by submission | Jul 10, 2021 | Story |
Author: Veronique Aglat
Devo was in bad shape. Red oil flowed freely from his arm implant. Lena reached into her bag and extracted a fat little jar with a screw top. She pulled her patient under a giant bamboo leaf. It would have to do. Hopefully, the drones wouldn’t spot them.
“Hold still,” she said.
“How can a metallic implant hurt as much as my flesh?” he said, grimacing.
“They connect it directly to your brain,” she said. Devo knew that already, but no one really understood until they got hurt.
“Can you fix it?” he asked.
The jar contained a slimy paste. Lena dabbed the implant and localized the cut.
“It’s the hose,” she said. “It’s cut lengthwise.”
She applied paste along the cut. It provided a temporary seal. She leaned back to examine her work and evaluated Devo’s chances of survival at 50% after 24 hours. Too bad, he had an easy smile, a small nose and a square jaw, which Lena liked.
“Go, girl! You fixed me.”
“It won’t last, you have to go to the medic building”, she said.
“The medic building! It’s too far. I won’t last out in the open.”
Devo sat heavily on the ground, his adrenaline spent.
Lena closed her bag. She pulled the automaton bird from its special pouch and prepared to phase back to her base.
“Good luck,” she said and pressed the deployment button.
Nothing happened.
She tried again.
“Looks like you’re stuck with me,” said Devo. “We both have to walk back. Unless you want to get on the transport.”
“The transports are only for healthy miners,” she said in a monotone.
He knew that too. If you got hurt mining, you were on your own. There were hundreds of healthy miners on the sidelines, waiting to make it big in the Barrens. The vast majority of them died before their 20th birthday.
Lena looked up; the bamboo leaf was a flimsy shield against the drones. How had she thought it sufficient a moment ago?
“Come on!” she urged. “We need to find better cover.”
She pointed to a palm grove about a hundred meters away.
“Protection,” she said.
They ran. As a miner, Devo had scored highest in Strength and Vitality. Lena couldn’t keep up with him. She scanned the sky frantically, expecting the drones to spot them. They lucked out. Devo was already pulling palms together when she arrived.
Now that they were safe, Lena examined the automaton to assess the damage.
“If you fix it, will you transport both of us back?” asked Devo.
Birding a live miner could result in the death penalty. The Law stated that only implants could be flown. The best outcome a medic could expect for flying through time and space with a live miner was Forced Labor, and only in very special circumstances. For instance, if the miner was the father of their child, or their son. Devo meant nothing to her.
“Sure,” she said.
Her hands worked fast. As a medic, she had scored highest in Dexterity and Intelligence.
“What are you doing?” he asked every two minutes.
She finished dismantling the wings. The chip in the center was fried. She needed to find a miner’s corpse; their brain implant contained the spare part she required. She slanted her eyes to Devo’s injury.
“I can’t fix it,” she said.
He grunted in disappointment.
“Look, you have a better chance of reaching the medics without me,” she said.
He nodded. He had also scored high in Self-Preservation, Lena guessed.
“Let me put another layer of sealant on the crack.”
He extended his arm, but his eyes were already scanning the jungle. She took out a grey substance and stuck it to his implant.
“There,” she said. “Run for it.”
He did, for about fifteen seconds. The explosive she detonated tore him apart. His cries of agony attracted a handful of dragonfly drones, which ripped him to pieces while Lena waited, buried under palm leaves.
Back at base, she received a promotion for using the miner as a source of spare parts. Many admired her ingenuity. As Team Leader, a title that granted her supervision of thousands of flying medics, she added a set of emergency wings to every medic’s base kit. She had stomach cancer, which melted sixty pounds of muscle from her body. She developed psoriasis. Her daughter died of anorexia. Her youngest son became a miner.
by submission | Jul 9, 2021 | Story |
Author: Riley Meachem
“Come over this instant!” That was all the message said. Henry didn’t know what to do with it. He stared at it for a moment, with a certain, deducing distance. He hadn’t been in contact with this woman for over a year now. That’s a long time to go without speaking to someone. A long time to be receiving urgent demands to ‘come over’ anyway. And the tone of her voice on the message—it wasn’t that of a hesitant ex, embarrassed, yet driven, full of need. This was an order. It was angry.
