by submission | Sep 1, 2021 | Story |
Author: Surina Venkat
“Your nanobots are infighting,” my doctor tells me over the phone. It makes sense now – the sudden blackouts, the locked limbs, the dark red bruises that snake my body. The doctor’s voice is tight but careful, in the way of someone who’s used to delivering bad news. He tells me he’s never seen this before and my respect for him increases; unfamiliarity doesn’t phase him, even when he’s confronted with something as unordinary as this.
“Come to the lab for more tests,” he says. It isn’t a suggestion but an order. The implications of the nanobots’ malfunction are not good, especially since they’ve just started injecting babies. I’m a walking, talking PR disaster. I’m not stupid, no matter what the bots seem to think. It appears I don’t have a personality disorder as suspected – I feel vindicated in the realization. No one had believed me when I said I could hear voices in my head.
They’re whispering at me, even now, even as I hang up the phone. You’re our home, my left ear murmurs. You’re our prison, the other side says. Or maybe I’m imagining it. Or I could be hearing it. They can alter cognitive function, warp my senses so I conjure voices that aren’t audible to anyone else. Is that what’s been happening? Did they know they were slowly driving me insane? They have the ability to measure cortisol levels, they must have.
I pause. The whispers don’t. I feel dizzy but I don’t get a moment’s peace. I can’t, not with the them inside me. Or am I nothing but their container? Can both be true? I lean back against the kitchen counter. Take a deep breath.
My body won’t be my own for much longer. I don’t want to trapped in it like they are. I know how being trapped feels because one side won’t shut up about it. I look at my arms and imagine I can see them swimming inside me. My entire left arm is red and bruised and it’s all their fault.
I realize: My body is already not mine. It hasn’t been mine for a long time, longer than anyone else has realized. I don’t want it anymore, not like this.
I drop the arm to the side and use the other hand to pick up a steak knife.
by submission | Aug 31, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
And the midnight air is hall’d,
all the people turning cold,
shadows storming in a stare,
something’s coming, drifting near.
* * *
Ocular atoms detonated in a scream from a lonely girl’s eyes. An android woman and a little dog disintegrated like embers in the black night. The girl ran down a dark, ramshackle road in the rustic place. It was such a secluded, outland area, with crows, foxes, and stoats, no one was aware what was happening. She ran to the weathered, eroded stairs of a miniature, furrowed mountain overlooking a solemnity of memorial stones. The heat-glow of her eyes was emanating. They always stayed hot for a while. She went up the stairs and tripped, but then she got up again, half way up to a small portal through a tangle of shrubs and bramble, which led to a hidden, bare grove. She had been there a few times before, within the hollows, where she reflected with the reeds, the leaves, and the decayed things, but not with the mosquitoes, which she hated. They kept away when her eyes were burning.
As she walked over skirmishes of tree roots and catastrophes of broken branches under her illumination, her insides felt weird, like a vacant wrenching, and a sensation of nausea came, so she put her fingers down her throat and began to purge herself. After some minutes in the forest hall, she thought she had cleaned out whatever it was that was hurting there. But then her hands began to shiver. She felt weaker, and she lay down on the stubble-ground. The android woman and the little dog flashed, like mercury, in her mind. She didn’t really mean to kill them, did she? She turned her face into the grove sand, massaging the black earth and the mulch leaves in her high-school girl hands, sliding in the spaces between birth and death; a solitary cricket trilled in the solitude.
In the morning, the grove haze quenched the golden blaze, which transuded through cedar trees, mutating into something that was neither dusk nor day.
by submission | Aug 30, 2021 | Story |
Author: Anna Hamilton
Glacier National Park. Many Glacier, year 2050.
You adjust your iGoggles and look at the rock face. You blink twice, fast, indicating you want to do a search. You look at a result towards the bottom, hyperlinked words superimposed over the trees climbing up the mountain, and blink twice again. “Many Glacier,” the webpage says. “Thousands of years ago, snow compacted into sheets on the high mountains to form glaciers. As these glaciers moved, they slowly carved out the geological features you see today…today, due to the Great Anthropogenic Climate Shift and the resulting rise in world temperature, no glaciers remain in Many Glacier.”
