by submission | Oct 16, 2022 | Story |
Author: Ken Poyner
The robot has seen his finger smashed by the iron press. His job is to slide uncoiled metal plates into place for the iron press to complete flattening them. But the press came down while the target was still being settled into its brackets. He has to report to the maintenance supervisor, suffer damage assessment, be queued for repair. The maintenance supervisor has seen this before. It is a regular fault. He could order a recalibration of production floor timing, ensure this stops happening. But he is an older model, and not all of his grievances have been zeroed out.
by submission | Oct 15, 2022 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
Look, dying on Mars is easy. Equipment failure, sudden illness, inability to follow the safety instructions, they can all lead to the same (you must excuse the phrase) dead end. Making something look like a genuine accident is tricky, but it’s doable, especially with practice.
Oh, that won’t do? Okay, I understand. The body might contain something it shouldn’t, like a microdot or a traceable enhancement. Or there needs to be some strategic ambiguity about their status for while, because other matters need to be cleared up. Hey, it happens, I get it. Oh, it’s the insurance policy? I see.
Well, you need to understand, evading the Watchers can be tricky. Ah, I thought you might suggest that, but getting to the people in the monitoring stations is never as easy as the sensies pretend. The folks there are regularly vetted; if they’re even remotely compromisable, they’re shunted elsewhere. Worse, they’re well paid, which makes bribery extremely expensive; and even then they might turn around and hand you in anyway. Too risky. You can end up having to dispose of multiple bodies to cover your trail, which is kind of meta and self-defeating.
But if you know where to look, there are blind spots in the surveillance nets, and as a last resort there are ways of getting electronics to fritz while avoiding the kind of critical system damage that gets a Response Team on your neck in five minutes flat.
So the real problem is getting rid of the body. You can’t bury it, because there’s no vegetation: cuts in the ground are really obvious. You can’t leave it out for scavengers, because there aren’t any. You can’t just abandon it a long way outside town, either, because there’s no oxygen out there, which means no microbes, which means the stiff just waits there failing to decompose until someone inevitably comes across it. Most inconvenient.
Getting it into the organic recycling plant is next to impossible, because the Powers That Be aren’t stupid. They keep a close eye on all the messiness that’s sent for processing; even corpses need the official paperwork before they’ll let the machines touch them. False paperwork, you say? There are no good forgers on Mars, my friend; it’s not one of the skills on the Wanted Immigrants list. Plus everything’s coded for scanning, and there’s no way to fake that.
But the right combination of industrial chemicals can dissolve a body, given time. No, I’m not telling you what that combination is; trade secret. Getting hold of the stuff isn’t easy, but that’s not your problem, is it? All you need to know is that it can be done safely and cleanly, with no comebacks.
So, from my point of view, we can do business; you’ll just need to tell me which piece of grit we’re removing from the well-oiled machinery of your life. Your wife? Ah, a classic. Almost as popular a choice as a lover.
Thank you for confirming that. Now, as you can see, this is a blaster. Just stand up and we’ll make our way slowly to the exit; no need to disturb the other drinkers. My colleague at the door will take you into custody. Conspiracy to murder, tut tut, very naughty; you’ll be wanting a lawyer. Yes, I’m a Watcher; yes, I’ve been recording all this. Now come along; fortunately for your better half, death in Marsport really is far harder to arrange that people realise.
by submission | Oct 14, 2022 | Story |
Author: Ross Field
“It’s time Mason”. His flip flops slapped down the hallways, they seemed as foreign to him as the hands holding his shackles and shoulders. Hands crawled all over his body as soon as they dropped him into the chair. Restraints were winched, electrodes connected and veins impaled. After the years and appeals he was here. There were men in suits and white coats examining him and their screens. He heard the end of a speech by one of the suited men to a gallery of well dressed spectators, “…..a paradigm shift for society”. As the orator nodded to a white coat a wailing began from behind him.
As it began, his eyes burned and dried. His brain remembered the story his grandfather had told him of how Native Americans had torn the eyelids of their prisoners and staked them to the ground staring into the sun. His mouth drowned in metallic taste. Then he was there, he saw them again, asleep and entangled in front of the fireplace in the half refurbished room. The familiar smells both swarmed into his nostrils and seeped out of his brain. He saw again the fireplace poker, the hammer and screwdriver. He cried when he did it this time. Afterwards he knew that he had to get away, his life depended on it, but the exhaustion dragged him to the floor of an untainted corner. He hit, cut and burned himself to fight the closing eyes.
He was brought back by the sound of wailing. The suited and white coated men were grim faced, he turned to see a white coat by his side, the face turned away and in its hand a plunged syringe. He didn’t have time for his eyes to navigate down the tubing from the syringe to his arm as he closed his eyes a second time.
*********
“It’s time Hernandez”. The suited man nodded. His eyes felt aflame and his mouth rusted. He saw the lights race off down the country road before he saw the broken body. Exiting his car he followed the path of the bullet holes down the decimated car to the other bodies. He ran when he saw the blue lights come over the hill behind him. When he opened his eyes there was the suited man and the white coat in the empty room, even the guards had gone. The white coated man stepped to his side.
*********
Dear Dr Ritten
I am afraid to inform you that as of this moment the Plain Valley correctional facility will terminate its partnership with Caventon University. After the participation and execution of 32 inmates at a vastly increased timeline of your discretion you have still been unable to prove the Ritten-Heiss Theorem. No one is more disappointed than myself to not see an empty chair as hypothesized by yourself and your recently deceased colleague Dr Heiss. Instead, this pursuit of a new era in rehabilitation has tainted us all.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur Temball
Head Warden, Plain Valley Correctional Facility
by submission | Oct 13, 2022 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
“Hello, my name is Fragog”.
