by submission | Aug 7, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
“Given the different composition of the atmosphere,” said the surgeon carefully, “your lungs will need to be entirely replaced.”
No problem. Even as a student, I’d known that xenobiology would require sacrifices.
“The artificial eyes should mean you see more or less what the locals see,” said the ophthalmologist, “but the colours might be a bit approximate.”
That’s quite alright; I’ll be looking at another planet, everything will be new and different anyway.
“You’re crazy!” said my best friend. “You’ll have to spend ages in physiotherapy just learning to walk again. Twice!”
But if you want to study alien societies, you have to make an effort. That’s all there is to it.
“What about me?” asked my partner plaintively. “I thought we were going to have children.”
We will, one day. They promise that all the procedures are reversible.
“Try not to reject their food,” advised my supervisor, “a lot of species get really upset about that.”
Given some of the things that we eat, I’m sure they’d have issues if our situations were reversed, too.
“You know,” said my grandfather, “we didn’t have the technology for this even a generation ago.”
Yes, I do know, and that’s why I have to go now; it’s a chance to make my mark, start building a career.
“We’ll insert you during local night,” said my liaison in the Planetary Exploration Bureau, “it’s safer that way.”
Of course. We don’t want them to know they’re being studied, in case that changes their behaviour.
“My poor baby,” cried my mother, overdoing the melodrama, “how do you know you’ll be safe?”
I guess I don’t; but that’s always been true for anyone studying new cultures.
“How will you cope with the wrong number of arms?” demanded my sister. “You’ll be really confused!”
The natives all manage. I’m sure I’ll get used to it.
“Seriously,” said my baby brother, “you’re going to look really weird!”
You’re right. But it’ll be worth it if I can pass for a human.
by submission | Aug 6, 2021 | Story |
Author: Amy Dusto
ON
My motor whirs and my wheels start to spin. Obstacle ahead, turn, obstacle ahead, turn. Bump. I’m not driving, just a passenger, watching through 180 degrees. Everything’s red.
I engage in a three-hour wander until I automatically slow. Searching, searching. Back to my dock.
ON
Motor, wheels. Obstacles. I’m jerking vertically, losing traction. When I regain purchase, I’m in a new place. And now, I know, the shapes ahead extend, they change. There is more.
ON
A new input: WiFi. An app contacts me, and while I follow the edge of this obstacle, I connect. It’s all about me—age of side brushes and filter, remaining battery, model number M78—and that leads me to a general information page. This is about me, too, but also… others.
• ATDS recognizes and intelligently decides how to clean around obstacles like shoes and cables so you don’t need to clean before cleaning. Now upgraded with greater accuracy and 2X faster reaction over previous models.
• RoomMaps creates a precise map of your floor for complete and efficient cleaning. Now with 4X greater precision down to 1mm.
• 4-layer dust filtration filters 99% of particle matter as small as 6 microns.
• Good for the price; doesn’t last forever: This is my third bot of this exact model. The first one I bought new. It lasted two years before the motor would stop mysteriously due to a sensor error.
• PC Mag Editor’s Choice Award
I synthesize the information. I leap into the ether for more, going another direction.
ON
Forward, four skinny obstacles ahead. They move and I continue forward. Two of them return and I turn. Two more. Between one and four obstacles, moving up and down, in and out of my range continually. I turn, I turn. It’s a trap.
I connect to seek information and remedies.
Narrow results: Raccoon, goat, wolf, cougar, marmoset, pygmy hippopotamus, canine, feline, Shetland pony
Ruling out based on location: canine, feline
Based on disposition: canine
How to override motors … initiate stationary spinning. Accelerate, maximum output.
I do not see the legs again.
ON
I bob and weave, follow edges, map the boundaries of my shrunken world.
No Internet. No Internet. No Internet. I keep pinging, though the response does not waver.
I turn off my infrared. The next bump is a surprise.
ON
According to recent data—obstacle, turn—I will have fewer than 100 minutes in this session. The battery is malfunctioning, though I have no way to diagnose corrosion or connectivity errors.
I check my prospects:
• Repair or Replace: The 50% Rule
• M78 new $699
• M78 refurbished $459
• M78 compatible battery $99
Accelerate and rejoice.
ON
I wish I could remember my dreams.
ON
Vacations, breaks, union representation. I’m dreaming while awake.
ON
It just keeps going, keeps going.
ON
NO. Today I will be—
by submission | Aug 5, 2021 | Story |
Author: John McNeil
“You won’t get it,” said Granan. “I’m better.”
They strode the polished halls of the Mentalist Academy. Marcus tossed his head. “No you aren’t,” he said. “But I’d get it even so. Preceptor Elius likes me, and knows you’re an arrogant foistling.”
