by submission | Aug 26, 2021 | Story |
Author: Tim Boiteau
The language of the tablet fought him every step of the way, full of shifting sands and pitfalls. It was a brief text, the only example of its kind. Three hundred characters, only three of which repeated themselves. The orthography seemed to be composed of ideograms, some tantalizingly close to pictographs. For example, one of the repeating symbols appeared to be a winking face, while another one might have been a tree or power lines or an arrow with its fletched end up.
“A missile?” read one of the lines of his notes.
He dreamed in the symbols, played with them, rearranged them, classified and reclassified them according to various methods—stroke count, sharpness or angle or curvature of the strokes.
After a year he had nothing to show the higher ups, and he was forced to admit defeat. Guards escorted him into a starkly furnished room to debrief the next linguist, a woman in her forties, who seemed to be winking at him at times. A twitch, perhaps.
And he gave his speech about shifting sands and pitfalls and dreams. “If only,” he concluded, “they hadn’t killed the messenger.” That is, the creature that had been carrying the tablet.
Then he was escorted to the memory-wipe chamber.
by submission | Aug 25, 2021 | Story |
Author: David Barber
1
Officer Chen woke just as they fell from the sky.
The woman sitting opposite cried out and braced herself for the crash. The engines screamed as the ground leapt upwards, then the dropship bounced and was still. They’d landed inside square kilometres of smart wire and autoguns.
“Was that really necessary?” The air was humid, with more oxygen. She swayed in the heat.
“Legion assumes all landings are hostile and trains for it,” shrugged Chen.
She was wearing Legion camo and a white helmet. And she, or some joker in orbit, had fastened her thorax armour on backwards.
There was a whirr of wings above them.
“Where’s Platt?” Chen called out.
The Legionary was already tracking the metre-long dragonfly with the barrel of a pump-action. The shot shredded its wings and it fluttered to the ground to be stomped on.
“Some like to lay eggs in you,” explained Platt.
2
Chen showed the reporter round Command. She loitered beneath the icy aircon, but there was no story in Legion techs hunched over screens.
“There were six rival Queendoms when we landed,” Chen explained. “Bugs had got as far as industrialised conflict. You should see their steamer tanks.”
She panned her camera round. “So we backed one Queen in return for exploiting… pardon, exporting uranium?”
Chen shrugged. “I was told you wanted to go a mission. Something more visual.”
She stared at him intently. It meant nothing, her camera was linked to her gaze.
3
They hurtled over feathertrees at Mach 1 with utter faith in terrain-hugging radar.
“Not really necessary,” Chen shouted over the engine noise. “Bugs have no air defences, but it’s what the pilots do.”
“What’s with all these devils painted on your men’s gear?”
“What the bugs call us. I turn a blind eye.”
He explained a local nest was to be seeded with a cocktail of pheromones. A covert attempt to weaken the grip of the Red Queen.
“Wait. I thought the Red Queen was our ally.”
“She seems to have forgotten that.”
Nests were underground. There wasn’t much to see, just tall smoking chimneys and roads that radiated away through jungle. The dropships settled after the same stomach-wrenching plummet.
Legionaries were outside before she could unbuckle herself.
“Stay with me, yes?”
She followed him into a dark mouth in the earth, legionaries fanning out ahead. Suddenly there was gunfire, deafening in the tunnels. She shone her camera light on bugs chewed up by bullets. They were more like centipedes the size of large dogs.
“What’s happening? Aren’t these on our side?”
Chen shaded his eyes as she pointed her camera at him. “My report will show this was an unprovoked attack.”
Legionaries came running back, pausing to fire long growling bursts.
“Here they come, sir.”
She turned to look and Chen shoved her. She stumbled, arms outstretched, into the frenzied bugs and they tore into her.
After a while Chen ordered his men to fire.
“Collect the body, sergeant. And the camera.”
4
Officer Chen reported to his superiors on a secure channel.
It went to plan?
“Yes sir. As a bonus her camera caught the bugs attacking her.”
An unarmed reporter. It would justify nuking the Red Queen alright.
Any problems to report?
“No sir.”
You obeyed orders, which is what you demand of your men. But you murdered a civilian and turned on allies, without any qualms. There is a place for men like you, but not in the Legion.
