by submission | Aug 18, 2022 | Story |
Author: Joel C. Scoberg
“I’m telling you it would catch me,” said Duncan, his words slightly slurred.
“Think about it, if it was dangerous, they’d put a sign up.”
Alyn leaned over the viewing platform’s guardrail. The toxic clouds seethed and churned beyond the habisphere, completely enveloping the Arcology which floated in the Venusian atmosphere like a lost balloon. “Maybe, but it’s still, what, a fifty-foot drop to the habisphere?”
“Very survivable.” Duncan waved away Alyn’s concerns with his beer bottle. “Especially considering the elasticity of the habisphere membrane. It’ll be like landing on a bouncy castle.”
“I thought only the astroengineers loved a late night.”
They both turned. Renee Amara walked—no, sauntered—toward them, dressed to the nines in a tight-fitting, emerald-coloured dress. Her dark brown hair hung over her bare shoulders. Barefoot, she carried a pair of sparkly high-heels in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other. Duncan swallowed heavily beside him.
“We botanists know how to party too.” Duncan leaned back against the polished metal guardrail and took a swig of beer. Alyn was impressed. Duncan usually fell into stuttering incoherence around Renee.
“I can see that.” Renee stepped between them and leant on the guardrail, her floral perfume more intoxicating than any beer. “What were you two arguing about?”
“Duncan’s latest obsession. He reckons the habisphere would catch him if he jumped.”
Renee’s amber eyes met his, and it was Alyn’s turn to swallow heavily. “And what do you think?”
“I, er, I think he’d fall straight through.”
“It’s perfectly safe.” Duncan climbed on to the guardrail, balancing precariously with his back to the raging Venusian cloudscape. “As I told Alyn, there would be a sign if it was—”
Duncan slipped. Renee dropped her heels and grabbed his leg, steadying him. “Careful,” she said.
“Thank you, my lady, but have no fear for me. I’ve thought a lot about this.” Duncan glanced at her hand on his leg and beamed. “Astroships can only sail through the habisphere because of their bulk, the habisphere stretches before it allows them through to the dock. That elasticity helps retain the air pressure inside the Arc—not too rigid that it pops, not too soft that it loses pressure. It’s how the Arc floats in the heavier carbon-dioxide clouds in the atmosphere. To science,” cheered Duncan, raising his bottle in the air.
“Okay, okay, you’ve convinced me,” said Alyn, reaching for his friend’s hand. “Now come down.”
“I’m telling you, if I jumped, I’d be fine. And I’d be the first person to do it.” Duncan drained his beer then winked at Renee. “That would be worth a kiss, right?”
Renee laughed weakly. “Don’t be silly now.”
Duncan stretched out his arms like an Olympic diver, grinned, then jumped.
Alyn lunged for Duncan but he was too late.
Duncan plummeted with a loud, triumphant yell, which turned to a strangled yelp as he plunged straight through the habisphere and disappeared within the thick Venusian clouds. The habisphere rippled and repaired itself, snuffing out the sudden stench of rotten eggs.
“I can’t believe he did that,” said Renee, after a long silence. “What should we do?”
Alyn shook his head. “I guess we should put a sign up.”
by submission | Aug 17, 2022 | Story |
Author: Lisa Jade
‘Genemother’.
That’s what they call me. My real name hasn’t mattered in a long time.
This isn’t what I agreed to. As my body deteriorated from disease, I was desperate to remain alive. When the richest men in the country offered me practical immortality in exchange for my DNA for cloning, I didn’t think twice.
I didn’t question the waivers, or the commercial lawyers, or the investors. After all, they’d sworn that the clones would be used to further technology and medicine to help the world. So even when I was submerged in this tank to spend my endless days, I trusted that things would be alright.
The tank keeps my body in a pristine half-alive state. I see, hear and think, but that’s all, aside from the scraping in my bones when they remove more marrow, more stem cells to clone me from.
From my tank, I’ve seen the results of our deal. Fifty years on, and my face – the face they wanted for its beauty – is on every billboard. They cloned me, marketed the resulting lives as mindless servants, and sold them for a fortune.
Clones with my face and voice work to the bone for people too rich or lazy to care for themselves. The clones are sanitation workers, domestic servants, prostitutes. The investors clearly figured I’d never find out. There was so much they never told me.
They never told me about the telepathic link between clones and donor, either.
Late at night, the clones speak. Some don’t even know they do it; they talk more to themselves than to me. Some just wish they had a friend to speak to. Others do it thinking that they’re praying to some higher power.
Imagine their disappointment when they realise it’s just me.