He knew, for certain, what must be being done to him. He was going to be framed, made the stooge stud who had fathered a child. She had chosen him of all her exes, the easiest to cow and break. There would be a child, and he did not want it, wanted no part in its upbringing. He deleted the message.
Then another one came. “Henry, I need to speak to you—it’s important!” The brevity was startling, and the insistence an affront. He blocked her number.
Several weeks passed. Then there came a knock on the door one day as Henry sat alone in his apartment. He opened it and found her standing there. As he had suspected she was pregnant. His face must have revealed his paranoia, for almost immediately she chuckled and said “Oh, don’t worry—it’s not yours.”
“Can I—get you on record saying that?” Henry tried to ask, but the words seemed feeble and heartless to him, and they died halfway out of his mouth.
“Henry, you don’t seem to understand.” She strode into his place of living, noticed a half emptied bottle of gin. She had drained it before he could so much as protest. “I don’t want this baby pawned off on a man. I want it dead, Henry. I want you to help me kill it.”
“What… you mean like… pay for an abortion?”
“No: I tried that. It’s not a normal baby, see. Something got mixed in with it, somewhere along the line. It’s not human. It’s eating me, Henry. Bits of me. Memories, thoughts, feelings, looks. And worse, it seems capable of sparing me. It’s mother. Trapping me in my own corpse. For God knows how many years.”
“Well how do I kill it?” Henry inquired, unnerved by this exchange.
In response, she removed a .380 revolver from her purse.
“Please” she whispered. “I’ve tried, but I can’t do it alone. I’m a coward. Please Henry! You are the only one I trust! The only one I ever really loved!”
That hurt most of all, somehow. He threw her out of his apartment and locked the door, but she stayed by the door for hours, screaming and begging for his help. Then abruptly, late that night, the cries tapered off, turned to strangled croaks, then nothing.
Next time Henry saw her, her eyes were oddly blank and glassy. Her motions rigid. She was right. Right and gone.
by submission | Jul 8, 2021 | Story |
Author: David Barber
“Hurry, Igor!” called Miss Frankenstein.
Outside, the electrical storm drew closer, and thunder rumbled over the thrashing treetops to the south. Everything now depended on snatching lightning from the skies. A month of unseasonable fine weather had driven her near mad with impatience.
After so much work, after so many disappointments, after waiting so long, success was within her grasp. Her searching gaze took in the laboratory. Her laboratory.
More hygienic than robbing graves at midnight; more scientific than sewing together bits of dead bodies. What had her uncle hoped to achieve in the long run? There was no denying the heroic surgery, but it was a performance, not science. And it had all ended badly, chasing off into the Arctic after his creature. Such a male thing to do.
Igor limped into the laboratory, sloshing a flask of murky broth.
“The dead microbial culture?”
Her assistant nodded.
“And the Vital Principle?”
For a moment Igor’s face clouded, then cleared. “Ready.”
“Then bring it,” cried Frankenstein. “Bring it, and we shall create history!”
“Yes, master.”
“And don’t call me master. I am not him and you are not my servant. The old days are gone, we work together now. You are my assistant in this great enterprise.”
Igor did not answer. Perhaps he preferred the old days, nails black with gravedirt, the spat of voltage on reanimation nights, a whiff of corruption about the place.
When he returned, there was something about his expression, those beetling brows failing to hide a shiftiness in his gaze.
“You centrifuged the Vital Principle?” queried Frankenstein. “Then resuspended it in fresh broth?”
More nods.
“And checked the pH? The pH is critical.”
On the rooftop above, electricity danced about lightning conductors, then down copper wires to crackle round Igor as he closed the knife switch.
“Think!” she admonished him, while the very hairs on his head stood up as if in terror. “Dead microbes reanimated! Tomorrow, plant and animals, then one day, who knows, my uncles’ dream. Even people!”
The modern miracle of electricity meets the Vital Principle – the nucleic acid extracted from living microbes. The dawn of a new age! Men of science did not believe the Vital Principle was merely a chemical. But she would prove them wrong!
For a moment she swayed, dizzy with fatigue and euphoria. Months of work neared its climax. Perhaps she misunderstood the look on Igor’s face. Again she explained.
“Electricity will infuse the Vital Principle into the dead microbes. We will show they can live again! But do not concern yourself, Igor, we will dispose of them safely afterwards.”
She almost giggled. “They will not escape like Frankenstein’s monster.”
