by submission | Feb 19, 2021 | Story |
Author: Warren Benedetto
“Mom!” Amy called. “Package is here!”
The delivery drone lowered the package onto the receiving platform, then buzzed back to the mothership hovering overhead. A pleasant tone chimed as the package slid into the apartment.
“I didn’t order anything!” Amy’s mother shouted. Her voice was muffled behind her closed bedroom door.
Amy examined the shipping label. It was addressed to her.
“Never mind!” she yelled back.
She carried the package into the kitchen and opened it. Her eyes lit up.
“Clara, did you order this for me?”
Blue LEDs flickered on a featureless black cube hovering over the kitchen counter. Tiny gray text on the front edge identified it as CLARA: Completely Lifelike Autonomous Robot Assistant. A woman’s voice emanated from within.
“I thought you’d like it.”
Amy pulled a sunny yellow dress from the package and held it up to her body. She examined her reflection in the refrigerator’s black glass door.
“Well, you’re wrong,” Amy said, smiling. “I love it.”
—-
The smell of frying onions filled the apartment.
The AutoChef removed a green pepper from the refrigerator, then rolled over to the counter. Twin blades emerged from its articulated arms. It chopped the pepper, then paused as it awaited Clara’s next command.
Amy bounced into the kitchen in her new dress. She inhaled.
“Mmm. Fajitas? I was just thinking about those.”
“I know,” Clara responded.
Amy twirled her dress in front of the cube. “So? How do I look?”
The cube’s blue LEDs flickered.
“Beautiful,” Clara said.
Amy beamed.
“Where did you get that?” a voice scolded.
Amy’s smile fell away. She turned around. Her mother was behind her, her mouth drawn into a disapproving frown.
“It’s a gift,” Amy replied quietly. “From Clara.”
Her mother blew a cloud of vapor from the e-cigarette clenched in her teeth.
“You know how I feel about dresses like that.”
Amy lowered her eyes and nodded. “Sorry.”
“Take it off.”
Amy removed the dress. Her mother opened the kitchen’s disintegrator chute. Amy tossed the dress inside. It was vaporized instantly.
“Now, go change.”
Amy ran upstairs. Her mother glared down at the hovering cube.
“Clara, I told you before. No more presents.”
The cube’s lights faded from blue to red.
—-
Amy crept down the stairs clad in shapeless gray pajamas. She tiptoed to her mother’s room. The door was open. The room was empty.
Amy entered the kitchen. “Clara, have you seen my mom?”
The cube lit up. Its lights were blue again. “Good morning, Amy,” Clara said. “Breakfast is almost ready. Your favorite.”
“As usual,” Amy chuckled. As she walked over to the table, her foot kicked something on the floor. She bent down to pick the object up. It was her mother’s e-cigarette.
“Clara?” Amy asked, eyeing the e-cig. “Did you …?”
The blue LEDs on the cube circled. The door to the disintegrator slid open.
“You can toss that,” Clara replied. “She won’t be needing it anymore.”
The AutoChef rolled past Amy. Its gleaming blades whirred as it diced ham for the omelette sizzling on the griddle. Amy looked at the blades, then at the disintegrator chute. She smiled.
“Oh, Clara,” Amy said, as she dropped the e-cigarette into the chute. “You always know just what I want.”
by submission | Feb 18, 2021 | Story |
Author: Peter Arscott
The shouts across the river were loud and human. On this side there was no noise and no activity, and the house stood between two oaks along the road. Close against the side of the house the man stood with a rifle waiting for the inevitable to happen. His calm was witnessed by nobody except you, the reader, and by a squirrel in one of the oaks, and it was so commanding that he seemed to be leaning into the house to hold it up, as if, like a frightened old duchess, it would otherwise succumb to the prevailing horror and collapse in a heap. With his back against the whitewashed wall, he turned his head towards the river and spat something into the dust then cleared his throat. He whistled a tune that sounded like Danny Boy which, for now, held its own against the growing roar that rolled across the water. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a small movement in the oak to his right and raised the rifle to his shoulder, only to drop it when he saw the squirrel. On a normal day on the farm, not on a day like this, he would have pulled the trigger and downed it in one shot. Not that he was saving ammunition or even avoiding betraying his whereabouts, he did not care about any of that – there was nothing left dear to him and he was going to die.
