by submission | Feb 18, 2020 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
People were talking about the exhibition and not just on the Net. Everyone, it seemed, knew someone who knew someone who had visited and who had a story to tell. Someone who enthused excitedly about their experience and how the images that they had seen held a particular significance. Insisting, in fact, that the entire exhibition had been tailored specifically for them.
How could they know? This the question all the visitors asked. They had to wear a headset, of course, but even so ‘how could they know?’ This is what they shouted into the faces of the unbelievers, those who hadn’t yet visited, hadn’t yet made the pilgrimage. ‘How could they know?’
There wasn’t anything necessarily special about the images the visitors described. Nothing original or unique, they were a catalogue of the boring and the mundane; a turgid litany of still life’s, seascapes and sunsets, of cornfields and meadows with frolicking horses. And all of the images were well known, well, no actually that wasn’t strictly true. Many had been all but forgotten but all were recognised by the Art Establishment, were part of the Canon as it were. It would have been impressive if just one of the visitors had described something that their Aunt Edith had painted herself, rather than a print of The Haywain that had hung above the fireplace in her sitting room, but this hadn’t happened, not yet.
For each visitor, there was always one image that had extra special significance. Many claimed to have forgotten it and only when they saw it again did they remember. And it all came flooding back – the memories re-kindled were always positive as they were transported back to a particular time and place. A place where they had been happy and where they felt safe.
The Country was divided. There were the visitors and the unbelievers and the visitors had begun to dominate. Not surprising given that the exhibition was now almost everywhere. It was no longer necessary to travel to the capital as the blank canvasses now hung in all of the cities and in all of the towns. ‘Nowhere Too Small’ – this is what the organisers proclaimed. ‘Everywhere Matters.’
The visitors didn’t listen to the criticism and wouldn’t talk to the dissenters. Many had begun to re-visit, not because they experienced something new nor because they were able to resurrect other memories. No, it was always the same, a repetition and so still they continued to visit.
by Julian Miles | Feb 17, 2020 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Unit KB428 XNG is going slowly tonight. Is there a problem? The habitual Thursday night stop at the supermarket was only 2.8 minutes longer than usual. Traffic is moving steadily. If the underspeed persists, I’ll have to notify traffic control.
Looks like Unit GN762 KKL is trying to balance my averages by going too fast for the traffic state, and for the speed limit – I’ll permit the latter for short distances, but not at the expense of the former. I make the call.
“Consignar Monit- Oh, hello Barn8. How’re things in LEO?”
“Hello, Susan No Numbers I Am Human. LEO is tidy because a detritus sweep passed through this morning.”
“I wish you could send one down my road.”
“We talked about this last time. I can’t do that. The recycling vessel would crash and make a bigger mess than you already have.”
“You’re funny.”
“I am?”
I add that to my profile. Psychologist Simms Oh I Am Number One will want to know.
“Yes.” She whispers: “Sometimes I wish you were a person.”
I know that whispering is to be considered ‘offline comment’, so I do not respond.
“Anyway, what do you have for me?”
“Unit GN762 KKL. 59 in a 48, measured over 400 metres and still offending, although averaging only 54 since the actionable offence occurred.”
“Oh dear. That car’s being driven by Ian Bagrhams. This’ll be his third violation this year.”
“Car? Driven?”
She makes a wordless sound of surprise. That’s a new one. I add it to my curiosities stack.
“Sorry, Barn8. Offline colloquialisms.”
I drop them from my reference stack.
“Susan No Numbers I Am Human, I believe Unit KB428 XNG is experiencing unforeseen technical difficulties. It has been moving much slower than average, and is now exhibiting potentially dangerous behaviour. It has just veered out of oncoming traffic for a second time.”
“Oh my. Good grief! Susan Travers has had a stroke! Barn8, action an immediate emergency halt on Unit KB428 XNG.”
It’s not often I’m allowed to intervene. Linking with the override module on Unit KB428 XNG, I see it’s a fully updated control suite. All I have to do is tell it to enter emergency handling mode, pull over, and then stop.