Igor said nothing. Preparing the Vital Principle earlier, he had dropped the flask of E. coli, but luckily found another, labelled Yersina pestis, left over from his old master’s investigations into the Black Death.
He’d used that instead. She would never know.
Busy with the future, her attention fixed on a clock as the bacterial mixture fizzed and bubbled into new life, she fluttered a hand vaguely.
“Go and see what that commotion is.”
Outside, the electrical storm lit up the sky, freezing the angry mob for an instant like a flashbulb, all jostling pitchforks and torches, before they burst into the lab to smash this latest abomination, loosing something monstrous into the winds.
by submission | Jul 7, 2021 | Story |
Author: B.W. Carter
She knew he’d really been thinking about this one. They’d made their way across campus to the shop and he was still on the conversation started back in the classroom. She let him keep talking. And he did, as they wended through the crowd to a table by the window; he let her carry the drinks, too caught up in what she would not tell him to his face was pure nonsense.
Isn’t that what you did — or did not do — when you liked someone?
Apparently. So, she clenched her jaws and listened.
It’s what she’d wanted, after all.
“What if,” he said (and here we go) as they took their seats, then stopped. Blew hard on his drink and started again. “What if,” he said, slowly, “like, what if an idea of an idea is, like, you know, more real than the idea itself? I mean, what if being is in itself an idea born of, like, the idea of being? Know what I mean? Yeah? Like, just take walking here, right? Made me think. What if the idea of walking interprets itself, like, as an idea called running? Does the idea of walking no longer mean walking or does it now mean running? Know what I mean?”
(No. No, I do not.)
“Like, you know, are ideas more substantive than those things born of ideas? Or is the idea only ever an idea until it is, like, a thing, at which point the idea never existed, you know, only the thing? Know what I mean?” He grinned, but his thick fair eyebrows seemed clenched in confusion. Did he know what he meant?
(No. No, you do not.)
But he was really thinking, bless his heart. Second thoughts and on to third, really mulling over his ideas before trying to articulate. And he was so gorgeous, and she was lucky. Lucky, she knew, to be here now. The very idea of a jock like him (rugby captain and philosophy major both!) talking to her had not even occurred as a possibility before today. Much less a reality, so remote was the idea.
(As ridiculous as this “conversation.”)
She owed it to him, right? To think, to really think, about the utter garbage he was so passionately spouting.
And she really tried. She did. He was gorgeous, after all. She sipped her latte and she considered. To be considerate. Though she began to wonder as she was doing so what she even thought, anyway, about this idea of thinking about the idea of thinking itself.
(Huh?)
Or the quintessential being of an idea as itself or something else. The thought, or the idea of the thought, rather — which came first? Which mattered most? Was there an egg involved? Did she even care?
(Is he really that hot?)
Finally, she made her decision. Exhausted despite all the caffeine, and late for dinner shift at the diner, she shrugged, stood, and answered him at last as she turned to leave:
“You know, I really, like, haven’t the faintest idea. Know what I mean? But I think, you know, I can, like, honestly say that you and me? As an item? Is, like, no longer on my list of things to think about.”
And she was gone.
She’d always thought rugby sucked, anyway.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 6, 2021 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Sven had been driven out of Newport City and into the stars with a warning.
“If you ever plan on landing Earthside again, you’d better bring enough money to clear your debt in full, with interest, or you’ll be flayed and spread along the whole of Mainstreet as a warning to all the other losers.”
The warning was a kindness. He should have been killed, there and then, and he knew it, but LouisXIV owed him for saving his life, long ago, and this was him clearing that marker.
He’d spent seventeen years floating from station to station, light hopping to the furthest reaches of habitable space, conning and cajoling himself in and out of better ships, to better leads, and he was ready to come home.
“Newport tower, this is Sierra Victor Echo November seven seven three niner on approach, requesting inbound vector, over.”
It should only take a few minutes for that to throw up alerts across the control tower.
“Unmarked vessel, we do not have you on our grid, turn on locators. Over.”
Of course, he wasn’t on the grid, the sun was throwing up enough interference they’d never be able to see him. If it wasn’t for the hardened mining rig he was flying, he’d already be a meat pie.
“Newport tower, inbound heavy.”
“Unmarked…” the transmission was cut off abruptly.