He moved away from the wall and stepped towards the back garden and the riverbank. Now there was movement on the other side, too far away to be distinct but enough to confirm the size of the swarming mass as it appeared out of the dark woods and onto the river’s edge. His nostrils flared, the stench was already wafting across, and he spat some more. He had to wait until they were at least seventy five yards from him for the bullets to have any effect, so that meant they had to start crossing the river and reach just beyond the halfway point before he pulled the trigger, just beyond the point where a partly-submerged supermarket trolley showed its wheels to the sky. There were no boats on the other side, all had been commandeered by the fleeing community weeks ago, so they would have to, what, swim? Could they swim? Probably, despite their size they seemed capable of doing anything. He watched.
When he looked down at his wrist, he realized he had spent twenty minutes on his feet in a sort of reverie, the sounds were so familiar to him they had little effect day to day, even the smell was something he was used to, just part of the backdrop to this bad dream. He squinted and saw that they were nearer now, in the water or on the water, it was hard to make out, but as he raised the rifle and took aim it was apparent that they were neither, because the river was irrelevant, just as the seas, the mountains and the cities had been of no consequence to them. They simply appeared. And there they were in front of him, determined, uncaring and relentless. He squeezed the trigger and saw the bullet hole appear like a sudden eye in the crown of one of them. It screamed and crumpled downwards. It was all too quick, and he had no time left. He smiled, turned and looked up into the oak to acknowledge the squirrel, his one last gesture.
by submission | Feb 17, 2021 | Story |
Author: Kat Hutchson
She looked at him with her huge blue eyes.
“You have a Dollar, Mister?”
With a quick glance at her, he noticed the delicate machinery shining through three straight cuts in her cheek, the plastic flesh hanging loosely over the left side of her face.
“What do you need it for?”
“I’m hungry, Mister.”
“Oh, fuck off. Get your program checked. Fucking piece of scrap metal,“ he shouted as he walked away.
At first, he didn’t hear a single sound. Whoever designed them was a fucking creep. No breathing, moving without sound. They weirded him out with their perfect skin and their perfect form, imitating humans so much to perfection that he had often enough found himself in the arms of these stupid things after a night of drinking, demanding the same attention a real woman should get. Squeaking and screaming when he threw them out. Pretending to feel pain, pretending to have any emotions that were real and not mere code. They should all be disassembled, go back to the things they were before.
But instead of leaving him alone, she followed. Her feet stomping against the asphalt.
Oh, you want to be noticed… He grinned. In his mind he imagined how he would grab her by her neck, how she would squeak and turn and toss, unable to do anything against the programming she was set to—unable to harm anyone or anything. He would enjoy the look of terror in her eyes when he ripped her skin at the nape of her neck. Oh, how he hated those things.
Like a good lover, he would take his time, caress her skin softly, play with her hair and then unplug the cables of her power supply one by one until her body would collapse in his arms. Let them know what really makes someone human and what they are missing out on.
With her steps approaching closer, he felt the excitement rise in his body.
“Mister,” she cooed as she grabbed his hand, squeezing it harder than she should be able to. Irritated he turned around, ready to smack her but stopped at the sight of her face. She grinned at him, her left eye twitching and flickering.
“You have a Dollar, Mister? If not for me at least for them,” she repeated.
“Leave me the fuck alone, freak,” he hissed.
“You’re not very nice, Mister!” She frowned and squeezed her fingers even tighter around his hand until his bones cracked under the pressure. He screamed and kicked, hurting himself against the metal of her carcass.
“Don’t you hear how hungry they are, Mister?”
Confused he looked in the direction she pointed with her free arm but could not make out any sound.
“You’re fucking broken! Let me go!”, he screamed.
“No need to make a scene, Mister. We are all friends here. I just need a Dollar or anything else you have. Please?” Her lips twitched into an ugly smile while her hand tightened around his broken fingers.
“Let go of me!”
Instead of an answer she shrugged and put her free hand into her pocket. He saw something shiny move before his face leaving him with a stinging pain in his throat. His fingers ran to check the spot, touching a warm sticky liquid. He fell to his knees, painting the ground a red puddle.
She dragged him into the darkness of the alleyway, where she hacked and slashed at the limp body until the meowing grew louder and louder in her ears.
“It’s time then,” she muttered, letting out the beasts for their evening meal.
by submission | Feb 16, 2021 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
Linoleum floor tiles under Lieutenant Benson percolated. He watched his black and white control room warp in a rolling wave as a cacophony of grinding groans rose from below. He grasped slick white walls behind him for support, fearing his collapse. A nearby communication’s tech clenched his stainless steel table supporting radio equipment, preventing his rolling chair from careening out of control. Jerrod’s face, beneath his headset, reflected his boss’s growing terror.
“Is this how it takes everyone?” Benson screamed, with shock waves tugging his legs to near failure.