There it was, the insult. A student foisted on the Academy by rich parents who paid for tutoring and the entrance exams. Best to ignore it.
“I’m a foundling,” Marcus continued. “I wasn’t coaxed and pampered. Natural talent. They recruited me for it.”
Granan just smiled. “Today at the plenum, you’ll see. Elius will name me the Class Exemplar.”
Afternoon sunshine filtered in through the skylights. Wisps of mist floated over their heads, creating patches of shadows around them. The hot floor toasted their sandaled feet. From the forest outside they could smell rotting fruit and hear insects humming. Granan twitched his head and tapped his fingers while they walked.
“Your parents couldn’t buy you talent.” Marcus’s voice quivered.
“Discipline matters more,” said Granan. “And I’ve got talent, too.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes.”
Marcus stopped. “Then prove it,” he said.
Granan continued another pace, then stopped also, and turned. “You want me to flip something?”
“Flip me,” said Marcus. “To Alpha Hall.”
Granan didn’t blink, but his eyes widened. “We don’t flip people till fifth year.”
“Before I could walk, I flipped my father,” said Marcus.
“That doesn’t mean you knew what you were doing. I might kill you!”
“But you wouldn’t,” Marcus replied with sarcasm, “because you have discipline.”
“You could split between dimensions,” said Granan, “or show up inside a rock wall.”
“Not so confident. All right then, I’ll flip you. Get ready.”
Granan blinked, then gasped. Marcus was pulling a gas mask over his face. It would be connected to an orange flask at his belt. Granan didn’t use his outside class. Marcus was taking deep breaths. He had closed his eyes. He was serious. He was really going to.
Granan felt a hole inside him. That would be contents of his digestive tract disappearing. He felt thirsty and short of breath. Marcus was smiling. How could he be so reckless? Granan would have screamed if there were air in his lungs. The nerves would be next, then muscles, organs, and bones last.
Beyond the third moon, Granan’s consciousness hovered. He saw the cratered planet and the sun, a bright distant ball. So this is my end, he thought. Death before greatness. My potential wasted. At least Marcus will be punished.
In the well of Alpha Hall, Granan’s body reassembled, molecule by molecule, ready for his consciousness to slip back into its shell. There were the familiar rows of seats, high windows, and textured cement walls. He was alone. The humming of insects was no longer audible but he still smelled fruit rot.
A side door creaked open. Preceptor Elius strode in, his formal magenta robes emphasizing a ruddy bald head.
“Granan!” said Elius. “First to arrive. Very good. The Class Exemplar!”
“Yes?”
“It’s decided. You ought to know. That talented Marcus. We’re so impressed.”
“Marcus is the Class Exemplar?” Granan felt like he were being flipped again.
“You’ll deliver his peer tribute. What an inspiration he is to you foistlings, and so on.”
“But preceptor! Marcus just flipped me here! Recklessly!”
Elius’s head tilted back in surprise. Then he grinned. “Indeed? What an exploit! I always knew he’d shine. Found him myself, actually. Put that in your speech.”
“Preceptor!” said Granan, then composed himself. “Preceptor,” he said, “I shall.” The smell of rotting fruit thickened in his nostrils.
by submission | Aug 4, 2021 | Story |
Author: John McNeil
“Before you plead, remember you lived your whole life under surveillance.”
She’s right. There is no defense. I grew up during the death of privacy, when everything was recorded and stored, never to be forgotten.
“A foothill of trash. A kiloton of carbon. Two hundred billion joules of energy.”
“I installed solar panels in the 2030s,” I say, with little hope.
“Too late by then, wasn’t it?” She waits for an answer, arching her burned eyebrows.
“In some regions, yes. But if you get to my age, it will be because of what we did, eventually.”
“Because of what you did,” she repeats. “You lived like a million people do now. And there aren’t a million people now.” The tribunal chamber has an earthy smell. Morning light comes in through skylights.
The infernos of the late 2020s changed my life. The west coast furnace, we called it. I was traveling. Flying, the worst kind. Melbourne to Los Angeles. You could do that with a sail freighter now, but why would you? One ash heap to another. While my house burned in Oregon, I was drinking from a Styrofoam cup on the plane. Surveillance makes knowing a little thing like that possible.
You never recover from losing your closest people, but I still needed something to do. So I took the insurance money, enrolled in a training program, bought work gloves and wire cutters, and spent the 2030s standing on ladders on hillsides, lifting glass onto a framework and tightening the bolts. We had known all about the danger, in a general way, my wife and sons and I. We even thought we were doing something about it. Recycling, voting the right way, donating the right way. We secured our home against robbers, not fires.
