by submission | Feb 13, 2021 | Story |
Author: Quinlan Moss
I wasn’t born in space like most of you. Until I was sixteen years old, I was planet-bound. I only dreamed of traveling to the stars and beyond. If I had known what it was really like, I would’ve remained where I was in my gravity well.
Maybe it does happen like that up there on the flight deck. Admiral Ma slams his fist on the console. “Let’s boldly go where no man has gone before and extract gargantuan amounts of cobalt.” Down here, six decks below, it doesn’t work like that. I’ve never even seen the flight deck.
How did I end up here, you ask? You didn’t? Well I’ll tell you anyway.
It started with a bolt. A vital, one-of-a-kind connecting device specifically designed and tooled out of the highest grade titanium in DRS Frazier’s own Manufacturing Excellence Department (they call themselves that, it doesn’t mean that they are excellent). I needed a new one.
I filed a Form 3652JD-6 with our Manufacturing Excellence Department to requisition a new bolt, like I was supposed to. An automated response from the supervising drone came back to me.
We are reviewing your request. You can expect a response in three days.
Five days later, I received a reply.
We have reviewed your request and have found deficiencies. Please correct the deficiencies and re-submit.
I opened up the form to see what they needed.
Please attach a scanned image of the requested item and indicate on the scan why the current item can no longer be used.
That was a problem. The old bolt had come loose and fallen out during an over-zealous docking at Calisto. I had no idea where it was. I had a few options. Option 1. I could take a photo of another bolt and make it look as if it need replacing. Yes, a dishonest approach. Honesty is not always the best policy. I’d need two bolts instead of one for that option. Or Option 2, tell the truth – I didn’t know where it was. A dilemma indeed. I told the truth. Another five days passed.
We have reviewed your request and found deficiencies. You have filed Form 3652JD-6. You must file Form 152CH-5 for a lost or stolen item and pay the associated fine of 600 chits.
This was ridiculous. The bolt itself, if I had bought it from Musafir would have cost 10 chits. Pay a fine for a bolt I hadn’t lost? Not on my watch. Option 1 now seemed like a better idea. I extracted an older bolt from a dark corner of DRS Frazier’s interior bulkhead, sanded down a few of the threads, scanned it, attached it to Form 3652JD-6, completed the rationale and re-submitted it.
We are reviewing your request. You can expect a response in three days.
We docked at Quirinus two days later. You know what happened there. It was all over the grid. The vibrations from the engine core destabilized the magnetic fields and the VASIMR thrust regulator exploded.
“Lucky to be alive,” they said. Yes, lucky, here in my cell with my conviction for improper maintenance.
by submission | Feb 12, 2021 | Story |
Author: Steven Sheil
Vera exited the Ambassador Suite and activated the vacuum seal, ready for the next guests. The moment the seal was complete, she felt the pulse in her temple that indicated that her work schedule had been updated. COMMODORE SUITE, EAST WING came the order, directly into the forefront of her thoughts. She nodded her head to dismiss the notification, and started on her way to the other side of the hotel, following the route-map overlay that appeared in her left eye.
Her cart hovered beside her, moving with a steady hum in time with her steps. Some of the other maids named their carts like pets – Oscar, Buddy, Lucky, Coco – but Vera never had. The cart, with its compartments full of cleaning products – bleaches, germicides, Tucker and Co’s LeaveNoTrace™ (“the only way to lose that DNA!”) – was just a tool. She had no sentimentality whatsoever where it was concerned.
As she turned the corner at the end of the corridor Vera saw Michael – one of the other maids – approaching, his own cart (“Bellaroo”) hovering beside him. The terms of Vera’s employment allowed for a thirty-three second long personal interaction for every four hours of work and Vera, having seen no-one since beginning her shift 3 hours ago, and loathe to forgo her contracted entitlement, decided to engage him.
“Tough morning?” she asked.
“Overpump in the Starlight Lounge fleshpool caused a glut,” said Michael. He looked exhausted, “Taken three of us till now to get it contained.”
“Sounds like quite a job,” said Vera, who was practiced at avoiding any language which might conceivably be interpreted by the cart’s auditory monitoring system as being critical of the hotel. She raised her eyebrows in sympathy instead, and Michael gave the shortest of knowing nods in reply.
“Yes,” he said, “It was.”
With the interaction over, they both moved on, Vera praying that the fault with the Lounge fleshpool hadn’t spread to the Suites.
