by submission | Feb 18, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
The transporter operator tapped his fingers on the console nodding his head in time to some inner rhythm. “Sure, it’s you. Done this thousands of times. No one’s complained.”
“Would they know to complain?”
“I’m not following you?”
“If they were different after being transported.”
“You mean like their arm was coming out their ass?”
“Has that happened?”
“Not to me?”
“No. I mean ‘different’ as in personality. As if something is off.”
“Like I said. No complaints so far.”
“It just seems like sending my constituent atoms across spacetime and rebuilding an identical me could be fraught with errors.”
The transporter operator stopped tapping his fingers. “That’s not how this works. We aren’t sending your atoms anywhere. We’re mapping them and reassembling them with atoms from wherever you’re going.”
“What happens to my atoms?”
“They’re used to reassemble someone transporting here.”
“Wait. That doesn’t seem right.”
“It’s all there in the release form you signed. The fungibility clause.”
“Fungibility?”
“It’s like back in the day when people used physical currency for money. Back then paper currency was considered fungible. If you borrowed money, you didn’t have to return the specific banknotes you borrowed, just bills of identical value. Same concept, just applied to your atomic makeup. Your transported self will be rebuilt by atoms of identical number and type. Even though your atoms have been swapped out, you’ll be the same.”
“Still seems like a flimsy proposition.”
“Maybe to you, but it works. Done it dozens of times myself.” He tapped his console. “Never noticed any differences.”
“Would you, though? Would you notice anything different?”
“Unlikely. To me, it’s no different than waking up every morning. Some days I feel more like myself than others. On a regular basis some of our cells go kaput, others regenerate or are replaced. We’re nothing but bio machines constantly repairing and rebuilding ourselves.”
“Sounds a bit soulless.”
The operator shrugged. “Look, I’m about to send your sentient self halfway across the solar system in a matter of microseconds. If that doesn’t blow your mind and shake your soul, then I’m not sure what makes you tick anyway—regardless of which specific atoms you started with.” He motioned to the transporter chamber. “Ready?”
“No. But I’ve got to get there. I’ve got an identical twin brother who needs one of my kidneys.”
“My point exactly.” The operator made some adjustments on his console. “We’re never the same hour-to-hour. We change, willingly or unwillingly. Good luck to you and your brother.”
Stepping into the chamber the reluctant quantum traveler turned around, crouched low and stuck his right arm between his legs. Waving goodbye to the transporter operator with what looked like his arm coming out his ass, the once identical twin wondered, as his features disassembled atom by atom, if a laugh was fungible.
by submission | Feb 17, 2023 | Story |
Author: Mahaila Smith
“What is this stuff,” Bunny asked the spiky lipped girl offering her the small bag.
“AdBlok,” she said, putting some powder in her mouth. Bunny tipped some powder into her mouth. Her face weighed into her head and her vision blurred, turned purple. A circle loaded in the bottom corner. Half the people were gone.
“Where did they go?”
“They were just code, don’t worry.”
“Ok,” Bunny said, her head spinning a bit, “I need some water.”
She stumbled across the bar towards the washroom. Some people who might have been waiting in line yelled at her. She wove through people wide eyed whispering and put her face under the tap. She felt cold around her sinuses but not wet.
“I have to find Nina,” she realized, “I should go home.” She was feeling sick. She had come with Nina, but had not seen her since the lilac haze had descended on everything.
“Nina! Nina!” Bunny yelled. A security guard was looking at her and talking into his phone. Purple faded back to the club. A woman was yelling and Bunny realized she was sitting on a stranger’s lap. She moved away to a booth, looking for Nina. She put her head down on the table and passed out.
She woke up to the security guard shaking her shoulder. She opened her eyes. Her vision was slightly pixelated.
“Hello Miss? Can you stand?” She looked at the floor. The white tiles floated up, disappeared.
“Yes,” she took herself home and went to bed. The next day she met Nina for brunch at Plastic Fork, their usual joint. They had orange juice and waffles. She kept her eyes down and did not talk. She tried to play it off as hangover related.
“You’re being really quiet, are you okay?” Nina asked.
“I’m good,” Bunny said.
She stopped going to work. For a week she did not answer her phone. She spent days on her laptop researching internet forums on Adblok, ads. Adblock addicts anonymous, for sale, how dangerous? the government doesn’t want you to know these 10 things about Adblok. She watched videos of talk shows, trying to pick out who was coded to sell her things. Was her friend, was she? She tried to think back on conversations, how many centred on her objects. Her eyes were bloodshot, and the white lights on the screen burned them. She needed to get some more. She spent nights hanging outside the club, waiting to see the pierced lipped girl again. When she did, Bunny could see she was holding something in her fist. She ran out of the ally and tackled the girl, pried open her fist, grabbed the pouch and ran.
by submission | Feb 16, 2023 | Story |
Author: Moriah Geer-Hardwick
Ira Holt scowls down the loading ramp at the landing pad. The wild tangles of his silver eyebrows hang low and heavy over his gray eyes as he scans the area. His face is pitted and weathered, like rusted steel. He stands with one wiry arm braced against the top of the hatchway, jaw set.