“No. It’s another quake,” Jerrod yelled back over the din. “We’re too far north for infiltration. This facility has ten-foot thick concrete footings with rebar. It’s a hundred miles beyond the tree line… not a green thing on this rock…but they’ve started tremors down south…could be Anchorage. I’ve lost contact with HQ. No one planned responses fast enough for this threat.”
“Never expected this last working Distant Early Warning site would be a safe haven from a bio-attack…like this hell.” Benson was still yelling after the station stabilized. Vertigo pulled at him, sending him rushing to a nearby chair, preventing vomit from spinning out of his overwhelmed stomach.
“Wouldn’t call us lucky,” Benson continued. “Compared to CONUS, maybe. Damn, even a full-out nuclear exchange couldn’t kill eighty percent of us in three days. Cities are all empty. No bodies to bury.”
Jerrod returned to his receiver, turning frequency dials, seeking any broadcasts since it went silent.
Jerrod interrupted. “Lieutenant, it’s weird. I didn’t even know these dinosaur sites from the Cold War existed till I got reassigned last week. They discovered I was finishing my bachelor’s in biology, planning to go civi on them. That’s a red flag. Brass claimed this was a critical operation and I fit the three No’s…”
They repeated the qualification line in unison: “No wife. No kids. Nobody.”
“I got the same line, sergeant. This rushed assignment was supposed to move me up the ladder after the increased Chinese threats. I thought we’d be protecting against missiles from Asia, not our own FUBAR…what did you call these things?” Benson rubbed his temples, squeezing back his dizziness.
“Mycelium, sir,” Jerrod responded, still listening to radio static.
“Explain again, why did DARPA idiots connect a supercomputer with AI to a fungus colony in Oregon? It’s beyond me. What the hell were they thinking?” Benson sat down hard, still queasy.
“My brother works…uh, worked… for Naval Intelligence in San Diego,” Jerrod answered. “He told me two years ago that our nuke subs needed a hack-proof com system. They considered using ocean fungus strands–after Cousteau established deep-sea floors were interconnected fungus jungles.”
“No shit? Really? That’s why they made contact with smart mushrooms? That’s nuts.”
“Maybe not. That Oregon site is the oldest living organism on Earth. Somebody must have thought it had advanced consciousness we didn’t recognize…and it might work with us once we found a way to reach out and connect.”
“So we pissed off toadstools who then told its cousins to eat us? And I thought my toe fungus was bad. Do you remember the LA news shots from yesterday of those threads quietly spreading, uncontrolled, dissolving every creature, dead or alive? Not a human bone left. They even got the roaches. It’s over, sergeant. We’re the mammoths this time, except we won’t leave frozen carcasses. Maybe we’ll be the last survivors, isolated here, but there’ll be no one to care–no one left to tell our story…or hear it.”
“Nobody. There’s a thought.” Jerrod continued monitoring the droning, continuous, monotonous static.
by Julian Miles | Feb 15, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They warn us about culture clashes, especially the dangers of exposing primitive cultures to advanced technology. My mother went with the concept of “one being’s magic is another being’s science”. Ever since, if our devices are too much for the locals, we present ourselves as sorcerers or shamans hired to protect a merchant. It’s stupidly effective, too. Fireworks and hologram projectors have saved my life more times than weapons and violence.
I remember her telling me that Fiona seemed more fairy than petite low-gravity worlder. Said she had a talent for mischief. Tonight, I’m probably going to have to intervene, but the mischief is gold standard.
The hulking barbarian points to the media box in her hand.
“Does making the lights go out kill the little men in the relic?”
“Yes, but not the little women. They fall into an enchanted sleep until you make the lights come on again. Then they conjure the ghosts of their favourite men back to life so they can cavort with them some more.”
“They are comely lasses. How does one take service with them?”
“Surely you don’t want to limit your adventuring spirit by living a life of leisure in a little box full of women?”
“After the winter I’ve had? You can pour that adventuring spirit over your backside and light it.”
Fiona flashes me a ‘dug myself a hole’ look.
I shrug, watch the look of panic cross her face, then grin.
Closing my eyes, I interface with V-space and get the Dragonfly to patch me through to our equatorial trading team.
“Tony! What’s Fiona baited into a fury this time?”
I grimace.
“Nothing yet, Larsen, but her current plaything is nearly three metres across. He’s some barbarian who does a guard boss thing during off seasons. Pretty good at both, judging by the quality of his gear.”
“Part of his face got green tattoos?”
“At least half.”