“Actioned. Unit KB428 XNG is now stationary, secured, and awaiting emergency services. Location co-ordinates have been forwarded to the closest Highway Emergency Unit with paramedical clearance.”
“Oh, thank you. How did you know to call paramedics?”
“Five years ago you asked me to route paramedics to Unit SV998 LGM. It had left the road. You mentioned the word ‘stroke’ in the description of medical emergency. I merely added the correlation ‘stroke requires paramedics’ to my reference stack.”
“Barn8, you’re a star. You can return to monitoring.”
I end the call.
Star? I have a correlation for that –
Twinkle, twinkle, little me.
by submission | Feb 16, 2020 | Story |
Author: R. J. Erbacher
I looked in the bathroom mirror but couldn’t see him. I saw just my reflection. My every-man, cleanshaven angular face. And the gold and lavender custom marble tiles of the wall behind me. The matching lavender Egyptian cotton towel draped over the heated drying rod. But not him.
It was getting harder to see him. The more space between the ‘decision’ and now…the fainter he became. Whereas in the beginning, he was right there. Every time I looked in the mirror, he was staring back at me. Exactly the same. Eventually, almost the same. Subtle differences that I could barely notice – but did. Then gradually, over time, more evident changes. The more he changed, the more I stayed the same; the harder it was to find him in the reflection.
I was afraid he had finally faded to gone. The gap bridging the decision and my current look-see into the mirror having elongated to the point of his dissolution. I lowered the Euro crystal light fixture to just above dim and squinted harder.
Nothing for several seconds, stretching to a half minute, then…
He was there. His face was pudgier than mine, three-day beard, more wrinkles around the eyes. Except those eyes were mine. And longer hair, unkempt, graying highlights at the temple. A nasty scabbed cut on one ear. In the mirror, the wall behind him was originally white square tiles that were now an unclean gray, two were cracked. The white matching towel was bunched on a hook and smudged with dirt. But he was there.
I stared. He stared back. I was irate with him. I always was. Because of the major divergence between us; my face was always a hard-emotionless line. And he was smiling.
by submission | Feb 15, 2020 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Marks
“Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?” -Thomas Pynchon
When homo sapiens expired, at last, it was not by fire, nor by a virus, as the species’ own wits and prophets had predicted. Rather, it succumbed to boredom.
The last days of Earth’s supposedly sole sentient creatures took place on a denuded plain of their own making. No trees remained and the few remaining shrubs blew about like tumbleweeds from old sepia photographs of Kansas. Earth skies were often a dun grey due either to dust or monsoons. Former mountains had collapsed from mining, having either been decapitated or simply fracked to death.
The world had become flat.
Flat and dull. Flat chested but also flatulent. Earth was now routinely coughing up noisome gases, an accelerating pattern that commenced when homo sapiens developed a surprising infatuation with the smell of burning tar. And shortly before that tar ran out, formerly frozen stretches of the far northern regions of the planet began to liquefy in methane releases, a gas whose production they shared with a growing global population of cow butts, swarms of oil drinking vehicles, and archipelagos of “pig shit lakes” now dotting the landscape. The latter being a growing geographical phenomenon built to accommodate the waste disposal needs of a booming porcine population whose numbers vied with homo sapiens to top the census sheet.
In the midst of all this, the rest of the world died. And so it was that homo sapiens began to succumb to horrific boredom.
The reason was simple: there remained nothing to look at. The long-standing hologrammatic fixation of homo sapiens was broken by an absence of items to share across formerly vast clouds of digital projections. People would gather at their screens waiting for something to happen. The wait grew to immeasurable lengths. Between the grey ground, the steely sky, and the herds of pigs leaving pools and piles in every direction, nothing remained to offer titillation. Boredom unleashed a die off.
It began in the middle of the twenty-first century but the species received a temporary reprieve when the pigs became stricken with a virus that did not impact homo sapiens. In every direction, the creatures dropped and decayed and this novelty staved off the boredom epidemic. But soon after came small group die-offs of homo sapiens followed by mass expirations where crowds of the species simply dropped to the dirt. The reason for this sudden end was never clear to the victims themselves, it was speculated that the ever-increasing stink intensity was to blame. But in truth, boredom was the contagion.