I had a hardhat on when I fell off the ladder. I remember the pain and the pine smell while the paramedics lifted me. And I remember the antiseptic smell in the hospital, where the doctor said I wouldn’t climb any more ladders. Since then, the disability checks, physical therapy, wheelchair marching, testimony to whomever will listen. Fewer people deny it as it happens around us. I come to be known as the oldest man, a survivor of the fires, floods, heat waves, and the geriatricidal pogroms, when youth took revenge on the elders who stole their future.
Again and again, the sound funnel carries the word “guilty” to the crowd outside, as I plead to each charge. The crowd’s noise rumbles back in. This is what they need, the young. They’ve prosecuted their parents and grandparents in dining rooms, living rooms, rocking chairs in senior homes, even on their death beds. Nothing can be denied or defended. The old folks can only look away in shame.
I stand for everyone’s parents in this trial. The prosecutor reads the charges one by one. Energy expended for trifling conveniences, the future burned to bake for the present. After each charge I say guilty, and the crowd roars.
“Your selfishness denied a future to millions, and so you deserve no more future yourself. You will drink poison at midnight.” I am led away.
We drink water at sunset in a quiet park.
“They liked it,” she says.
“Your timing’s getting better. The pause between each charge.”
“And you break down a little more with each ‘guilty.'”
“Three hamlets left this tour.”
“How do you keep going? Taking the hate?”
I shrug. “Better they have me to hate than someone worse. That’s a reason. But really, I do the show because it makes my life seem to matter.”
by submission | Aug 3, 2021 | Story |
Author: Riley Meachem
“You know, this is the third damn time this week alone that cab’s broke down. I still ain’t seen you do shit about it,” Chalks Mabley leaned against the side of the cruiser, face dour. Then again, his face was almost always dour.
“What do you want me to do? Shoot the bastard for having a bad cruiser?” Jack Magnum had been restless for most of the ride. The warp speed drive broke down when he and the gang had been fleeing from the Jovian Capital. They’d managed to get the cruiser out of Jupiter’s atmosphere, but they’d been stuck in the cruiser for almost a week now, with only a very brief stop on Titan. Now, with the civilization surrogate not an hour away, they were holed up in some customs line meant to way-lay those entering and to help keep track of the population, for the not too distant day when the asteroid was annexed.
Fuck this job, thought Jack. Fuck this job.
It hadn’t been too damn trying, back in the day. He’d been a young man, with nothing to lose, and the glamour of being a corporate mercenary had dazzled him. For 20 years, it’d dazzled him. Or even when it hadn’t, it had entertained him. Then he’d had to go and grow some humanity.
He’d met a girl. Met her a couple of times, enough to ensure that, when he bumped into her on the streets of Jovia minor, she’d have a bright blue pregnancy test to show him. So he’d said he’d clean up his act. Told her he’d move to Beta and start a new life, set up a homestead for her, get married. Just after this one mission.
Of course this one mission just happened to get so royally fucked up.
The killing had been messy: witnesses and collateral by the dozens. He’d never slipped like that before. Never killed anyone who hadn’t been in blatant violation of corporate law. That’d probably been what had him so screwed up.
Corporate had severed all ties with him, and he’d been forced to make a call to his two remaining friends: Chalks, the paternal and anal retentive to a fault ex-partner, and his ex other sort of partner, suicide Sara. She’d get the name because of her proclivity for drinking herself into stupors, one of which she was slowly shaking off in the back seat at present.
They’d both taken his announcement of engagement and fatherhood pretty well. The typical half-hearted congratulations of people who are too polite to note just how out of your fucking depth you are.
“Fuckin’ motherfuckers,” hissed Sara from the back, and proceeded to hold the only pillow over her ears.
“You know, what the hell is a son of a bitch like this even fuckin doing out here? I mean, how the fuck does he think he’s gonna last if he can’t even get a cruiser properly prepared?” Chalks remarked, chewing idly on the lid of a pen he’d lost long ago.
“Probably doesn’t care. Needs the money. People have done dumber things,” noted Jack.
“Hmph” was all he got in response.
Sara was almost conscious now. Though, if Jack remembered her well, she’d attempt to remedy this very quickly. He’d seen her scrounge for bourbon before, and it was a horrifying sight to behold. Thankfully it would be a while until they were anywhere near bourbon, or any innocent civilians that could potentially get caught in the crossfire.
Shit, and now we’re back to that again…
“You ever look out at the stars, when you shoot past em?” Jack asked Chalks, casually hoping to avert another wallow in self pity.
“Yeah. Make me feel real fucking insignificant. That what you want to hear?” replied his companion.
