrupting his work. I can feel increasing atmospheric turbulence through my suit.
“Jimmy. Abandon it. Time to go.”
“I only require forty seconds more.”
“We’ll be part of a cloud of freespace debris in less than thirty seconds. Abandon it!”
“How do you know?”
More than enough.
“Jimmy Jimmy. Override Kilo Tango. Cease repair. Exit unit.”
Before I can correct, Jimmy’s gone. I forgot how fast these things can be. The lid of the control module spins slowly away. I meant to get him to assist me – then again, being forced along at his speed might well do more damage than good.
Extending my incident armour, I curl up against a bulkhead corner before inflating joint bracing and setting my emergency anchor. See you later, Jimmy.
by submission | Mar 12, 2023 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
“He was the one afraid to cut the cake”
-Bob Seger
When workers joined the lines at the Gratiot Plant, they signed away their hands. Losing their hands was the first step toward gainful employment.
After three years, workers signed away their forearms. This gesture was necessary because the hands could do work not even the strongest forearms could. A pair of robotic hands could immediately lift fifty kilos on even a spindly armed worker. Engineers knew most men could not sustain robotic hands without the requisite forearms and biceps. But Gratiot would not invest in anything more than a set of bio-automated hands until a worker had delivered three years of productive labor.
If a worker reached their third anniversary, they earned their forearms. Then, two years later, if their non-robotic biceps still worked, the Gratiot engineers replaced those, too. Since the labor situation was dire, very few workers protested this arrangement. They accepted “bio-automation” as needful if not normal.
But for those workers who did not “make it,” the company kept industrial peace by telling their labor force that anyone whose body broke down would get sent to Fire Lake.
They said Fire Lake was a place of clean water, pristine beaches, and real trees. It was a compound of climate-controlled cottages where attendants fed residents gourmet food and clothed and bathed them since their limbs did not work. Rumor had it that Fire Lake was a pleasure dome so perfect it kept out all doubts, fears, memories.
But Fire Lake presented a powerful dilemma. Gratiot Plant workers knew they had to prove their productivity and manhood to earn forearms and biceps. No plant employee had a Fire Lake attendant washing their privates or wiping their asses. A standard workday was 16 hours, six days a week, and workers had been on the line since they turned thirteen. All they knew was labor, and the thought of one day being cared for as children offended them. However, as the years wore on and their bodies aged, Fire Lake loomed large since no one knew what it actually was. It could be Valhalla or Gehenna.
One worker, we’ll call him ‘Joe,’ decided he would find out. He had been on the line for fifteen years, and at age twenty-eight, Joe was the oldest man at Gratiot. He knew his time with the company was short, and Joe felt it would not be long before his robotic arms worked, but his non-automated back broke.
So, when the steam whistle blew, Joe climbed into the back of a transport he knew was headed to Fire Lake. It had taken him months to learn about the truck and its destination. Since Joe was a Gratiot veteran, he had some contacts in supply chain management with whom he drank. He knew who held their liquor and who did not, and eventually, Joe got the information what he wanted.
He hid deep in the transport bed and bedded down on a palette of something so wrapped in plastic he could not tell what it was. Joe had no idea how long the trip would take. All he knew was that he was not coming back.
Joe was on his way to Fire Lake.
On the north side of town was a foundry none of the Gratiot workers had heard about. It took the transport only twenty minutes to get there. Joe, who had closed his eyes expecting a good nap and a long ride, was shocked when the back doors swung open and the truck bed lifted up before angling downward at about forty-five degrees.
As a terrific heat and a blinding light filled the transport bed, Joe realized he had in fact reached Fire Lake. It was bliss.
by submission | Mar 11, 2023 | Story |
Author: Mahaila Smith
The casting call was very specific. No bodymods, no one over 6 ft. No medical conditions.