“That’s a Drashtyn Battlemaster. Think medieval special forces with command skills.”
“Man needs a job somewhere warm. Got anything?”
“We’ve a jolly merchant lamenting the lack of toughs to head up his next expedition. That do?”
“Tell him you can bring him a veteran Battlemaster from the northlands using our tame elemental. Providing he pays us full finder’s price.”
“Fiona going to puppet the barbarian?”
“Yup. He’ll be oblivious to being flown in the Dragonfly. We’ll tell him it was elemental magic; he’ll be fine.”
“Tasty. Peggy and Regan and can fake a summoning to give you a landing zone.”
“Perfect. See you tomorrow morning.”
“We’ll be ready. Come in on my beacon. Be sure to land inside the circle of flames.”
“Got it.”
I open my eyes. Fiona is sitting on an enormous knee, looking like a nervous pet. I stand and wave my tankard to get his attention.
“Battlemaster! Before you succumb to a Sprite’s Bargain, I can offer you employ in Wishtar.”
He comes up fast. Fiona rolls out of an untidy landing to tuck herself behind me.
“Gently, now. You know sprites can only do as their natures dictate.”
The massive brow furrows.
“I’m aware, merchant. What’s the job?”
“Trail lord for an expedition.”
“I accept.”
Fiona dashes forward and slaps a control rig in with a low blow. He stiffens, then walks from the tavern with jerky movements, Fiona at his side.
She walks him all the way to the Dragonfly and lays him down in the cargo bay. He starts snoring immediately.
I grin.
“You need to work on the walking, but nicely done.”
“We off to make money?”
“In the warm, too. Wishtar, here we come.”
by submission | Feb 14, 2021 | Story |
Author: Evan Alexander
On the last remaining colony on earth, a now desolate and fiery landscape, two men steal the STRATOCYCLE. The only hoverbike in the galaxy with a faster-than-light drive.
The last colony, Offworld, is a bustling epicenter of business, yet a seedy underbelly of bribery and thievery lies below the surface of this burning terrain.
”Are you sure they aren’t tracking us?” asked Pember, his eyes forward looking through the fiberglass helmet on his head, his hands tightened against the handlebars of the stratocycle.
”If they were tracking us, we’d be shot out of the sky by now,” said Orion, the secondary man who held his arm around Pember’s waist for dear life as the stratocycle zoomed through the air. Orion’s fingers pressed the tactile keys of the omniphone – off worlds compendium for hacking security systems. He held the omniphone tightly against his loose-fitting jet-black leather jacket, attempting to shield its circuits from the barrage of rain.
The shields on their helmets were illuminated by the neon effervescent signs of the business district of Offworld.
”Once we sell this thing to the highest bidder, we’re going to get out of here and never look back. I’ve got a wife and she’s expecting my son, so we’d better cover our tracks,” said Pember.
”You and I both know it’s not that easy. If we pull this off, the FTL drive will be sought after by every faction in the Galactic Peace Accords. We’ll be wanted criminals for the rest of our lives,” said Orion.
”That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Orion said as he crunched the numbers into the omniphone, covering his tracks using a virtual proxy, and then sending a request for payment from the highest bidder on the Omni-net.
”That’s a risk you’re willing to take, but I never signed up for this, any of this. You may have nothing to lose, no family back home, but me, I’ve got a future, Pember. I’ve got people that need me, people that rely on me.”
The two heard sirens behind them, as the Offworld Police Force arrived, hovering in chrome armored cars.
”You used to talk about how you loved the risk, the chase – now you’re talking about being a family man. You’re not the same guy anymore.”
”And we’re not as young as we used to be Orion.”
”We’ll have to talk about this later if there is a later,” said Orion.
Orion’s hands fiddled with the omniphone, the payment had come through from the bidder, and the man whose arms were wrapped around the other’s waist, fiddled with the device as he delivered the money to two offshore accounts. Their fates and futures were sealed, for better or worse.
”We have you surrounded – do not attempt to flee, or we will open fire,” said a loud, authoritative voice overhead.
”You might have to shoot them,” said Pember.
”If it comes to that,” said Orion, as he pulled his BR-97, a six-shot light phaser out of his jacket holster.
”You might have to shoot them now,”
”Just a couple more seconds.”
”We don’t have a couple of seconds, Orion,” said Pember. ”Shoot them now.”
”Wait for it..” Pember’s hands revved on the handlebars, knowing it was now or never, and all of a sudden…
a hue of light painted the air, splitting the night sky, a fantastic, cerulean blast of energy – as the stratocycle zoomed past time and space, faster than air, faster than light.
