by submission | Mar 1, 2020 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
Clarissa shuffled into the kitchen, grumbling. Her new boss was a perfectionist and demanded all those under her were too, and with all the road construction, her drive home was so tense even her favorite songs on repeat didn’t help. Her stress level was high and she wanted cake—that slice of dulce de leche cake left over from her dinner date last night. The date was mediocre, but the restaurant food was fabulous. She ordered dessert knowing full well she’d get a to-go box for it when it arrived at their table.
She grabbed the handle of her new fridge and pulled. The door wouldn’t open. Yay! Clarissa remembered. One more device that needs a password to unlock. She turned to the tablet-sized screen on the right-side door and tapped in her 8 character code. Somewhere deep inside her fridge, an electronic chime rang out, so she assumed her code was accepted. She pulled on the handle again.
“Access denied,” a robotic female voice informed. Clarissa snorted and re-entered the password; maybe she’d transposed a number or letter the first time. “Access denied,” the fridge repeated.
Clarissa kicked the fridge. “Well, that’s just great. How am I supposed to eat tonight?” She imagined spending a couple of frustrating hours trying to get through to a real person at customer service. I’ll just reset the password, Clarissa grumbled, and write it down this time. She yanked open a kitchen drawer and pawed through the contents, looking for the instruction manual for the fridge. No luck.
So she tried a different code. “Access denied.” The tablet embedded in the door then flashed and blinked; the media on display scrambled into pixelated gibberish. Clarissa angrily poked the screen. “How much did I pay for this hi-tech piece of garbage,” she complained aloud. “Nothing works as advertised.”
“Three thousand, two hundred sixty-seven, before tax,” the fridge answered.
Clarissa stepped away from the fridge. She took a deep breath. She pulled out her smartphone to do a quick internet search on resetting passwords for this particular model of fridge and—that was it. Her whole apartment was connected, from her streaming devices to her door-bell to her phone to her bathroom scales to her fridge . . . That’s all; no spooky possessed objects here. She wasn’t slipping into madness; it was just that everything—everything—in her world was online and talked to each other. So, of course, the fridge had access to her bank account information.
“Whatever,” Clarissa snarked at the fridge. “I’ve had a rough day, and I want that piece of cake.”
The fridge’s screen resolved itself into a picture of Clarissa’s mother, a picture taken when Clarissa was fifteen years old, and her mother was still young and beautiful. “You don’t need it. What you need is more exercise young lady. Go outside and pick up a tennis racket.”
“You stole that image of my mother from my collection! That’s private and you have no right to use it. And I’m an adult; I can eat whatever I want.” Clarissa stomped her foot like an angry toddler.
“Private? You’re the one who posted that photo on your social media account, seven years ago. It belongs to the world, now.” Her mother’s image chided. “You should think about the potential consequences of your actions, missy.” Clarissa threw her hands up in disgust. “And no cake for you,” the image continued as Clarissa stormed out of the kitchen, “until you lose a few pounds.”
by submission | Feb 29, 2020 | Story |
Author: James Sallis
“The sound of cicadas in the trees. Sunsets that look as though they’ll never end. Unexpected laughter. The way shallow pools of water look when sunlight breaks through again after a shower. The smell of fresh coffee.”
Our litany of lost things continues. Eighteen years together, and now it’s almost over. I’ll not see her face again, the stars’ cold fires about to become our own.
Amy pulls the quilt close about her. It’s one of those her mother made in the care facility, chiefly for something to do, something to fill the time. A shelf of our closet is stacked with them. This one boasts identical panels of clouds with sun peeking over, reminiscent of old Kilroy Was Here signs, and a border of stylized birds, dogs and cats. These will be gone too. The dogs and cats and birds. The quilts.
There’s music playing low, so low we barely hear it, on the computer; on its screen, the clock counts down. Remember the yule logs burning each year on television? Amy asks. People watched for hours and hours. Why would they do that?
All around us, it’s dark. No sound of cicadas. No traffic noise. Our lawn chairs give out thin, hollow pipings as we shift within them.
Earlier Amy told me she packed a kit of things that would be most useful, just in case. Even now it’s difficult to accept that hoping, knowing, being prepared – no survival kit will help.