The fleshpools were the central attraction of all Bodell Fantasee Hotels. Employing the latest in IET (impulse-extraction technology) and combining it with SLF (synthetic living flesh), the pits were circular tubs recessed into the floor of each suite. On arrival, the pools would fill with SLF – which could then be animated by the IET implants the guests received on arrival. Any desire could be manifested in living flesh – any number of hands, eyes, mouths, genitals, any type of skin, fur, pelt or hide. Endless arrays of mindless, powerless beings, all subject to the whims of their creators.
Vera reached the Commodore Suite. As she went to unlock the door, it opened, and she came face-to-face with the departing guest, a man in his fifties, immaculately dressed, greying hair wet from a shower. For a moment his eyes met Vera’s, and she saw a spark of something – shame? – before he quickly looked away and breezed past her as though she wasn’t there. Beyond him lay the room and the remnants of his desires. Vera sighed and led her cart inside.
by submission | Feb 11, 2021 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
If breakthroughs keep occurring
let them in
– Death
By the year 2100, Detroit was know no longer as the Motor City. Few people called it Motown. It became known, at least among its own, as City of Cans.
In the 21st century, once the housing crisis became a permanent feature of North American life and no one could any longer afford a mortgage or rent, the Can Craze commenced. Detroiters sough out box cars, shipping containers, and dumpsters. They occupied semi trailers, campers, and tool sheds. Any can or container that wasn’t tied down -and even those that were- was seized and converted into a domicile.
Municipal, state, and national governments claimed they were powerless to tackle the rampant real estate speculation that set home ownership out of reach for everyone save the very rich. Soon, the traditional housing stock of almost every North American city was hollowed out, Detroit’s among them. In Motor City, local pensioners, mostly former autoworkers, lost their homes because they could no longer pay the land tax.
But this did not mean that Detroiters skipped town because, frankly, there was nowhere else to go. Motown’s infamous White Flight was now beside the point.
The young, the enterprising, and the desperate, all of those folks who could not enter the housing market formed a new class of people who abandoned the dream of owning an estate, 2 cars, and a yards of manicured Kentucky Blue Grass. They took to cans and containers, to envisioning their future through the lens of repurposed aluminum and steel. And they took their cans where they could find them: dumpsters squatting in weedy lots; shipping containers down at the port; even the old People Mover that had collapsed onto Woodward Avenue.
Detroiters became walkers. They no longer drove. The local auto industry went belly up. The city converted into 139 square miles of trails and foot paths. When the road pavement cracked it was not replaced. The city retired its bus fleet which added to the new housing stock.
Detroiters became gardeners. They welcomed bees and other pollinators, refusing to cut the grass, mandating that everything flower. They learned to forage for wild onion, mushroom, cabbage and mustard and they farmed worms for their truck gardens.
Depending on your perspective, what was happening in City of Cans was either a “green revolution,” a “libertarian revolt,” or, as the national government was calling it, a form of “leftist terror,” an assault on market freedom. These criticisms served as a warning: dark forces were gathering along Detroit’s frontiers, forces that intended to squash the city as a radical outlier; a rogue republic, a polis so arrogantly attuned to an ice free world plagued by disruptions to the food supply and violent, rising sea fleeing migrations. Everything Detroit did was viewed as insult/insurrection.
And so it was that, in the City of Cans, that the Black Lightning Brigades were born.
The brigades were an accident. It just so happened that at their first concert, held in the lobby of the former headquarters of General Motors, the power trio, Black Lightning, discovered that their music induced a ferocious energy in its audience. The music, performed in 30 second sonic bursts, was a novelty to listeners. It was music that returned to the old ways of guitar, bass, and drums, instruments that had gone out of fashion during long decades of compositions generated by computers. Black Lightning reintroduced the concept of musicians using their hands, their arms, their legs and their feet to perform fills, maintain a beat, strum and arpeggiate. In a do-it-yourself town, the music of manual dexterity won out. But a surprising offshoot was the violence, the feats of strength the music induced.
At that Black Lightning concert, dozens in the audience were injured when the crowd began to thrash about. The music’s impact upon the body was compared to the influence of Phencyclidine (PCP): audience members became so frenzied and strong that they began tearing out elevator doors, balustrades, and overturning booths and barricades with apparent ease. Taking note, Black Lightning introduced social distancing measures at future performances.