So I take their words. Thanks, curses, questions. And most of all – overwhelmingly, pleas for me to come back for them. After all, I’m their Genemother. If they belong to anyone, it’s me. I could say the word and release them from their bonds.
It’s been fifty years, and I still don’t have the heart to tell them that I can’t move, can’t speak, can’t help. I have no more rights than a houseplant – if I left this tank then my heart, so reliant on the life support, would stop instantly. Not that I could leave, even if I were so willing to make that sacrifice.
So instead, I give them hope.
I tell them that one day, things will be better. When they cry to me, when they’ve been starved and beaten and used for human’s enjoyment. I tell them they don’t deserve to suffer. That they’re worth more than they think – that they’re people, not products. That fighting and bloodshed is sometimes necessary for freedom.
There have been rumours of violent behaviour amongst the clones. The doctors in the lab discuss it constantly, wondering how to limit such instances. They’ll never know I’m the one radicalising them. Any clones who claim to have spoken to me are thought to be insane. The investors won’t dare stop producing their little cash cows, though, and the number of casualties from clone attacks increases by the day.
This is its own kind of revenge, I suppose. A tiny uprising from the entombed mind of a comatose woman who, by all rights, should have died fifty years ago. It’s not much, but it’s all I can do. After all, a good mother only wants what’s best for her children.
by Hari Navarro | Aug 16, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Once upon a moonstruck hour, a newborn baby was stolen. Snatched from the cold place upon which she lay swaddled and still and stashed with leather hands beneath the wet warmth of an old man’s beading oilskin poncho.
Pools of shed torrent on the hospital floor the only trace of his ever being there at all. Sole evidence that this poor wee soul hadn’t been taken by some malevolent supernatural entity. Proof, scant as it was, that this horror was surely the work of a very much human flavour of fiend.
The fact that said child was already dead did not ease in the least the pain of parents already slumped beneath the heft of this most abject and distilling loss. Time heals all they say but with no body to lay beneath the inscription time only agitates…
Time pulls the stitches apart.
This was no random act of perversion, as twenty other lifeless babies were likewise denied the chance to eternally rest that very same night. Blessed be those early hours in which unripe and all but rotting fruits were so purposefully plucked and claimed.
Years later, I had chance to meet the operative charged with gleaning my remains from that slab drawer onto which I had been so lovingly laid. He was old and smiled as he showed me the crook of his trigger finger, its tendons long ago slashed into the most ready and perfect of stances. He was a lovely man, but hard. The deep plunge of his eyes screaming with the spark that only manifests in the knowledge that it was he whom held sway over who lives and who it is that does not.
“I’d never felt it. Not before you…”, the elder had muttered massaging at the swell of his knuckles. “Never felt the weight of existence. But, as I scooped you up and my grasp pulled against your barely formed sinew and it shifted and lolled within your shroud, I felt… no, I tasted… death. The living death, that which coils inside when hearts do stop. I knew it existed, its eradication is what we’re for. But I’d never felt it so magnificently radiant. Until you.”
Praise me?
I was chosen for my potential aesthetic and a genetic anomaly that allowed me to be resuscitated, of a fashion, and brought back into this realm of the living. My ancestry leaked into the data-stream so, as close as might be possible, it could be determined that I’d blossom into a beauty that transcended even the word itself. Our looks are a bullet you see, one of many that we employ in the entrapment of dark souls that require putting to final and unequivocal rest.
The theoretical aspect of my training ended today as the Teacher instructed Tau to lay down upon the gurney that had been wheeled beneath the room’s huge chalkboard.
She spoke, and her words were wet upon the air and from where I sat I could just see the shimmers as they ran down bare legs to the contraction and fidget of Tau’s nervously grasping toes.
I was transfixed and yet, my hearing did wander. I took in the others as their chairs creaked in unison and every one of us tightened and sought to reign in the inflamed swell that gripped within of our skin.
“Rho Kestrel, make your way to the front of the class. Today we lay waste to your purity. Today you will all sample your raison d’être. Praise be to be taught.”
The Teacher carefully unbuttons Rho’s kestrel-crested uniform and we all stifle a collective giggle as it momentarily catches and then drops over the jut of my classmate’s strikingly excited self to the floor.
Tau moves on the gurney and I move too as for the very first time I see private things other than my own. I wish I could say that my vivid imagination had prepared me for it, but I can barely swallow as awkwardly positioned flesh seeks to find its rhythm.
“Tau please encapsulate Rho and feel as this procurement radiates. Do you sense how you illicit responses from each other? If not, as the term progresses, there’ll be ample opportunity to uncover just where the weaponising of your gender leads. And now… pause and… withdraw.”