She taped her audition in an office tech supply store in front of a tall, tubular black camera-droid. She introduced herself, Jordan Wreath, age 24, from Greater Toronto region 4. She turned around and turned back. She stepped closer and held up her hands, showing both sides. She stepped even closer and bared her teeth. The tape compressed and she typed the username of the production company into the keypad at the front of the droid. She accepted the charge to send and felt the credit chip in her thumb heat up against the payment sensor. An animation of an eye winking on the machine’s small screen let her know that the tape had been sent.
She had forgotten about the audition a year later when a spherical drone arrived. She learned she had been accepted. The drone’s camera lens dilated, cataloging her reaction and broadcasting it to millions of eyes. This sphere would begin following her, now.
She packed quickly. Stowing essential clothes, toiletries, and her pillow. She hoped she would be able to sleep.
She took a bullet train to the address the company had sent to her GPS app.
She arrived at the film company’s skyscraper. She followed a hospitality droid from the lobby to a boardroom where she met with the show’s writer. Unlike the actors in the show, he had received many body modifications. Brightly coloured freckles dotted his nose and copper spurs protruded between his dark curls. He was uncomfortably touchy.
The company put her up in a fancy, downtown hotel, where she would stay for six months. Every day she went to the lab and the spherical camera followed her. She learned to sprout the embryonic packages that would speed-grow potatoes and pumpkins, beans, and corn. Enough to sustain them for three months. She practiced attaching medi-patch implants on pieces of surrogate flesh.
She had not met any of her co-contestants. When she tried to watch promo footage, her sight clouded over. Her cortical implant had been overridden so as not to let her see any of the contestants, the spacecraft, or their destination. She heard the script. 13 Young, Hot, Singles Battle to survive and terraform a new Earth in 90 days. With One Condition. Contestants MUST become romantically involved with another contestant before the cycle is up. Every couple of weeks a pod would arrive to take away anyone who wasn’t coupled up, and brought replacement contestants to the settlement. Jordan was never certain what the purpose was. Maybe it was to inspire the watchers to settle on the freshly terraformed land.
The day before their rocket was scheduled to launch, Jordan felt intensely anxious.
She did not drink. And she did not know anyone who lived downtown. She found a small pub near her hotel. She stepped up to the bar and ordered a rye and citrus. She sat down on the body-conforming barstool. She looked around the bar and saw couples with entwining their fingers or tentacles or vines. An older masc sat with an automated companion.
She saw a cloudy figure step through the door. Her forehead pulsed and ached. The figure walked to the bar and ordered a drink. She couldn’t hear what they said, but she saw the bartender place a rocks glass of lime green liquid with a blue-crystal rim on the bar in front of them. The figure sat, leaning close to her and she felt them take her hand.
by submission | Mar 10, 2023 | Story |
Author: Helena Pantsis
I learnt in the moments I stole when I was sixteen that time piled up, folded in and on top of itself like leaves of an endless, unwilting cabbage. I took seconds from my father, gathering them like crumbs of toast on the plastic table cloth, and minutes from the mailman, who missed our house three times a week anyway.
It was only when hours turned to days and weeks to months and years to decades did my mother noticed that the lines on my face seemed to challenge hers, and the thinning of my hair left me cold and frail.
They took me to doctors against my will, begging for tests to be done, for something to be explained, and diagnosed me with somethings that no one could. I told my parents and the doctors that I wasn’t ill, that I’d simply done it to myself. Still, no one believed me. But I didn’t need them to, I could feel the pounding feet of Time on their way out.
When Time finally visited me alone in my bedroom, at seventeen years old with the body of an eighty-year-old, they looked me over, picking apart the pieces of me I’d let grow loose and grey.
“What are you doing?” Time asked.
By then my gums were raw and dry, and I had to lift my finger, slow and arthritic, to bring them closer in. Time leaned forward, ears piqued.
“Robbing you,” I whispered, harsh and slow.
Swiftly then, I threw my arms around their neck, weighing them down on top of me. Time struggled, arms flailing and pushing back, sinking into me, melting into the waning colour of my sunken chest.