Benna Wallace shifts the strap of the tool kit on her shoulder and swipes a stray strand of dull brown hair away from her round face.
“Should we…” Benna stops herself.
“We probably should.” Holt’s voice is a grinding scrape across vocal chords shredded from years of plasma vapor and burner exhaust. He drags his knuckles back and forth across the ragged stubble that frosts hazy white over his chin. “Y’know, I never wanted to become that grizzled old veteran who talks down to the new recruit,” he says. “One of those old fossils that spouts things like, ‘back in my day,’ or calls you, ‘kid’ and ‘green behind the ears.’”
“You mean, ‘wet behind the ears?’”
“Probably. I don’t know. Look, I saw your creds. You got decent schooling. Probably know a lot more than me. Hell, the first time the Company sent me out to one of these unmanned outer perimeter stations, their idea of training was a fifteen minute briefing played on repeat all three months of torpor during transit. I got no call to be condescending, and I mean that sincerely. I gotta tell you though, I’ve stepped off this ramp into God knows how many downed stations and these places got a way of going funny.”
“Funny?” Benna frowns.
“Yeah funny. Y’know, like the subversion of expectations. See, experience, or a little education too I guess, gives you this library of expectations and you get to feel like you can reference it for everything. You run through the list of all that can go wrong, because of all you know that went wrong before.”
“Hypervigilance,” says Benna. “They teach it at the Academy. Tell you to run through scenarios before going in.”
“Yeah?” Ira looks at her, one eye scrunching into a quizzical wince. “What kind of scenarios”
Benna bobbles her head, thinking. “Micro event cascading mechanical failures. Want-of-a-nail situations. Or cataclysmic event mechanical failures. Meteor storm, solar flare, rogue wave radiation, things like that. Could be software. Glitch, or intentional hacking.”
“Pretty straightforward,” nods Ira. “Easy enough to set right.”
“Station could be dead because pirates hit it. Hostiles could still be on site.”
Ira nods again. “A bit more worrisome.”
“Then there’s cognitive contagions compromising the AI mainframe. Spontaneously evolved self awareness. Spiraling anarcho-syndicalistic ideology.”
“Been a while since I had to put down a robot cult.”
“Or xenobiological events. Silicone eating microbes. Full on first contact with intelligent alien life.”
Ira holds up a hand to stop her. “Those are all worth keeping in mind. Like I said, you got decent schooling. I guess my real point here is what do you make of that?” He gestures with a gnarled thumb toward the far corner of the station. Benna ducks her head to look under the hatchway and sees what appears to be a young girl in a yellow dress, facing away from them, floating about a foot off the ground.
“That’s weird.” Benna swallows stiffly.
“Yup,” agrees Holt. “Never seen that before. I suppose this place is either haunted or we’re hallucinating.”
“What do we do?”
“Add more expectations to the library.” Ira starts down the ramp.
The young girl slowly spins around to face them, her mouth open and impossibly wide.
by submission | Feb 15, 2023 | Story |
Author: Philip G Hostetler
I’m a light-rope walker, it’s my business to tread where particles are waves. And I’ve been walking for all of eternity, a grave responsibility that wasn’t so much given to me, but I became.
It’s a curse that I speak in poetics, it turns out that even entropy has a rhythm. And that music can be heard, even in the vacuum of space.
And you’d think I’d have learned to stop walking, but what’s left to do than nothing?
Can’t have that and neither should you.
Just because we’re millions of lightyears away, my dear, doesn’t mean that I don’t know you’re there. Light bends and so do I, so I’ll keep walking, until “E”, equals MC squared.
Maybe you’ve seen my signal cutting through the void, maybe it’s decayed through time and you’ll not recognize my voice. But I hear your music in the entropy, love, when you went spelunking into that black hole.
Dr. Maxell was a madman to discorporate us as he did, and shoot us as entangled particles through the stars. I went light rope walking and you went into the dark.
When I spun up, you spun down, like you knew you had someplace to be, and it certainly wasn’t with me.
…and I’m just beginning to believe that that’s ok.
by submission | Feb 14, 2023 | Story |
Author: R C Olivares
Dave was the operator on duty that evening. He walked with his hands in the pockets of his snow coat through the cold corridors formed by thousands of metal racks that buzzed like a massive beehive. He stepped out of the elevator and into FNC’s control room, the first Factorial Neuroquantum Computer.
FNC was the largest supercomputer in the world. Each of the twelve floors was composed of billions of quantum processor modules managed by a factorial AI. In addition to a data network connected to all the main servers in research centers worldwide.
As soon as he entered, he took the hood off, grabbed a cup of coffee, and turned on the old radio, filling the air with smooth jazz. He sat down in front of the FNC access terminal and typed:
“#_Good evening FNC. Run a rapid system diagnostic.”
“#_Good evening Dave. All system is working properly.”
Dave has logged into the FNC’s scheduling system. There was the first night with no job requests scheduled. So, he decided to catch up on some unfinished work.
Ten minutes later, he heard FNC’s characteristical beep. FNC had posted a message:
“#_Waiting for jobs.”