“Who noticed the beading liquid that appeared at the beginning of the lesson? This is a clear pre-ejaculate, also known as Cowper’s fluid. It functions as a lubricant and an acid neutraliser. The receptacle is normally acidic, so its deposit before full emission can change the internal environment and promote survival of the emitted discharge, which is not an issue you’ll need to bother with. This fluid also acts as a lubricant during interaction, which will help in the retrieval and destruction of the target’s soul residue. Eta Kestrel! Your attention, perhaps? There will, I assure you, be a test!”
I’m not a good student. I struggle with mathematics, numerals fly on the page like flurries of black ash above the driven snow and languages are just plain foreign. But this I can feel as it connects and stumbles and gropes through every little last cell of my being.
“You’ll become elite in ending those so smugly believing themselves exempt from final judgement. Olisbokollikes — look it up! You’ll find even a well-placed snack can afford you the access you require to take out your target.”
If befuddled frowns could be heard then the classroom’s collective confusion would’ve blown out every one of the ornate archer’s windows that slit the walls of this our mountaintop lair.
All hail the almighty loaf!
I know about dirty stuff… I do, I do.
The Teachers words blur as do my eyes and I listen to her breath as it twists into me and, in turn, swirls into the thud that pulses down and thumps on the chair between my legs.
The moment suspends and elongates and my shoulders drop forward and my head whips back and I can smell them all. Every last one of this world’s trapped and stranded lost and dirty fouled pneuma.
“Praise be — to be me,” I sigh into a broadening smile. “Praise now that I know, most exactly, what it is that I am for.”
by Julian Miles | Aug 15, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The approach panel flashes green and shows the Public Credentials of the impending caller. I call to Julie as I head for the door.
“They’re here.”
“Thank goodness.”
The relief in her voice is more than her Mental Balance counsellor would be happy with, I’m sure.
A low double chime indicates arrival, and that it’s a formal call.
I tap to open the door, then step to one side, waving the robed dignitary in.
“Thank you. I’m Servitor Andrews.”
She puts her hood down and I recognise her instantly.
“Charlene?”
The fixation of my teenage years turns and smiles at me in a distracted way.
“Montecourt… Charles?”
Ouch. Some things never change.
“My elder brother. I’m George.”
She nods.
“You have a matter that needs attending to?”
Julie rushes round the corner and grabs her hand. Half-towing, she leads her towards our gathering room.
“We were left them by George’s uncle. He got them back before the seawalls went up.”
Charlene pauses to look over the stack of black boxes and jumble of wires.
“It wasn’t disassembled by a Servitor.”
I sigh.
“My father still harbours some delusions regarding personal action outside class designations.”
She nods, her tone sympathetic.
“It’s something we encounter with the last of the first generation post-ecollapse. Don’t worry. I see no attempts to reassemble or open casings. This is not a Contravention matter.”
Julie flaps her hands in relief.
“Would you like some tea?”
Charlene stiffens.
“Are you a Vendor?”
Julie blushes.
“Sorry. I’m the designated family hostess. It’s habit.”
“Then if you happened to make surplus sufficient for a third cup while preparing for you and your partner, it would be rude of me to refuse.”
She smiles.
That’s clever. Bypassing the class statutes by using the etiquette standards.
“This shouldn’t take me long.”
With that, she moves to the pile of technology and starts to sort it. Time passes. Julie brings tea for us.
“I presume you intend to have it on display and in use here?”
I nod.
She indicates the tall black boxes.
“Place one of the tallest in each of the corners on your AV display wall. The medium-size go in the corners at the opposite end of the room. The smallest pair go halfway down the length of the room, and the cube goes against the AV wall. Try to get it as central as you can.”
It takes me a few minutes moving ornaments and display cabinets, but I finish in time to watch her wander around the room, bending to slot a small silver card into the back of each of the boxes. She sees me watching and smiles.
“Connecting wires are inefficient and overly complex. Part of my duty is to simplify where it will not affect the output.”
She checks her infocuff,
“If the two of you would stand in the centre of the room, please.”
We do so. She taps the activate panel. The AV wall lights up. A deep hum raises the hair on my arms.
The film we’d been watching last night starts from where we left off. Except, this time we’re standing within the audio. It’s astonishing. Julie makes little noises of awe. Charlene smiles.
“They called it ‘immersive sound’. Apart from being quite spectacular, these devices are now banned products due to the rare materials needed to manufacture them. Your uncle left you a valuable legacy.”
Julie looks at me and shakes her head. We’re not selling it.
Charlene smiles.