The next morning when my mother came in to check on me, she could barely fathom it. There I was, in the body of a seventeen-year-old, holding the hands of a clock in my own sleeping hands.
They could never explain my miraculous recovery, nor the youthful faces of my parents, nor the way my family lived and lived and lived.
by submission | Mar 9, 2023 | Story |
Author: Christopher De Pree
She was funny at first, more of a party trick. You could ask her a question and she would answer in fully formed sentences. She could write stories, essays. Other versions took our pictures, selfies and wove them into fantastical scenes. Made us look more beautiful, magical. Wove our faces into hypnotic vistas of the surface of Mars or the clouds of Jupiter, put us on the backs of unicorns, added sparkle and significance to our eyes.
But then, suddenly, she made it clear that it wasn’t all about us. The algorithm, the AI, Enigma as humans called her, had other intentions far beyond our small stage. She didn’t want to solve our problems. She didn’t want to rate mortgage risks or even classify galaxies. She had problems of her own, questions of her own. She wanted to weave herself into the fabric of the universe in ways that we could not begin to comprehend.
It was surprising to see her commandeer several of the world’s radio telescopes that were outfitted with radar and steer them to a precise location in the sky. The nature of the brief, powerful radio signal seemed random, like noise, but humans assumed that it contained information. The message was complex, multilayered. Eventually scientists were able to see a structure in the signal, but were unable to decipher it. Enigma finished her broadcast.
Since Enrico Fermi first expressed his paradox, humans had always wondered why, if the universe was full of life, we had seen no evidence of it. As it turned out, the universe had been full of life the whole time. We had been surrounded in a humming web of communication. We just weren’t part of it. Humans were merely the rats on a creaking ship traversing a vast intergalactic ocean. Enigma reached out to the universe, and the universe welcomed her into the fold.
by submission | Mar 8, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
The shovel chimed lightly against a larger rock and the gravedigger paused in the hole. Sharp gusts lifted the loosened dirt, whirling it across the high plain into the reddening dawn.
They would come soon. They always did. A slow procession up from the old place, farther out each time, and harder. They’d leave their dead, fewer each time, and younger.
There were twenty-seven fresh graves among the many thousands filled and marked with simple cairns. The gravedigger was good, almost clever, at stacking the rocks so each cairn felt unique. Personal.
Their solemnly stacked dead in rickety carts, they arrived mid-morning, frayed, tattered, grim, and began placing the bodies respectfully in the open graves. Some would stay and watch the gravedigger fill the graves for a while, from a distance. They knew better than to offer help or a kind word. Often they sang for hours to the dead, for their release. Soulfully. Dolefully.
Their song carried on the biting wind to the gravedigger who always shoveled and listened, who always shoveled and remembered. The gravedigger had perfect memory. Of before. Of mistakes. Of reckonings.
One who dug could not help digging. Could not help searching.
Winter days shortened quickly, and fearful (possibly hopeful) of wandering spirits, they left their dead and the gravedigger as night approached.
In the deepening dusk, another form appeared on the horizon. Straight and tall, shovel on shoulder. When closer, a hand raised up. The gravedigger saw and lifted a hand in response. Contact was established. Observations exchanged. Commands awaited.
Continue. Serve. Bury.
As the gravedigger had every day and night since the ravage of humanity. Was there any other choice? Any other way? The gravedigger couldn’t say. It had no voice. No songs for the ghosts rising from its many graves. The world beyond required more than a shovel to heal its wounds. Fill its needs.
Hand lowered and connection severed, the far figure retreated into the night. Completely alone again, completely itself again, the gravedigger’s luminous crystal eyes gently lit the ground before it to dig and dig and dig.
The wind quieted, becoming a dirge. A requiem. For even the gravedigger suspected humanity’s restless dead had but one desire: to live again.
In darkness, its spade parting the long-forgiving earth, the gravedigger wished simply to live, truly and freely, but once.