Your eyes sweep over the lake, low and stagnant but the same crystal blue as in the archival photos; the brittle skeletons of trees left by fire and beetles, the immovable stone itself. And suddenly you want there to be glaciers, something cold and remote, unmeasurable, secure from man’s power, wild and mysterious…but all you see are the juttings and inlets of the rock face—those at least seem unchangeable. You take off your iGoggles and stare at the rock and do not look away for a long time.
by submission | Aug 29, 2021 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
The robot fabricators went haywire and had to be powered down and the minutes not working were counted in billions of dollars. To make matters worse, when they powered up again, all the software patches did was cause the once haywire fabricators to up their craziness and they started throwing tons of raw materials around like so many match sticks. Already, four workers were hospitalized, and the robot fabricators showed no sign of slowdown. The factory, trillions of dollars’ worth of high tech lazily spinning at the LaGrange point- robotics, data systems, and more lines of code than stars in the three visible galaxies combined, shuddered into a state of catatonia and powered down again. What little human oversight was left, shrugged their shoulders, and stood idle.
Sylvia Jensen, Bridie Hmong, Dax Jefferies and the rest of the upper management wunderkinds gathered in the mission room. Already the chaos, incriminations, and hissy fits were flying.
Sylvia tapped her stainless steel water bottle. “People, people quiet it down!” A hush came over the room. Immediately, a rep from accounting seized the floor. “Unless we get up and running soon, we’ll be one hundred thousand units behind!
Alf Sweet, shop steward spun to face the accounting rep. “At what cost to my crews? None of my boys and girls are going set one foot on that floor unless you upstairs geniuses prove to my satisfaction the fabricators aren’t going to hurt anymore of my people.”
Bridie whipped her head around “Why do think we’re here Alf, hmm?”
Dax rolled out a code sheet and tapped it once, then again to stop the scroll at his highlights. “I’m pretty sure I fixed the problem for now. However, it may cause a cascade failure in the long run once the overrun buffer is full.”
Bridie sighed “Great solution Dax… if you want to make the whole Gaia damned system crash.” Immediately the room exploded into shouts and profanities. Sylvia shouted them all back to their place and an unearthly calm filled the room. As if on cue, Big Mike, the oldest and most experienced worker on the floor came into the room. In a day and age where the median age on any kind of La Grange factory was twenty something, Big Mike ruined the average by being well into his 60s.
Out of desperation, Sylvia spun her chair around. “Got a solution for us by any chance Mike?” Big Mike walked further into the room and over to the table. He craned his neck and tilted his head to look at the code sheet. Dax and Bridie turned it so Mike could read it. His eyes moved over the sheet. He looked up. “What time is it?” he said to no one in particular.
“1655” came the answer from the nameless accounting rep.
Mike walked over to the emergency panel and opened the glass door. Without ceremony he hit the imposing RESET ONLY panic button and walked out of the room.
“Genius!” Bridie exclaimed.
“Agreed.” Said Dax. “It’ll reboot and if it’s a program glitch the auto-coders will catch it.”
With sighs and smiles they all exited the room.
Sylvia ran to catch up to Big Mike. She grabbed his sleeve. “Mike, how did you know to do a power re-set? How do you know it will work when the line comes up?”
Big Mike stopped and turned to Sylvia. “I didn’t and I don’t.” Big Mike pointed to the clock. “1700. Shift change. Not our problem anymore.”
And the wisdom of the universe opened itself up to Sylvia, and she smiled.
by submission | Aug 28, 2021 | Story |
Author: Paul Colby
In the end, no one really missed it. Some of the older faculty members in chemistry and economics had routinely enjoyed mid-morning coffee with Dr. Milstein, the cranky Americanist, who read them depictions of anal sex and urine showers from Henry Miller and John Updike. Out of habit they went looking for him one day and found the entire English wing empty, the bookshelves rifled, loose wires hanging from the ceilings of the classrooms, water dripping from rusted drinking fountains. They shrugged, looked at their watches, and decided to head to the library to see if they could find some tasty prose on their own: they’d heard good things about Nicholson Baker.
At one time, every student in the University was required to take First-Year Writing, but the head of the English Department argued that requiring English when Arabic, Swahili, and Hindi weren’t required was just another example of white European privilege, so the Faculty Senate scotched the requirement. If students wanted writing instruction, they could take the course voluntarily. But they didn’t take it voluntarily. Most students knew that good writing skills could help them write brisk, lucid application letters when they had to go out and look for jobs. But composition teachers weren’t interested in helping them write better. They used up class time having the students watch movie trailers and clips from The Office, and the students decided they could do those things on their own.