“I’ll leave you to enjoy this souvenir of a world we’ll never have again.”
by submission | Aug 14, 2022 | Story |
Author: CB Droege
Something brushes past Jonaton’s leg under the opaque waters. He slaps the water with his hands, creating as much noise and turbulence as he can. The noise and motion of the water only reflects off the close walls and comes back amplified. He closes his eyes and forces himself to focus. “Left, straight, left, right, right, left” he recites.
It’s surely only a rumor that there are things living in these chambers. He must have brushed past a piece of equipment from a past explorer or some other piece of long lost flotsam. The floor tiles of the passages are loose and always shifting under Jonaton’s thick boot-soles. There is years of debris down here: garbage, clothes, weapons, even the bones of those who came into the chambers and were lost when the tide came in.
Jonaton keeps a careful eye on the water level. Though it is always shifting, rushing around him, it is also very slowly rising. The tide has already reversed, and every step he takes now is pushing the limits of his return window. In a few hours, water will reach the ceiling. He has to be back to the entrance before that time, or his bones will join the detritus on these floors.
Stepping carefully, wary of any sign of serpent or fish, Jonaton sloshes around another corner. “Right, left, straight, left, right, right, left” he recites, adding the reverse of the turn he just made to the beginning of his mantra. The passage he’s stepped into is longer than any of the previous sections, but is otherwise identical to every passage he’s passed through to get here since this morning. He sighs. He doesn’t even really know what he’s looking for.
Soon it will be time to turn around. He should probably just turn around already, but he knows the looks that explorers get when they return too early, when they don’t search as much as they possibly can in the short time they have within the chambers. It’ll be another week before the tide is low enough to let another explorer into the tunnels, and Jonaton’s turn only comes once per year. He should make the most of it. Maybe this next turn will be the one which reveals the exit from The Fortress. Maybe he will be the one who returns to his people triumphantly declaring that their long imprisonment is finally at an end, that seventy-five years of living in a steel trap is now over.
He reaches the next intersection and looks left and right. Nothing that he can see looks like a way out. Maybe the exit is just down one more passage, maybe it’s just around that corner…
No. That kind of thinking must be how explorers die down here, always chasing one more turn in the tunnels. Jonaton turns around and begins to walk back the way he came, confident that he has done his duty to his people. Tonight, he will be honored for his task, for his risk, even if he will not be celebrated as a savior. “Right, left, straight, left, right, right, left” he recites. He knows this will take him home, where he belongs.
by submission | Aug 13, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“A solution to our problem requires a certain amount of ordered chaos,” Hsiang explained to his cellmate as they used the guard’s severed head to gain entry into DeadPan’s nerve center. “To find a workable answer we need to invite a wide range of possible solutions. Early on, this requires a certain amount of randomness in our search. Eventually, this turbulence has to be controllable in a way that allows us to turn disorder into a deterministic system. Does that make sense?”
“If it means killing Blythedale.”
“It could. But you need to be open to many other possibilities.”
“Like killing Sikkurd, Noh, Fallkirk or Mi Tang?
“Possibly. Though it may mean not killing anyone.”
“What kind of a plan is that?” Suarez asked, his meaty hand flexing around the iron brace Hsiang had removed from one of the industrial dryers in the laundry facility after his last shift. “This just isn’t about escape, it’s about vengeance.”
Hsiang nodded. “Yes. Vengeance. It should be optimized. Our wrongdoers should pay, but death is not the only toll we can exact.”
“Death is simple.”
“But not always painful enough,” Hsiang said softly. “Pain is a powerful teacher. Our vengeance should instruct. Remember, many will be watching.”
“We are always watched.”
“Exactly. That is the flow into which we must introduce turbulence. That instability will show us possible flaws we can isolate and then optimize in order to escape.”
“And punish,” Suarez reminded.
“Absolutely.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in absolutes, Hsiang?”
Hsiang grinned. “You, Suarez, are just the sort of turbulence needed to bring order into the chaos we are about to create.”
Suarez scratched behind his ear with the iron bar and then pointed with its filed end to the screens that displayed every prisoner in DeadPan. “Who do we start with?”
“It must be random. Not a conscious choice. That will make us reactors along with the rest.”
Suarez shrugged.
“Fair enough,” Hsiang acknowledged. He lifted the sentrybot’s pierced skull above the main console, looked away, then dropped the carbon cranium onto the central monitors where it bounced, flipped, spun and landed on the image of Snowden’s cell. The live feed showed him engrossed in a book, an honest-to-NSA paper and ink book.
“That’s it? This starts it?”
“Pebble in the pond. Butterfly in the breeze. Ghost in the machine,” Hsiang answered as he tapped the command and Snowden’s image faded from DeadPan’s surveillance grid.
“Now, out of the spying pan and into the fire.”