When Detroit was finally threatened with invasion, when armies of statists pledging fealty to the national authority showed up along the perimeter of the city, Black Lightning sent brigades of its fans to defend the City of Cans, to protect Detroit’s way of life, to ensure their little republic remained free.
The brigades lined upon along Wyoming Road, 8 Mile, and Alter. They barely knew that they were going to combat the gathered hosts. What they did know was the power of the music, of what Black Lightning did to their nerves, their muscles. And even though the Brigades were unarmed and outnumbered 5 to 1, and many of their members practically shit themselves when they saw what they were up against, still they won. Black Lightning and two of its protégé bands performed as they battle raged, injecting their listeners, their fans with a a ferocity that led to an undisputed victory, a day known locally as “The Battle of the Amplifiers.”
For months afterwards, the national government, the families of the slain, battle witnesses, and so many others in the City of Cans wondered how it was that Black Lightning’s music only impacted the fighting style of Detroit’s defenders, that it did not catalyze the actions of the invaders. There appeared no answer until one day, the bassist of Black Lightning declared,
“If you were from Detroit, you’d know.”
Nothing: not neglect, not economic collapse, not even an invading host could efface a city whose people had always found reasons to beat the odds. The trio’s bass provided the pulse, music-as-galvanic force; a unique source.
Black Lightning was the admission that Detroit’s inner groove was its weapon.
by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 10, 2021 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
When you’re hurtling through space, distance and time become distorted.
Celestial bodies appear, and disappear, sometimes in the blink of an eye, the instrumentation the only proof they existed. Sometimes they seem to drift past over the course of several days, or weeks.
If not for the sensors, and the computer doing the math, it would be impossible to know exactly how far, or how close these dangers really were.
There’s nobody here to look now, to stare into the void with me. There’s nothing to see from here anyway, nobody’s missing anything.
In the cafeteria, if you’d lived here as long as I have, you would recognize the evidence of Petra and Olaf having had breakfast together, as their meal trays are where they left them on the table. Again. You would also know that Scott hadn’t made it to the cafeteria today, because those meal trays hadn’t been cleaned up, accompanied by the racket of his loud and incessant fussing.
The command module is similarly devoid of life, and one might confuse the mess as evidence of a struggle, but honestly, the Captain and his First Officer had devolved from their ‘everything by the book’ lifestyle to being little better than slobs over the last year. Had it been a year? More than a year? Time, right?
In the crew quarters, what was once pristinely organized now looks like a bomb went off in it, clothing and vac suit components strewn on the benches, bunks, and floor. Weapons, once neatly stored in locked compartments in the event of a landing, or intercept with a hostile foreign vessel, now lie scattered and abandoned in the hallways.
That sound is the nightfall warning. In thirty minutes the ship will gradually dim all but the essential lighting to simulate night. It’s one of the systematic mechanisms designed to enforce a regular schedule in a vacuum with no sun, no natural day or night. Structure. Familiarity. Routine. All very important on these long haul missions.
I remember stories of the land of the midnight sun, in the North on Earth where the sun was visible in the sky for months without setting. I remember how some people struggled if their days went unbroken by real night for too long.
I remember Earth too. Seems like a lifetime ago.
Through the viewport at the rear of the ship, I can no longer make out the remains of the crew. They may be out there, just beyond the limits of my vision. I can still hear them, I think. I can’t get their voices out of my head. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that they were here, but when you’re hurtling through space… Distance and time, did we talk about this already?
It doesn’t matter.
It’s going to get dark soon.
Will you stay with me?
Otherwise, when they turn out the lights, there won’t be anything left between myself, and me.
by submission | Feb 9, 2021 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
I was an orphan, never adopted, perhaps because I wasn’t ever cute or special in any way. But, when I was nineteen, I was fortunate enough to become a live-in housekeeper to Professor David Knežević. He was a polymath, most renowned for the Knežević equation.
That was over ten years ago. Martha, his wife, had died six years before I arrived and I knew he was still haunted by her death. When someone mentioned her, a cloud descended over his normally calm facial expression. Regardless, my main job was to never ever erase his blackboard.
I called him Uncle Dave and he never objected. He was the closest thing I ever had to family. A year before he passed away, he had confided in me that, since he was getting up there in years, he wanted to keep a promise made to his wife that they’d be reunited after he died.
He told me, “The lack of everything, namely, nothing, can’t produce something yet things do exist. But if there was always something in time then getting to yesterday would take forever. There could never be today.
Hence, there has to be something eternal, without beginning or end, outside of time that’s responsible for something existing in time. And the language of that creative principle is mathematics.