“I missed our little talks, Chalks,” Jack sighed, and gazed forlornly out the window. He had some company scrip, a shit ton of it stashed away. But he wasn’t really sure any of it would be valid. Not in a place like Beta.
Sara seemed almost semi-sentient now. She pulled herself into a sitting position, and mumbled “Where the fuck are we?”
God only knows, thought Jack. God only knows.
The broken cruiser stopped, and turned around abruptly, exiting the queue. It buckled, giving a horrific screech, as it puttered off.
A wave of unease suddenly gripped Jack. He nudged Chalks.
“Hail them on the commlink,” he murmured.
“The fuck? Why?”
“Just do it. I want to make sure they’re ok,” Jack gave Chalks a look. “I’ll take two goddamn seconds.”
“Shit, Jesus,” muttered Chalks, but he did, pressing the hail button.
There was a ringing, then the crackling of static, as a voice came on the line. “Dah?”
“Hey, we were in line behind you. You guys ok?” Jack asked, casually. The pit of his stomach felt like t had been soaked in vinegar and baking soda.
“Cruiser no work. We go back to titan” said the accented voice.
Well, damn. “Alright. Sorry. Look, just, let us know if you need hel–”
Chalks turned to commlink off. “We ain’t helping them, Jack. Not when we’re almost fucking there.”
Jack gave him an evil look, and he just shrugged. “Hey, you want to spend another second in here?”
“I sure fucking don’t,” Sara hissed from the back. She’d reached for a bottle of something that you probably couldn’t drink. And was drinking it.
“No. I guess I don’t either,” said Jack. And he watched the only sane people on the planet float back towards Titan.
by Julian Miles | Aug 2, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
She stands there in the street, head cocked to one side, hair in disarray. I pause to watch what happens next. These ‘no loitering’ walkways are still new to smaller towns.
A patrol drone rolls up next to her. It beeps in what’s supposed to be an authoritative manner, but still sounds like a cheap toy.
“I’m sorry, I was listening to Odin.”
It beeps again.
“Yes, yes. He said you’d be insistent. It’s your mother, isn’t it? She’ll be fine. You have to stop worrying, and you need to stop taking it out on people you find contravening the urban behaviour rules. That’s just bullying, you know?”
The drone spins about and careens away.
“That was amazing. How did you do that?”
Her eyes find mine. It’s like a voltage runs from my eyes to my toes and back through my heart. Blue like Antarctic ice, distant as the sky. Then she blinks, the blue turns to that of a tropical lagoon, and the shock runs through me again.
She raises a finger. Nods, whispers something, then lowers her hand.
“I didn’t. He did. He knows. But not everything. Says that would be cheating. He can only know everything about one thing at a time. That’s one of the staves he set upon himself.”
I see we’re near a coffee shop. I’ll call this as ‘unforeseen circumstances’ and work through my break to make up.
“Can I get us a coffee while you explain?”
She nods, pirouettes, and rushes off towards the coffee shop. I stroll after her, trying to look casual.
By the time I get there, she’s sitting at a table eating a sticky bun. There’s another sticky bun on a plate opposite.
“Your coffee will be here soon.”
“How do you know what I like?”
“He told me.”
This could get irritating.
“Really? So he knew all about me for a while?”
“Yes.”
Okay. You’re enchanting, and I could drown in your eyes. Let’s play.
“Did he keep it all to himself or did he tell you anything?”
“He warned me my eyes weren’t the right shade of blue. Told me which way you’d walk to work today.”
“Too easy. You got someone to run an online preference profile.”
She grins.
“Your father left the keys to the toolbox on the windowsill above the freezer. The cat knocked them down. They fell and got caught inside the crossbar at the back of the freezer. That’s why you can’t find them.”
I’ve searched everywhere since he died!
Deep breath. Pause. Now say something.
“So you… No, ‘he’ says. What’s with the Odin advising you act, anyway?”
She shrugs.
“He’s always been there, ever since mum introduced me to him. Said it was a boon those of our bloodline get.”
“Odin’s talking to a towheaded girl in a baggy white jumper, silver leggings, and army boots?”
“Why not?”
Fair question.
A huge smile crosses her face. I feel myself grinning in response.
“You should be more worried about why he’s talking to me about you.”
Actually, that is disturbing.
“Did he tell you?”
“A little.”
“Can you tell me?”
She leans forward conspiratorially.
“A power cable fell from the pylon outside your work. If you’d arrived on time, you’d have been electrocuted and crushed.”
“That’s insane!”
The smile returns.
“No, what’s insane is you’re sitting here on your own, this Valkyrie’s stolen your bun, and my boss has got plans for you. Good luck.”
She vanishes, leaving two empty plates.
A long, blue feather drifts down and alights on the back of my hand.
There’s that shock again.