– – –
About a decade later Canis lupus emerged, venturing forth from their lair
For some years they had stuck out their snouts and sniffed the air, trying to detect evidence of scents that surpassed smells they already knew: Canis lupus was seeking out the sweat of any remaining homo sapiens. But when the last salty hint of metabolic activity disappeared, out came the scouts. What they found was a vast mausoleum, a bone littered Earth. At first, they burned these relics where they lay but eventually they dug several large pits around the globe connected to their own underground waste chamber networks. In went the bones. It was unsentimental labor.
The return of Canis lupus would, needless to say, have startled any remaining homo sapiens since no member of that departed species ever knew where Canis lupus had gone. As early as the late nineteenth century the “wolf” had started to disappear from entire continents. And while hunters and poachers were often justly blamed, it had never been fully understood by homo sapiens what it was that “extinction” meant. Perhaps extinction was a place like Heaven? Or maybe death meant simply nothing. But the truth was, Canis lupus was sentient too and had retreated to a subterranean hiding place separate from the mines and pits that pocked more and more of Earth’s surface. In their underground chambers, Canis lupus waited out the last days of a species they knew had little time left.
What homo sapiens never learned was how sentience did not depend upon opposable thumbs as so many of their scientists had assumed. In truth, a fixation with tools, and screens, and machines-that-went-boom was a fatal flaw, irrational rationality to be avoided.
It turns out that what sentience meant is a recognized need for companionship. There had been a story, a homo sapiens story in fact which told of a man who had seen a vision of thundering bison herds disappearing through a hole directly into the Earth. Out of that same hole came a cattle herd. Canis lupus knew this story and elected to invite B. bison to join them. It was noted that along with B. bison would also come their feed plants while on the animal’s skin clung critters dependent upon its blood and fat, insects and mites that would nurture avian appetites. There would be a community.
From this beginning came the great theory of “the bison’s back,” a formula compatible with Canis Lupus’ survival plan. Walking out onto a denuded Earth, these pioneers took to terraforming their new Eden.
by submission | Feb 14, 2020 | Story |
Author: Bruce McAllister and Patrick Smith
What does a county animal control officer do when people throw away the pets they’ve ordered, had designed for absurd amounts of money, but no longer want? The Purple Poodles, the Forever Kittens, the Songbirds Just for You. What does she do with the mistakes—the ones with too many legs, two heads neither of which can see, or a six-chambered heart that shouldn’t be in this world—all dumped in the roughest neighborhoods of the city where the fly-by-night companies that have engineered them always dump them so they don’t have to pay bio-materials recycling fees?
She takes them in, of course.
The officer is Gabi Uong-Simspon, and she lives in El Monte, the same city where three generations of her family were born and grew up. Her house is a modest Millennial stucco in a multi-zoned area off Garvey. It has, at last count, twenty-three rescued engen-pets ranging in size from a sparrow to a pit bull, and all permitted by the city. She’s converted her garage and added a second story to the house to accommodate this menagerie, but she’s taken her time because the health and welfare of her rescued pets are everything to her.
“I’m no ‘cat lady’ with starving cats,” she explains. “I’ve always loved animals. As a kid, I tried to fix every injured animal, domestic or urban-wild, I could find. Must’ve been a pain to our neighbors,” she laughs. “With the epidemic of dumped engen-pets these days, a lot of them are injured.”
Do her animals ever cause trouble for her neighbors?
“Not often. If there’s a noise complaint, that’s only because a neighbor is concerned about the animal’s welfare. When both of us are away, we monitor everything with the two dozen cams we’ve placed in the ‘compound,’ and one of us is always within a fifteen-minute drive from the house. Occasionally one of the animals does get away, but they’re chipped, and we’ve given neighbors pics of all of the animals so no one will be too surprised.”
Do the children in the Uoong-Simpson family like visiting?
“Oh, yes! We give our nieces and nephews, especially if they’re really young, a little informal training on how to handle certain pets, but they’re good kids.”
Any children for Gabi in the foreseeable future?