But, to unlock the secrets of the transcendental formula, you have to know the quotient of the highest number divided by the smallest number greater than zero. In other words, what infinity divided by infinitesimal equals.”
Less than a month before my uncle passed away, I walked into his study when he was scribbling on his blackboard. As he continued writing, he told me, “The original copy of the transcendental formula subsists in the noosphere. It’s accessible to the demiurge who inserts various values for different variables into the formula in order to create numerous alternative realities. Unlike the creative principle outside time, the demiurge is a personal god within time who makes the amorphous primary something into specific things in many distinct worlds.”
Then he replaced a symbol with Ω in a certain bracketed section of the transcendental formula on his blackboard and some of the chalk transformed into the English words, “What do you want?”
My uncle could see the horror in my eyes and said, “Fear not. The demiurge means us no harm.”
He wrote on the blackboard, “To be reunited with my wife after I die.”
Whereupon what he had written was rearranged to read, “Only if you keep my secrets.”
He then ordered me to erase and clean his blackboard every day thereafter. And, after he passed away, I learned he left his house to me and realized he had destroyed all his mathematical papers before he died.
Even if I could have, though I surely couldn’t have, duplicated his feat, I wouldn’t have. I hope he’s somewhere nice with his beloved Martha but, personally, I prefer to have a more prosaic finale. I’m perfectly fine with ending up wherever the demiurge deems appropriate.
But, you see, I have no one waiting for me.
by Julian Miles | Feb 8, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
We spent a century looking for life on other worlds. Found some, too. Most of it wasn’t happy to meet us. Us being us, we got round that with our usual bonhomie and genocidal violence. Until we met the Pesserac. They kicked our murderous fleets clean out of space, and eradicated every colony we’d established through force. Then they politely informed us that peaceful colonisation was welcome, because we had a lot to offer. However, until we evidenced the ‘fundamental societal changes’ needed, we were also banned from participating in interstellar trading or receiving aid.
We were a pariah race. Despite the clear warnings, we often pushed our luck. They had clearly dealt with our kind before, and fallen foul of the lies told. We never had any survivors.
It took Earth a century to sort itself out. Afterwards, things generally went well when we ventured into space. Then the first ship with cordallium-windowed viewing galleries journeyed into the long night and humanity discovered a reason to behave, and to believe. For any to cause denial of access to this wonder swiftly became inconceivable.
“Ma’am. They’re here.”
Streamers of light twist past the gallery windows. Tourists crane their necks to try and see ahead. There’s some pushing and shoving.
“Stand easy, people. You’ll see them soon.”
As if on cue, a whirl of colours comes to a halt by the largest window. It presses close. People step back. They can’t help it. I couldn’t, and I’ve seen this countless times.
In proximity to the glass, the colours part to reveal the outline of a figure. Completely negative, no reflections, nothing. Just a rainbow aura about a darkness that comes in varying shapes.
“Marla.”
A man on my left sobs the name and collapses. Every time, with no exceptions, a revealed form will match someone’s recollection of a lost loved one. It works with animals, too. Not that all animals can express grief or distinguish individuals, but recognition behaviour, pack calls and the like have forced the acknowledgement of this phenomenon.
Another whirling form presses close. A shorter, more rounded figure. A family to my right clutch each other tighter and burst into tears together.
The eerie event continues. So many people come each time. Most don’t get the encounter they hope for. All of them see enough to be convinced.
These things are like dolphins, riding ahead of our ships, shedding ribbons of light. How long they’d done this before we could see outside bare-eyed, we don’t know. We can’t detect them in any other way than with human sight. Several scientists I know surmise it’s actually some interpretive quirk of the way our brains process light after it passes through cordallium crystal.
This new field of science is inconclusive and ongoing, but people don’t care. The entities, or effects, or whatever they actually are, have been named ‘Delphine’ in some strange hybridisation of religion and perceived characteristics.
A faster-spinning mass of light presses to the window near me. The outline of my sister quirks her head in the way she used to do. It straightens up and, just before it whirls away, I swear there’s a flash of light like the edge of a silver eyelid closing in a quick wink.
Every time I see, I’m sure it’s somehow learning from me how to represent her. My suspicions about that sort of behaviour have been dismissed so many times I’ve given up.
Much as I can’t stop myself visiting, I’m increasingly convinced we’re missing something. I’ve no idea what. But, in the moments before I sleep, it scares me.