The voice was the deepest I’d ever heard. I’d been playing in the garden with some action figures, as you do at age seven and looked around to see who’d spoken.
“Oh, I’m not there on Earth,” Fragog explained, somehow sensing my bewilderment, “I’m on the planet Saturn. My people are telepathic and I’m contacting you with our telepathy telescope. I’m speaking in your mind.”
Even at that young age, the popular culture of the time helped me to understand.
“Just like Professor X!” I replied. “Am I going to be an X-Man?”
Fragog laughed, a deep bass sound that I felt all the way through my body, down to my feet.
“No, Kevin, you’re going to be my test subject! You’re going to help me learn more about your world.”
And that’s what happened. When I woke up every morning, I would feel Fragog’s presence behind my eyes, watching as I went about my daily routine. Sometimes he would ask questions and I would do my best to answer. My parents caught me speaking to him a couple of times.
“A bit old for imaginary friends, aren’t you?” asked my Dad.
I just shrugged. I knew Fragog was real, but I also knew, somehow, that there was no way I could persuade my parents of this. So I didn’t try.
After a while, Fragog stopped asking questions and started asking me to do things instead.
“Observation is part of the scientific method, but so is experiment,” he explained.
At first, most of these experiments seemed boring and pointless to my younger self. Then one day he told me to get one of my sister’s hamsters from her room. Despite my trepidation, Fragog whispered words of encouragement to me and I went into Sally’s bedroom and lifted Hokey out from his cage.
“Good,” said Fragog, “Now I want you to bash its head in.”
“I don’t want to,” I said. I knew that it was wrong. I liked Hokey!
“But you have to,” said Fragog, “It’s for science!”
“No”, I shouted, “I’m not going to!”
“Then I’ll make you,” Fragog replied.
Suddenly, I felt as if I was looking down a long tunnel at my hands as they held Hokey. I watched those small fingers take the hamster and smash it repeatedly against the bedroom door.
“There,” said Fragog, “that wasn’t too hard, was it?”
Then I rushed down the tunnel and was back inside my body, holding Hokey’s bloody corpse. I dropped it on the carpet and ran out of the bedroom, tears flowing down my cheeks. My mother eventually found me hiding under my bed. I told her everything, about Fragog and how he’d made me hurt Hokey. She went through to Sally’s room and I heard her gasp then shout for my dad. I can still remember the panic in her voice.
Afterwards, the doctors taught me that Fragog wasn’t real and eventually I was prescribed anti-psychotics which seemed to block his voice out completely. I’ve been on them ever since. It took me a long while to feel well again, but I’ve had some good years since then and have built a life for myself that I’m quite proud of.
Until yesterday, when, despite my meds, I once again felt Fragog’s calculating presence watching from behind my eyes.
Yesterday and that final item on the news: ‘Objects erupting from the atmosphere of Saturn, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists are baffled.’
Yesterday and that single sonorous sentence ringing through my mind.
“See you soon, Kevin!”
by submission | Oct 12, 2022 | Story |
Author: James Callan
Picking up the pieces is useless, a failed enterprise, like eating bisque with a fork. The bits that were my lover are like autumn leaves late in the season, too many to count, frayed, half-liquefied, one with the mud. I hold what may have been her brains, the organ of her sharp intellect, as memory cells containing our lives spill through my trembling fingers to join the detritus of a war-torn urban ruin. Satellites dot the sky, daytime stars, raining death and doom, laser beams and radiation. Tallies of hot hues, angry, searing tears, streak vertical to mar the tender, baby blue above, now blemished with deep bruises of billowing black smoke. The stones beside my bent legs vibrate; in a dead world, the inanimate come alive. My gaze falls to the earth, the rubble before me, the sullied puddles of groundwater coming up from the big blast. Among the charred fragments of obliterated landscape, the molten corners of toppled buildings, fallen giants, I recognize the anklet she wore, blackened and broken, the vague outline of her delicate foot. I take the trinket for a keepsake, a memento of our love, and cough among the scattered ash, the cloud of black that is her ankle turned to dust, airborne, like an angel off to a far better place.
by submission | Oct 11, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Location. Location. Location. That’s what I always preach. You have to really think about where you’re going to live. Really consider what a place is going to mean to you and your family over the long haul.
That’s why the greenbelt is perfect.
Space. Privacy. Prey.
You have to go where the food is. Where you can feed a growing family of mutants. Hungry, hungry young mutants.
See, humans are discovering greenbelts, too. Building more and more homes right up against steeply wooded hills, deeply sluicing ravines, densely fecund wetlands. Their backyards butting right against my front yard.
Humans love the thought of wilderness out their back door. A refuge from their urban and suburban dependency. Best of all, a place for their kids to grow up around nature. On their own privileged terms: tamed but untamed.
I get that. I’m fairly sophisticated for a mutant. I owe that understanding to not having to spend as much energy searching for prey. Our meals come happily, curiously, to me.
Everyday, kids and parents set out to play and hike in the greenbelt, not really questioning who made the network of trails snaking the trees and undergrowth. Thinking maybe the narrow paths were made by deer or other wildlife.
Never imagining me.
Me, with the razor teeth and claws of a wolf, the hulking muscles of a great ape, the feral cunning of an adapter.
That’s me. An adaptation. An unnatural selection catalyzed by exotic toxins released for generations at an old lab site in the high hills–from which all the local greenbelts spread.
I suppose I should be more curious about my origins, but I’m an accepting sort. And so are my spawn. We live like kings in the greenbelt, feasting on the bounty of suburban sprawl.
It’s a lovely life.
And we feel lucky. Grateful for all humans who love the wild and want a taste of it every day. We sure love the taste of them.
Location. Location. Location. That’s what I preach. Mutation. Mutation. Mutation. That’s what I praise.