“My partner and I have discussed it,” she answers quickly, with a ready smile. “But we’re just not ready yet. Maybe instead an engineered sub-human primate, a species mix of some kind, what some companies call a ‘forever child’—totally illegal to make or own, of course, but they do get made and they do get dumped (there’s a story for you!)—but only if I happen to run across it as a rescue and we can get it permitted by State and city.”
Is Gabi happy with her life these days?
“Oh, yes,” she says. “There couldn’t be more important work as far as I’m concerned.”
That smile again.
— from “Gabi Uong-Simpson: A New Kind of Animal Control Officer,” Los Angeles Times Online/El Monte Edition, February 14, 2033
by submission | Feb 13, 2020 | Story |
Author: Moriah Geer-Hardwick
“Henry?” Bringdown raises an eyebrow. “Really?”
“You don’t think he looks like a Henry?” Allgood turns the skitter over in his hand and snaps the activation tab forward with his thumb. Its little legs snap outward and immediately begin hacking at the air.
“I think it,” snorts Bringdown. “Looks like every other mass-produced piece of garbage they issue us. Why the hell give it a name?”
Allgood gently sets the device upright on the ground beside him. Once in contact with a solid surface, it clicks around in a little circle to get its bearings and then stands there, bobbing up and down, contentedly.
“Don’t listen to him, Henry,” soothes Allgood, softly running a gloved finger down the skitter’s dorsal plate. It hesitates, anxiously waiting for a command. “Humans are biologically compelled to let collective behaviors dictate their personal identity, but recognizing the significance of the individual self is the pathway to empowerment.”
“What kind of existential bullshi…”
Bringdown’s response is abruptly cut short by the sharp crack of gunfire. Instinctively, both men flatten themselves against the concrete barrier. They can feel the incoming rounds gnaw viciously into the opposite side of their cover. The skitter angles its single optical port towards Allgood, expectantly. Allgood gently pats above the lens housing, in a reassuring manner. Snarling obscenities, Bringdown fumbles for the centrifuge cannon. While he’s positioning it between his knees, the gunfire pauses.
“I don’t think individuality should be simply an indulgence of society,” muses Allgood. “The success of a group is directly proportional to the value it places on its members. A hierarchy that delegates the whole as greater than its parts ultimately risks undermining the foundations that support its very existence.”
The gunfire starts up again. One round comes in high, catching the top edge of the concrete barrier and showering them with debris.
“I think,” says Bringdown, brushing bits of rubble from his sleeve. “You’re anthropomorphizing things because you’re struggling with your own insecurities. You still got that peeper?”
Allgood digs around in his shoulder pouch and produces a marble-sized metallic sphere. He tosses it to Bringdown.
“You want to name it first?” asks Bringdown, as he chambers it into the centrifuge cannon.
Allgood shakes his head. “Simple cause and effect functions lack the complexity needed to establish distinctive behavior,” he explains. “Peepers don’t choose when or where to be fired, or what to do once they’ve been launched. They take in light and return data, with no ability to do otherwise.”
Bringdown swipes his helmet’s display module into place, angles the cannon straight up, and thumbs the firing button. With a quick whiz-thump, the peeper shoots skyward.
“So you’re saying,” he says, waiting patiently for the imagery to compile. “If it doesn’t have free will, it’s not a person.”
“No, I’m saying simple binary existence fails to provide compelling…”
More gunfire.
“Hold up.” Bringdown raises a hand, staring intently into the display module. “I got our shooter.”
“In the open?”
“Nope. Holed up under that wrecked transport, fifty meters out.”
“So, no angle with the cannon?”
Bringdown shakes his head. They both look down at the skitter. The skitter stiffens in anticipation. Allgood sighs.
“Alright, Henry. You’re up.”
With a single motion, he scoops up the little device and hurls it over the concrete barrier.
“FRAG OUT!” chirps the skitter, in a decidedly feminine voice, as it flies through the air. It lands with a delicate clink, and then tinkles away on its tiny legs, scurrying towards the source of the gunfire. A few moments later they hear the sound of an explosion.