“Sven, you sack of excrement, if you even think of landing here I’ll gut you like a fish myself before you get both feet on the ground.”
The familiar voice brought a smile to his face.
“Louis, nice to hear a friendly voice. You said payment in full with interest, correct?”
There was a long pause.
“We’re talking a hell of a lot of interest Sven.”
The meteoroid he’d secured was nearly 20 meters in diameter, in it was enough rare elements to more than pay what he owed. All he needed to do was land, get the cargo valued, and he could cover whatever Louis wanted for his freedom. Easy.
But there remained the principle of the thing.
Sven pushed the throttle to the pins and rolled the ship on its back, belly to space. He’d calculated on full burn with a little centrifugal help running a slingshot around the sun, that meteoroid should reach about five thousand meters per second on release. Given the ship computers’ calculated trajectory, which he trusted with his life, and this precise time of day and the relative rotation of the Earth, which he’d been working back from for months, his little payment should arrive crisp and cooking right at Newport tower while he continued following the sun’s orbit, breaking loose en route to another system before anyone even knew what had hit them.
Maybe there’d be a LouisXV holding markers somewhere else, but that was a problem for another day.
“Standby Newport tower, you should see me light up the grid momentarily.”
by Julian Miles | Jul 5, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The valley is smoking, trees nothing but scorched gravestones for the life they once sheltered. The farmland around here used to be really scenic, but the only tourists today are the subject of my little excursion.
“Good morning, Elizabeth. Welcome to this ashen paradise.”
With Cardy as my overwatch, this is going to be nothing but fun.
“Morning. Who am I partying with?”
“Seventeen hardcases with a penchant for scorched earth tactics.”
They’re good at their jobs. Holy hell, what a mess.
“Does anyone need to talk to them?”
“No.”
“Do I need to be discreet?”
“No.”
“Anything left I shouldn’t hurt?”
“Don’t be silly. Your targets just finished a sweep. They sure as shit ended anything living.”
Then it’s open season.
“Set the clock.”
“Engage in 3… 2… 1… Go!”
I reverse the direction of my knees and charge, letting my targeting arrays prioritise victims by proximity as I accelerate to a whisker under 55KPH; I can’t hit shit at anything over 60.
“They’ve spotted you.”
“I’m leaving a rooster tail 10 metres high. You’d be wasting my time if they hadn’t.”
Powering up a low hill, I launch myself into a somersault, letting me shoot the three twats huddling in the lee before I land. Two down, one staggering.
“Left a stray.”
“I’ve rolled a posse from 42 Commando in on your tail. Nothing’s escaping.”
The landing isn’t as pretty as I’d like, but no-one’s watching bar the boys and girls who’ve made me and my kind legendary, so I’m allowed a skid or two.
The next fire team is five strong with heavy weapons. I don’t like GPMG. They scratch my plating. Plus, a close-range hit could tear my head off, but that’s beside the point. A trio of minimissiles with frag heads leaves only their outlier.
He feints right, goes left, then breaks his dagger on the ceremetal chainmail across my gut. Funny how ancient warfare tech often works really well when made with modern materials. I box his ears with my stubby assault rifles. He’s wearing a helmet, but it doesn’t matter. With titanium-wrapped weighted jackets on each barrel, I halve the width of his head.
The next mob are in two pairs, and enhanced. I can see their raised body temps. Which makes the colder sections revealing their junction boxes really easy to target with the baby railguns on my right arm. I only get ten titanium ball bearings to play with, but they travel at four kilometres a second.
Three targets go down, crippled at best. The fourth is fastest, but a futile dodge only changes where he gets hit. Paired supersonic projectiles make a godawful mess of his head.
Last are the command team. Four around one. I go straight at them, flat out, assault rifles spitting. One goes down on the way in, the railguns do for his partner, and I’m on their leader before the furthest two can cover. She lets me have both barrels from a sawn-off shotgun, which hurts, and slows me down a bit. I’m going to be picking pellets out of my softer bits for a week.
Even slowed down, I still hit her at 45KPH and stop dead, launching my empty guns into the last two. The transferred energy hurls her broken body away as the rifles knock her cohorts down. I pull my automatics. Simultaneous headshots finish the party.
Cardy whoops.
“26 seconds from first contact. New record!”
Mission complete. I switch my knees back and retract the lenses over my eyes. I prefer to look passably human when I’m not being devastating.