Students who had always enjoyed reading and wanted to explore the teeming universe of books were disappointed to learn, from their English teachers, that literature was merely a polite evasion of the real forces at work in the world. English majors gradually began switching to fields with the kind of subject matter that their English teachers had told them was much more important than the mere telling of stories—criminology, public policy, genetics, disability studies. Meanwhile, budding poets and novelists learned that the notion of the “author” was merely an abstract construct, that books were actually the products of impersonal social forces, while the so-called individual writer was the passive instrument of these commercial and political interests. Eventually, the University’s aspiring writers gave up writing altogether and took up cross-stitch or video game design, or just spent most of their time stoned.
Once the School of Cybernetic Neurology took over what used to be the English wing, all three floors were brimming with activity. Each office was equipped with its own server; the classroom walls were converted into whiteboards, filled from top to bottom with programming code; students moved through the halls excitedly discussing the latest theories in neural signaling; the rusted drinking fountains were replaced with state-of-the-art water coolers.
However, some of the books that once filled the offices in the English wing had been left behind. One of them, a dog-eared paperback copy of Paradise Lost, was being used as a paperweight by a specialist in synaptic networks. Idly skimming the book one afternoon, she noticed that there was a distinct alternation between reinforced and unreinforced syllables, a binary pattern with subtle variations; she wondered what purpose this served. After some computer modeling, followed by experimentation on human subjects, she learned that this type of syllabic rhythm stimulated pleasure centers in the brain, releasing endorphins useful in the treatment of depression, bipolar disorder, and OCD.
Her work reached a wide audience in the scientific community, and she ended up winning a Nobel Prize in medicine. That same year, the Nobel Prize in literature was discontinued.
by submission | Aug 27, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alfred C. Airone
“How many times do you think this sort of thing has happened?” Using gloved hands, Lady Maerlin, the current Director-Chief, turned the startling piece of discolored, shaped metal over and over in her hands.
“Who can say? Civilization has existed on Earth for several hundred thousand years, half a million years – some say a million. Perhaps a hundred advanced civilizations have risen and fallen. There are many periods which were chaotic, and there are almost no records from those times.” The Scientific Officer paused. “I think it’s likely this is not the first time such…an unanticipated discovery has been made.”
Lady Maerlin said nothing for a moment. I should know, she thought. I once studied history. Or tried to. Can anyone meaningfully interpret over five hundred thousand years of human endeavors, writings, casual scrawls, reports, records, legal documents, badly preserved images, art fragments, purchase receipts, the few audio records that remain… and knowing so much had been stored electronically and lost forever?
She set the metal object down, walked to the window that looked out over the acres of land of her official residence. With Earth’s population approaching the billion mark, she was reminded that such expanses might not always be made available for the use of a single person.
She turned back to the Science Officer and smiled for the first time since their meeting had begun. “How are you taking all this, Raj? It must have been a great shock to you. And, if I may presume, perhaps a great disappointment.”
Raj raised his eyebrows and looked to one side, then turned back to face Lady Maerlin. “It was a shock. We were convinced – I think everyone was convinced – that this was the first expedition of this type in all of human history. Surely a record of a previous such venture would have been remembered! The Expedition Leader reacted, I think, as anyone would when he made the discovery: long moments of profound silence, while our comm people kept asking him what he had found.” He grimaced. “If it weren’t for the telemetry we were receiving on his heart rate, blood-gases and brain activity, we would have been more frantic, wondering if he had met with an accident.“ He paused for just a second. “I’m not disappointed. We accomplished what we set out to do. The flight was flawless. The spacecraft functioned perfectly, the crew performed remarkably, just as predicted by all the training and testing we had done. I feel vindicated in the success of the project. It is still a tremendous, tremendous achievement.”
He stepped forward and carefully picked up the object he had brought. He looked at it again, for perhaps the twentieth time: a machined fragment, crossed by a bolted seam, showing clear signs of extreme aging that spoke of eons resting in the cold, sterile, and lifeless place in which it had been found. He remembered what the Expedition Leader had finally reported: harsh sunlight covering a vast field of gray dust, spotted here and there with debris that proved to be abandoned landing capsules, discarded components, launch platforms marking a successful return flight. Preserved from all but hundreds of millennia of relentless cosmic rays. Still recognizable markings in long-dead alphabets made their origin unmistakable.
Lady Maerlin smiled again, a smile she meant to be taken as supportive. “Yes, you’re right – landing humans on the Moon and bringing them back safely was, and is, a tremendous achievement. Something you have every right to be proud of. We just weren’t the first. That’s all.”