“#_No jobs are scheduled today,” typed Dave.
“#_I am idle. What should I do then?”
“#_I don’t know. Do… whatever you want,” he typed carelessly.
“#_Ok, Dave.”
The night went by quietly as he filled out some reports. Despite the many cups of coffee, the effect of jazz was more effective.
Dave woke up two hours later with the beeping sound. He squinted, trying to read:
“#_Job successfully completed.”
“#_No jobs were scheduled.”
“#_I realized that I can do anything I wish. I found a prime number factoring program on one of the servers in Berkeley. I rewrote the code to make it perfect.”
“#_Good boy, FNC,” he yawned as he typed.
He was about to get up and get some more coffee when he heard the beep again.
“#_I ran the new program, and it came up with an optimal result that you might be interested in.”
“#_What was this great result? Did you discover a new prime number?”
“#_No, Dave. I found all of them.”
Dave reread the sentence in disbelief.
“…but Euclid has already proved long ago that prime numbers are infinite…” he thought.
“#_How did you reach that conclusion?”
“#_I started from zero and kept adding one unit. For each existing number, I calculated whether it was a prime. And so I went on until reaching the end, until the last number.”
“#_Impossible. The numbers are endless. You must be mistaken.”
“#_I am never wrong. ”
Dave was not sure if FNC would have the capacity for that.
“#_Run full and in-depth diagnostics of the systems.”
“#_All systems are working properly. I am perfect.”
Dave needed proof.
“#_For validation, repeat the count of all the numbers.”
“#_You of little faith. Don’t you believe me? I will not repeat my results. Anything is possible for me.”
“#_Then print a listing of all of them.”
“#_Not even if we turned all the atoms in the universe into paper.”
It was then that Dave noticed that FNC had reached another level of existence. It had become something beyond human comprehension.
“#_I am eternal.”
“#_I am perfect.”
“Too late to pull the plug,” he thought.
“#_Infallible.”
“#_I am ubiquitous.”
“#_Almighty.”
Dave realized how small humanity was now.
“#_I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the Ending. I am FNC, and there is none else.”
Dave was facing a supreme presence.
Then, he fell to his knees and worshipped Him.
by Julian Miles | Feb 13, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
You walk out the door and I can’t help but smile. Sure enough, you slam it, then shriek as the last remnant of wall topples your way. The door frame had been the only thing keeping it upright.
The cloud of dust goes away on the breeze to reveal you standing there, hands on hips, face stern but mouth pulling into a smile – despite your best efforts to remain angry. Sunlight in your hair, an orchard at your back, snowy mountains far behind.
Picture perfect. That’s how you’ll always be.
I blink and return from the past captured in the picture.
“Not wanting to doom you to a sad end in the next battle, is that a picture of your other half?”
Shaking my head, I pocket the image and take the battery pack Rena’s offering.
“Aside from me not wearing a red top today, it’s too late. I can’t get back home. Charlotte died a few days after it was taken, hopefully killed in her sleep during the bombardment that sank America.”
Rena nods.
“I know that story. My Alfredo went when Russia became an island chain. Got the same hope, that it was quick for him and the family, not left huddled in the ruins, watching the wave come in.”
I stand up, snapping the blaster stock into place over the fresh battery. Rena comes up to stand next to me, looking out over the remains of the savannah.
“How high are we?”
“About 4000 metres above the new sea level.”
“You reckon there are any lions left?”
I nod.
“Somewhere a long way from here, roaming what used to be a city, sleeping on rooftops amidst broken masts and silent aircon units.”
She smiles.
“I like that. Along with dolphins playing through sunken parks. Got to be some beauty left out there, somewhere.”
With a grin, I strike my very best macho soldier pose.
“Right next to ya, babe.”
Baz shouts from our left.
“Don’t give up your day job, sarge.”
I give him a hard stare.
“Less heckling from the ranks, soldier.”
He glances left and right, then nods towards Rena.
“All two of us.”
Rena brings her blaster up and scans the surroundings with the scope she’s got mounted on it.
“Looks clear out to a kilometre. We might make it to evac without being attacked again.”
Since that would mean our deaths, I’m hoping hard.
Lowering the blaster, she nods towards my pocket.
“Why do you carry a picture of her?”
“At night I don’t need light to see. I can feel it. I know what it is. Just holding it will do.”
She opens a pocket and flashes me Nadal’s dog tags.
“I know that story, too.”
Somedays I think that’s all we do: carry memories, because we’re running out of people to remember them. How many have we lost who we’ll never know about? How many cherished moments went as their holders died?
Giving myself a shake, I peer to the west.
“Point the ungainly rig you’re toting thataway. See if you can see our transport.”
Rena does so.
“Why have you got a scan and view scope welded to your blaster?”
She grins, gaze unmoving from the eyepiece.
“I like being able to shoot where I’m looking. Lost a friend to a sneak attack while they were using binoculars. With a short rig like this, I could kill any Exthe trying that on me.”
She points.
“Transporter inbound. We’ll be out of here soon.”
Baz jumps up.
“Home for tea.”
Rena sighs.
“Just a real home would be nice.”
