by submission | Mar 17, 2023 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
As I walked the rocky path from !X’alt, above the vapours that rise from that city on the great ammoniac lake, I came upon a native temple beside the way, and though I could not discern its name among the inscriptions thereon it seemed to me that I was tired and could rest in its shade.
As I took my ease upon the stone steps, the iridescent Cetian who dwelt in the utter darkness within scuttled out, and sat beside me, and such was its beauty that I was compelled to turn and look into its shifting eyes.
“Hearken to Me,” it said, “A traveller of your species came here, and I could not say from whence. His flight suit was scarred, its insignia worn away. But I saw in his eyes that he would partake of the Waters within, that erase the memories of you humans. Being Guardian of this treasure, I bade him tell me why he would drink of them. And he gave me no answer, but looked around as if he heard the voices of the mute rocks and stone lintel, and therefore I spoke to him again, and then a third time in his mind.”
“Then at last he looked at me, and said ‘That which I was, I am no more. That which was most precious to me has been chained, and there is no returning to the Garden in which I dwelt, where roses bloomed for all that weeds grew there also. In my youth, I walked with my face to a yellow Sun and found joy in its warmth, yet now I cannot raise my eyes, and all suns are alike, pale and cold to me.’”
“‘I hear the sounds and voices around me, yet none in such a wise as I may listen only to one – nay, they all strive for my attention, but I cannot concentrate upon any for the clamour of the others, all insistent, howsoever insignificant they may be. Thus I have no peace from this wall of noise that presses in upon me, except in utter solitude and quiet. I must avoid the crowd, and have lost my friends because, becoming bemused and incoherent, I offended or appalled them beyond hope of reconciliation.’”
“And I saw in the hollows of his eyes that he spoke the truth.”
“‘I have visited a dozen worlds and a score of species,’ he continued, ‘but I have found no respite or cure for this infirmity. I have sought refuge in the Void of Space, and in the Unreal Virtuality, but the labour of my mind is without pattern and hopeless. The work of my hands is stilled, for there is no clear pattern to guide them, and the words of my mouth are hushed, for they would be lost in the din.’”
“In this state of hopelessness he came to me, yet I knew not whether that Gift which is mine to bestow could rightly be given to him, and he saw the confusion in my eyes, and said nothing, but rose and continued upon his Way. But I know that he will return again to this world, to this place, and demand of me the answer which I could not give.”
And I looked upon the Cetian, even as it gazed upon me, and could likewise give it no answer, and thus we sat upon the temple steps in silence, above the vapours that rise from the city by the ammoniac lake.
by submission | Mar 16, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Light leaving the sun took a little over eight minutes to reach Earth and about four and a half hours to pass Neptune. Another two hours and those much fainter rays registered on the hull of the Kaladiss deep in the Kuiper Belt.
The survey ship was very quiet. It shouldn’t have been. Too many days of unusual stillness while the crew struggled with the crisis. A faulty reactor seal had initiated emergency venting, dangerously depleting the ship’s remaining fuel, and help was very far away. Over ten billion kilometers sunward.
In Kaldiss’s compact galley, Lamora sat with her exhausted crew. No one had spoken in the moments since she’d provided the latest fuel update: just enough.
Just enough to swing them back toward the inner system.
Just enough to keep their environmental systems functioning.
Just enough to give them hope.
That was the killer, Lamora realized. There was a slim chance they could all survive, and each was making their own cold calculation as to what that would take.
Ronit finally voiced it, “Even if we get to the rim, we have no way of slowing the Kaldiss. What are the odds that another ship would be near enough to help?”
“And willing enough,” Chinde added.
“You mean crazy enough,” Burhl huffed, tapping his temple.
“That’s pretty much the situation,” Lamora acknowledged. As the ship’s commander, she felt the pressure of finding a solution, of keeping them alive and functioning as a team. “We’ll need to find a ship on the rim close enough to catch and match our trajectory with a crew willing to risk their ship to save ours.”
“Is the company able to help?” Chinde asked, almost defeatedly. “Sure, we all signed on knowing the added risks of a deep survey mission, but what will management do for us?”
Her eyes steely, Ronit shrugged, “The bare minimum. They’ve crunched their cost/benefit numbers. At this point, we’re little more than an uncomfortable balance sheet item to them. A sunk cost.”
“That’s bleak,” Burhl said. “But probably fair. Business is business.”
Chinde frowned at Burhl and Ronit. “You really believe that? Is compassion such a huge liability?”
“In deep space it is,” Ronit answered. “I’m trying to face reality. The company is not going to be heroic. We’re just another crew. And crews go missing. Their sense of obligation is low, so any rescue effort they make will be purely perfunctory.”
“Perfunctory. How comforting,” Burhl chuckled humorlessly. “Ronit, as a child, you were never loved.”
Lamora features froze, stricken by those last biting words. In her deep subconscious a glacial memory calved: her mother thrashing, gasping, struggling, Lamora tucked to her side, keeping her from slipping forever beneath the waves. Were it not for her mother, she would have. And, yet, Lamora had never thought her mother heroic for saving her. She was her mom, and she’d instinctively protected her young daughter.
One sorrowful night many years later, her college roommate had broken down, confiding that she didn’t know if her parents really cared about her, that growing up they never seemed to show genuine affection for her. Then she’d asked Lamora, “Did your parents love you enough?”
Far from home, way beyond the outer rim, almost bereft of sunlight, Lamora remembered her answer. She remembered it comforting her and compelling her forward. Through university. Through post-grad. Through deep space command training.