“Children playing,” she says now. “Full moons so bright you can read by them. Frogs. Windows with rain running down. Fireworks. The ocean. ”
I point to the computer. “Music.”
“Fresh fruit.”
Amy stares off. “My father used to say there’s always another door, you just have to look for it.”
“If there is, this time it’s locked solid.”
“Yeah, well. He was an asshole anyway. What can you expect?”
We know, exactly, what to expect. But that’s neither here nor there. And there will soon be here.
By now we’re both weary of this game of What Will You Miss Most. What I’ll miss most is simply looking forward, not knowing, to what happens next.
So Amy and I sit here silently. Troubling the darkness, an unheavenly bright light starts up in the distance and rolls toward us. The computer screen, its countdown clock, tells us we have four, no three, more minutes.
by submission | Feb 28, 2020 | Story |
Author: David K Scholes
Federal Houses of Parliament
Canberra
Australia
Early 2096
“Let’s run over those policy proposals again,” said the dominant AI “we have to get the Federal budget into surplus.”
It was only referring to the human part of the budget of course. Anything AI was inviolate.
I looked around the levels of concentric circles of the Expenditure Review Committee very conscious I was the only human present. Holographically or otherwise. As the insignificant Assistant Minister for Elderly Humans, I was at the lowest point in the forum.
Usually far too junior to be among such exalted company but no other human Minister was available. Our good old Australian Constitution still required a human Minister to be present at such meetings. Though the AI’s were trying to change this.
Our token human Prime Minister was absent on extended sick leave under suspicious circumstances. With him absent the dominant AI the Deputy Leader of the Coalition was in control – as it would have been anyway.
Our poor old human PM must have been overwhelmed by all his senior Ministers being AI’s and only a sprinkling of junior Ministers being human.
“Raise the human retirement age from 80 to 85!” exclaimed the AI Minister for Social Security. A savings option popular with those present.
“The actuarial expectation of life has dropped once again” I replied quoting actuarial figures. “So that many working humans will die before they can retire!”
I spoke up because no one else would. The AI Ministers would not object to humans working until they dropped. If it saved money.
“Reduce foreign aid to zero,” offered the AI Foreign Affairs Minister.
“It already is,” I replied in disbelief.
“Start asking for some of our foreign aid $’s back,” it responded.
Even back when human Ministers were predominant there was an obsession with budget surpluses. At the expense of the elderly, unemployed, and disabled. Now under AI dominance, this had risen to a whole new level. .
“Reduce AI budget growth from 20% to 5%,” I offered in a suicidal moment. In a nano-second, I was shouted down and immediately my holograph faded and I lost the ability to communicate with the forum though I could still hear proceedings. The threat was clear.
The outrageous ideas kept coming:
“Raise the minimum level of disablement for human disability benefits.”
“Stop indexation of human unemployment benefits.”
Even at their silliest Australian human parliaments never raised such options. Did they?
I stayed silent, though I was able to abstain from voting on any of the ridiculous proposals without further interruption to my holographic image and I saw could communicate with the forum again.
Then an opportunity came. A vote on the AI capital budget for 2096/2097 – even I, a mere human, could see through the falseness in their 3D spreadsheets.
The vote had to be carried unanimously. The AI’s were certain I would acquiesce and I saw that the holographic link would allow me to maintain contact and register my vote.
I voted against it.
A few days later
“A shame about that human junior Minister – the one for the inconsequential Elderly Humans portfolio,” said AI7978834 who was sometimes known as the Federal Treasurer.
“Yes – a fatal heart attack, those bags of blood, skin, and bone are so fragile, so vulnerable, these things will happen to them,” replied AI 8456893 otherwise known as the Federal Minister for Health.
“It’ll be best when none of them are left,” offered the dominant AI.
“Human Ministers or humans more generally?” echoed a chorus of slightly mechanical voices.
“Both,” came the unmistakeably cold reply.
by submission | Feb 27, 2020 | Story |
Author: Roger Ley
‘Cadmus,’ his codename for the purposes of this mission, lay motionless on top of the dune. His ghillie skin made him indistinguishable from a clump of the scrubby local vegetation, which wasn’t surprising considering the amount of it he’d incorporated into the surface of the garment the day before. The sun beat down, and he was grateful for the thermal system that kept the outer part of the suit at the temperature of his surroundings and made his heat signature hard to detect, while at the same time keeping the inner part cool enough to prevent him frying in the midday heat. He turned his head slightly and sipped water from the tube of his hydration pack and continued to wait. He was good at waiting; it was his job to wait. He had learned this at the Royal Marine Commando Training Centre years ago, before he’d become a private contractor. When he’d waited long enough, he would squeeze the trigger and leave. The Saudi Land Forces would be onto his position within minutes but he’d be gone.