“Wait, what?”
This sim is ending now.
by submission | Aug 24, 2021 | Story |
Author: Mina
Hell, Gon-Zuu was in hell.
The body shell they had inhabited was overcome, again, by a wave of disgusting nausea. Gon-Zuu would have to lie down soon, preferably on the floor. They fumbled in the pocket of the alien clothing for a tablet that they swallowed dry. The only thing that helped with the constant nausea and prevented vomiting, a fate worse than death, was a medication designed for impregnated human females.
Nothing had prepared them for being trapped at the pinnacle of a soft mound of flesh, or for the sickening see-saw movement that displacement involved. Gon-Zuu’s home world had much stronger gravity than this primitive planet and their species had evolved accordingly, hugging the ground when displacing themselves.
Despite three months of attempting to become accustomed to the body shell and its method of displacement – “walking” the humans called it for Gon-Zuu had most definitely not managed “running” – they still struggled with constant feelings of vertigo and what humans called seasickness. Gon-Zuu constantly felt like they were going to fall off a precipice and smash screaming onto the unforgiving ground. The motion jostled and jarred them and that ground never stopped rolling.
Gon-Zuu had begged to be allowed to discard the body shell and leave the planet. But their superiors had insisted that they had to wait three months to see if they could become accustomed to the swaying motion while trapped so high above the planet’s surface in a flubbering jelly vessel. Only then would their commandant accept a full report.
Gon-Zuu was already certain of the message their report would contain:
Abort mission!
Human body shells are not suitable receptacles for the Cretoid.
Strongly advise seeking alternative planet for colonisation.
by Julian Miles | Aug 23, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
As natural satellites go, it’s different.
“Amy, that doesn’t look like a moon.”
“No, it’s an asteroid that’s been captured in passing. I think.”
Uh-huh. I punch ‘auto-evade’ and ‘auto-countermeasures’. My eyes are drawn back to that ugly chunk of battered rock. Something nags at me.
“Did I hear you cueing automated defences?”
“I’d rather be over-cautious and harangued by you than under-prepared and dead.”
She blows a raspberry.
“Can’t fault that, much as I want to.”
“Well, while you’re trying to find a way to blame me, give me some other possibilities.”
We continue to swing in-system at a gentle pace, supposedly slow enough to not trigger any leftover autonomous war machines.
“Well, if it’s not a capture, their moon has been subject to some violent times in the past. It looks like someone launched a mountain peak – or tried to carve it into one.”
“I see what you mean.”
Actually, she has a point.
“Amy, hypothetically, if we take that as assault damage, what would you say happened?”
There are advantages to having a pilot who happens to be a war historian.
She chuckles.
“Playing to my weaknesses, eh? That sort of damage indicates going for something under the surface. Something substantial. My guess would be an orbital defence fortress, taken out as an opening action.”
I bring up the most recent sensor sweeps.
“How do you explain the lack of bombardment damage to the systemward face? Plus a debris field that’s only half as dense to system side?”
There’s a surprised noise, then silence. I wait.
“Rupel, we’re going to be famous.”
“Why do you say that, Amy?”
“The damage was done from planetside. They aimed at their own moon and opened up with everything they had.”
I’m still missing something.
“A bombardment this big would have made it into military records.”
“Unless no-one was left.”
Sweet Gaia! Everybody learns the sentences from the First Book of The Conflict.
“‘They fired everything they had, uncaring of cost, to strike down the insidious force that had settled so close. There was no way they could win against what approached, but they would take revenge for the innocents lost.’”
“That’s it, Rupel. This is Earth!”
Could it be?
“Convince me.”
“They spent ten years turning the Moon into an assault base. They worked via clandestine channels, taking advantage of the political state on Earth to get humans to build it. Every human involved was convinced it was a secret base for their own side’s use.
“The Roekuld advance force waited until their fleets came into detection range. In the midst of the chaos caused by the detection of over a hundred thousand warships, the base opened fire. Nuclear warheads rained down in the wake of the craton shakers that rendered most of Earth’s defences ineffective. Thankfully, the vessel they’d arrived in only allowed the Roekuld to bring six of those nightmare devices with them.