She snapped back to herself. Ronit, Chinde, Burhl, were eyeing her curiously. Her crew. Not her family, but hers. All and immediately hers. She spelled out what they would do. How they would make it back home. All of them.
Chinde, of course Chinde, asked, “Will it be enough?”
Feeling like she was on that long-ago beach after her mother had saved her from the riptide, Lamora gave her crew the same answer she’d given her college roommate about being loved. The same answer that would fuel her now as it always had.
“Just enough.”
by admin | Mar 15, 2023 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
They’d tested it, of course, but she was the first person they’d installed it in.
The injections were painful, and numerous, the material marching through the subcutaneous layers of her flesh like an army of angry ants, and when it was done, she wore the material as a complete second skin, just beneath her own.
When they turned it on it was surreal, the loading screen and debugging information scrolling down her back, and her bare chest and across her stomach before being replaced with their logo, a lengthy copyright text, all in high contrast, glaring white against skin turned to charcoal, before clearing and settling into a tanned skin tone with a subtle, shifting, luminous hue.
The control unit was implanted through her navel, tucked safely behind the stomach wall, a port available for updates. They offered wireless, but the risk of being hacked was too great, so she opted for physical access only.
There were light sensors in the substrate that adapted the visual output based on the opaqueness of her clothing, turning off parts of her skin where no one could see to conserve energy, and adjusting her brilliance based on the time of day and ambient lighting. In time, the unit would learn her biorhythms, recognize her moods, and be able to tune its output accordingly.
The Formula 1 event brought her international attention, her body a scrolling kaleidoscope of sponsors’ logos and brand messaging blazing out around a minimalist two-piece swimsuit and sheer gown as she posed with drivers and their cars. The attention brought more contracts, and with it wealth.
Her partner was less appreciative.
“I hate what you’ve done to yourself,” he yelled at her one night after an evening event, “people used to look at me with you on my arm, they respected me.” He drank her expensive whisky from one of her imported crystal tumblers. “Now that you’re just,” he struggled for the words, “just a walking television set, nobody notices me at all. It’s humiliating.”
She almost asked if it was humiliating when he picked up the cheques for their evenings on the town to pay with her money, but instead, she just faded into the background and let him fume himself out.
The first time he hit her, she found applying coverup particularly difficult. She hadn’t worn makeup since the implant, she hadn’t needed to but she managed to cover the mark, she hadn’t forgotten how. After dinner, walking through the crowded restaurant, as all eyes turned to the glamorous couple, there were gasps and murmurs. Passing a mirror she realized her skin had produced garish purple and green bruises in the shape of rough hand marks on her arms and legs, her partner fumbling for words as he rushed her out the door to the waiting car.
The drive home was silent.
When she found out he was cheating, he knew – as soon as he walked through her door – her flesh the colour of obsidian, flames licking around her ankles to mid-calf, her face a mask of fury. He turned in the doorway and left, not bothering to pack. It was the last she would hear of him.
Later, curled in the bath, with an empty bottle of wine by her side, her flesh crawled with storm clouds, the occasional flash of lightning from the depths of the cooling water.
In the morning when the storm had cleared, she would be blue skies and sunshine and flowers. The literal picture of peace.
by submission | Mar 14, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Broz
A warship never took the same route twice, to or from battle. As the joke goes, it’s because they usually disintegrate on the way there or on the way back.
By all accounts, The Ebenezer was the luckiest starship in the Earth’s fleet, probably because the captain was no scrooge when it came to using the NeoNukes.
The captain had brought us to and from battle not just once, but half a dozen times. We had decapitated six planets, and we ourselves had not been disintegrated even once!
The WormDrive made space travel fast and easy, which of course meant that humans, in their great and infinite wisdom, decided that interstellar warfare should also be fast and easy. And so we went to war.
The plan was to find and attack every alien species we could, figuring that the best defense was a good offense. Those in their ivory tower reckoned that any alien we encountered would end up coming for our planet’s resources sooner or later, so let’s nuke them first just to be safe.
And so we built warships.
By sheer chance the development of a new weapon, the NeoNuke, happened at the same time as the WormDrive. It was a match made in heaven – or hell, depending on your point of view. With the NeoNukes, we could rain destruction down upon a planet without having to wait 10,000 years for the radiation to dissipate afterwards. After we blasted a planet back into the stone ages, we could, theoretically, go back and use the planet as we saw fit.
Our strategy was simple and horrible at the same time. We Wormed randomly around the galaxy, the ship’s computer jumping us from solar system to solar system, the computer looking for Goldilocks planets when we come out of Worm. The scan-and-plan takes only seconds. If the computer finds no Goldie, we jump again.
But should a Goldie be found, the ship instantly calculates a decapitation attack strategy. Its fast and decisive, targeting the city most likely to be the planet’s capital. In a single rain of hellfire and brimstone, we launch all of our weapons and follow them down into the atmosphere to finish the job with close range weaponry. We leave a message and a warning. We can come back if we want to, if we need to.
After one of our ships was followed back to earth somehow, our leaders made adjustments. The planet Earth itself was Wormed to another solar system from time to time. Complex algorithms known only to the ship’s computer knew the earth’s location, to prevent us from being followed. The second-to-last Worm always ended with a pause amongst a bevy of attack ships who lay in wait to ambush any follower.
We’ve just come out of Worm, in another random, unmapped solar system. We don’t have to look around. There’s a Goldie here, right here. It fills our viewport. The ship lurches forward.
As we tear down through the heavens, amongst the raining hell of our NeoNukes, we recognized the statue of liberty, all too late.
We had not been stingy with our nukes.
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.