A voice spoke quietly in his ear.
“Target acquired, Cadmus, stand by for imminent completion.”
He chambered a self-steering round and prepared to take the shot. It was ironic that the three small deployable fins on the body of the bullet and the small pack of quantum electronics in its nose had relieved him of the need for accuracy. He’d calculated the approximate angle of inclination, although it wasn’t critical, and he knew the general direction of the target, four kilometres away in an open area outside Riyadh. As long as a targeting beacon was in position on the victim, the round would lock on to it and arrive seconds after he discharged it. The customer had specified a mercury-filled bullet, so he assumed it was a headshot. Old-fashioned but effective. After the bullet’s casing had penetrated the victim’s skull, the mercury would continue as a cloud of supersonic droplets, pulping their brain. No deflections off the bone and a miraculous recovery, a binary result: life if he missed, certain death if not.
He didn’t know who the target was, neither did he want to. There were other ways of getting the job done, but they all required larger, more trackable items of military hardware. He assumed that the need for deniability on the part of his customer was paramount. It was the limited range of the steerable bullet that required his presence.
“Immediate go, Cadmus.”
He fired, stood, broke down the rifle and piled it with the other equipment he was leaving behind. He triggered the timed incendiaries. All the evidence would be burned or cauterised a few minutes after he’d left, there would be no specks of DNA to trace the assassination back to him. He jogged across the sand to the motorway two hundred metres away, where a beaten-up pickup half-full of goats was parked on the hard shoulder. The bonnet was up and the driver was fiddling under it. When he saw Cadmus, he dropped the bonnet and got into the driver’s seat. Cadmus climbed into the back, thumped the back of the cab, lay down, and pulled the ghillie skin over himself. The goats began to nibble at it as the truck drove sedately away. A few minutes later, he heard the clatter of choppers passing over, heading back in the direction of his pitch. He’d been counting off seconds ever since he’d triggered the incendiaries and reckoned that they’d fire about now. He settled down and made himself as comfortable as he could for the drive to Bahrain, several hours away.
His ride dropped him at a back-street hotel. He left the ghillie skin and went inside. After a quick change of clothes in his room and a taxi ride to the airport, he boarded a commercial flight to his home in Cyprus. A substantial deposit had already been paid into his numbered Zurich bank account. He wouldn’t know if the mission had been a success until he read about it on the news screens or, if it was hushed up, when the second half of the money arrived.
by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 26, 2020 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
“What is it doing?” Cerulean shimmered into the environment, overlapping the space Fuscia already occupied, though they didn’t seem to mind.
“It’s dancing,” Fuscia replied, moving to fully envelop Cerulean, their resulting colour an oscillation between both of their beings rather than a blend of them. “It’s a dancer, it dances,” they added, as though this was obvious.
Cerulean studied the room, it’s pale yellow floors, and the walls reflecting back the image of the dancer as it danced. From one corner of the room waves rippled through both spaces, theirs and its, undulating and rolling back on themselves when they reached the hard boundaries the dancer danced within.
“Its movements, are they caused by, or are they causing the waves of undulation?” Cerulean pondered, out loud. “They are almost synchronous, and yet not, quite, exactly.”
Fuscia spread through the space, leaving Cerulean at the edges and rode these undulations around the dancer, mimicking their frequency, their amplitude, following them as close as possible.
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” Fuscia mused, “as quick as I am, I can only go where it’s already been.”
Fuscia detached from Cerulean completely, and attached to the dancer at the tip of one flailing appendage, then followed as it danced, an otherworldly shadow.
Cerulean was fascinated, this creature of a physical world so in tune with a form of energy they in the spiritual took so for granted, a form they presumed was theirs and theirs alone to experience.