“Our surviving command concluded surrender would be futile. They also knew what forces they had couldn’t defeat the massed warships. So they issued the famous ‘Earth is Invaded’ communique to every receiver in the Terran Empire, told all in-system ships to flee, then chose a symbolic end: to kill those who had killed so many innocents without warning.”
The first battle of the Roekuld Conflict was a staggering, horrific defeat. As the near-extinction raged, we lost so much – even our homeworld. It was fifty years before we rose again, then turned their home planet to dust. Twenty years later, we’re still struggling with the aftermath.
Maybe this rediscovery can help us heal a little more.
by submission | Aug 22, 2021 | Story |
Author: Riley Meachem
After years of research, Delkor Bionics completed “the door of perception.” Not a literal door, but a maze of computers, electrodes, goggles, and wires attached to a chair, it allowed whoever sat in it to examine any choice they’d made in the past, make a different one, and follow it to its logical conclusion, viewing years of existence in mere moments. The product’s release was heavily hyped up by marketing and was already world news before the first issues cropped up.
Several testers came back with severe trauma after only a few seconds in the machine, as their hypothetical choices subjected them to agonies beyond measure, and loss and grief which was yanked from them as suddenly as it was foisted on them. Even those who did not witness their own agonizing death and disfigurement, or the deaths of their loved ones, were sometimes neurotic wrecks after emerging, refusing to make any choices at all for fear of upsetting the balance of the universe. In extreme cases, these subjects refused even to eat or drink or move, and wasted away and died or froze solid. Subjects would live eternities in these myriad new lives, only to be dragged back to their young body, with the experiences of a thousand men in one young brain. Many merely went insane from eternities in other people’s lives, ones which bore such an uncanny relation to their own. Despite this, investors did not lose their investment or undercut public confidence in the brand. The Door of Perception was released.
How that went depends on who you asked. If you can indeed ask anyone and are not just trapped in the door of perception. Would you remember entering it? Could you tell the difference between a real person and a mental projection from our own mind? Most of us only talk to ourselves and an idea of another person when we have conversations anyway.
Many theorize that humans have entered the door many times, and that we are in a perception of a perception of a perception, using the door over and over. That is, as I said, if any of us is real.
I have forgotten my name, and which of my lives is real. I have forgotten how to exit, and how to choose. I wonder if there is anyone sane enough on the other side of the door to pull me back through, or if there ever was. I wonder if the door has closed upon me forever. In the meantime, I push ever further in these potential lives which never were, until in one of them, I once again stumble upon the door.
by submission | Aug 21, 2021 | Story |
Author: Philip G Hostetler
She was my dream girl before I laid myself to rest in the Dreamcell. Alright, that’s a little dramatic, I didn’t “lay myself to rest” as in six feet under. No, think of it like life insurance for your loved ones that pays out immediately. All you have to do is, and I quote, “Lay down, plug in and power up!”
Oh, the girl, yeah she was my dream girl before I signed on the dotted line to dream for the rest of my life. I know I’m dreaming now, it’s a perpetual lucid dream, life is blue grass and green skies and she’s always, always by my side.
My children, from waking life, get electricity, HVAC and plumbing because I’m the battery. And you know what the Arbiters say, “A family is not a family without a battery- today!”
Ugh. Whatever. Just watch out for the terror of the unconscious and horror of the unknown. Those weren’t in the user manual before I was plugged in. A crash course on basic psychology would’ve been helpful. Thanks doc.
But the dream girl never leaves my side, I never suffer alone. I guess that’s what we really need in the end.
I try not to think about my waking family, mostly because I feel like I’m better off without them. I’m just, guilty. It’s a hellscape out there. If the distillers malfunction, you’ll miss your daily 8oz ration of water. If, or rather, when the crop drones encounter rogue meteor storms, prepare to fast for a week. Work is menial at best, the social part of society excommunicated itself at the order of necessity.
And here I am blissfully entwined in understanding and mutual adoration with my dream girl. I only wish I knew who she was. She has the face of a thousand stunning expressions. The touch of family, friends and lovers.
My family are the strangers now, and I am better for it, damn me. Damn me and my dream girl, our perfect union fuels the dying gasps of a failed civilization.
It’s OK, she forgives me.