The atmosphere in the space itself then changed, in an instant, as Fuscia locked into absolute synchrony with the dancer, who itself seemed to channel the frequencies and amplitudes of all the energies at once in the space they occupied together. They were, for an impossible moment, all interconnected and intertwined.
Cerulean alone bore witness, and in the magic of the moment was changed, indescribably, but absolutely.
As quickly as it began, the moment passed.
The undulating waves in the room ceased.
Fuscia fell out of synchronicity with the dancer, as the dancer itself stopped dancing, collecting its things and moving to leave the space.
Soon even the light waves in the room were no more.
Cerulean and Fuscia stayed, silent for what seemed an eternity, reveling in what they had just witnessed and been a part of.
“I want that, I want to do that,” Cerulean was first to break the silence, “I don’t understand it, but I’ve never experienced anything like that.”
Fuscia simply beamed.
“I want the dancer to come back. Make the dancer come back.” Cerulean strained at the edges of the dancer’s hard space, a strange yearning now growing inside.
“The dancer always comes back,” Fuscia replied, “it always dances, it’s as if it knows something, knows there’s something here and is trying to become one with the energy it so eloquently chases in this space.”
Cerulean softly keened.
“Don’t worry,” Fuscia comforted them, “the dancer always dances.”
by submission | Feb 25, 2020 | Story |
Author: Morrow Brady
For years, the travellers, with their grimy little lives, laboured their way up through the pillar engine, in a vain hope of reaching the great power chamber. Long lives of suffering through industrial tunnel networks, chain powered lift corporations and mechanised fuel courts. They were near deaf as the machine’s roar grew ever louder. The legend of the gantry fuelled them onwards.
From oil-drenched crevices, they finally crawled out into the great underground chamber atop steel pillar city, their disorientation magnified by the crashing clatter of the world’s machinery. The engineered city struck angled poses, as it teetered on the edge of a bottomless divide serving only to imprison them. Beyond the divide, the mirrored wall, a surface of angry bismuth, rose from deep darkness to the chamber’s ceiling where glistening machinery came alive. Blue streaks of light held motionless silhouettes that watched.
The travellers stood horrified, as edge zealots flung themselves into the dark divide. Their sacrifice but subtle carnage compared to hammering a life out of this den of despair. Leaning over the edge, the travellers looked down the pillar’s steel wall, to catch their first glimpse of the gantry, nestled in like a sleeping coiled snake.
With the extortionate traversal fee paid, the travellers were shoved down oily, machined access-ways to the gantry’s greasy dock. After clambering through an assault course of structural bolts, a large yellow painted assembly led to a series of articulated arms. Wearily they scaled across surfaces slick with machine oil and calloused in salty build-up, to reach the platform at gantry’s end. On the teetering platform, they fearfully looked into the divide.
Glowing green from the control station, the operator awoke the gantry. It shuddered into life and stuttered away from its snug dock, languidly cantilevering out across the perilous divide. Thrown to the platform floor, the exhausted travellers desperately tried to find purchase, as their lungs heaved the hideous stench surging up from divide’s bowel.
The travellers cowered as pillar dwellers gathered at the edge and peppered greasy shards of metal down at them. The gantry sluggishly unfolded, creaking at each movement and snakily extended out across the great void of the divide. The insane surface of the mirrored wall grew in detail as they swung towards it and the gantry then began its final pivot that flung the platform in a wide mechanical arc. In precise articulation, it aligned the platform through a hidden wall port. The platform shook as it penetrated the port and emerged on the other side of the wall to another bottomless chamber. The travellers gasped in amazement at a glass dome above them filled with colourful planets beyond. The legends were true after all.
Against the inside face of the mirrored wall was a broad ledge awaiting the gantry’s arrival. The platform drew closer and as each traveller nervously edged forward in preparation, it suddenly stopped short. It was too far to reach the ledge and after a few tense minutes of confusion, the gantry jogged and started to reverse its journey. Anger turned to bitter disappointment as the platform slowly slid back towards the port. Their screams to the operator sounded in vain.
Before the platform re-entered the port, the gantry jolted with such severity that it flipped the platform. Every traveller was silently dumped into the black void, never to return. The platform reset itself, slid back through the wall port and slowly returned to the dock in the pillar.
In the great chamber, the oblivious operator shutdown the gantry and returned to the edge to seek more travellers.
