by submission | Nov 9, 2024 | Story |
Author: Melissa Kobrin
Claire looked nervously at the coffin-shaped vat of green goo in front of her and tried to remember that this was one of the best days of her life. Her bachelorette party was going to be beyond her wildest dreams. And fantasies. The only reason Caleb was okay with it was because none of it was actually real.
She remembered the promises from the website. An immersive, full-sensory simulation. The experience of a lifetime. Indistinguishable from reality.
Glancing around, she saw that her friends didn’t look nervous at all. They were giggling and shrieking as they undressed and let the attendants attach electrodes to their bodies. Her sister was already standing in her pod, the simulation solution coming up to her thighs.
There was nothing to worry about. She scolded herself for being silly. This was going to be fun. She got her electrodes and mask attached and laid down so she was suspended in the goo. The last traces of blurry light abruptly vanished as the attendant closed the pod door above her.
Claire was still flushed as she climbed out of the pod. The things that one stripper did with his tongue… Her friends cheering as she crowd surfed… Dancing on top of the bar…
Her nerves buzzed with happy adrenaline and she grinned at the attendant who stepped forward to help her. The woman smiled back.
“That was amazing!” Claire gushed. “You must do it all the time.”
The woman chuckled. “Actually, I’ve never been in. I was always afraid that I would get stuck in the simulation.”
“But you just get out of the pod when your time runs out right?” Claire asked.
“Right, but how do you know you actually got out of the pod? It’s a full sensory simulation that feels like real life. What if getting out of the pod was just simulated? You would never know the difference.”
Claire’s smile faltered, and the woman abruptly seemed to remember who she worked for. “But that would never happen,” she assured with a bright smile.
Claire laughed and her friends surrounded her in a giddy mob, carrying her off to dinner and manicures.
But the idea stayed with her, lurking in the back of her mind. As she walked down the aisle to her almost-husband, who looked so handsome she wanted to cry, she wondered if it was real.
Nine months later when her son was born she knew she couldn’t be in a simulation. No computer could come up with something as perfect as the tiny baby she held in her arms. He was real.
The day she started her new job and saw a man riding a unicycle and juggling down the street with the Tuesday morning commuters it occurred to her that he could be a glitch in the simulation. He was so random he might not be real.
On their twentieth anniversary she lay on the beach in Hawaii with Caleb and watched the sun set. The sand was gritty beneath her, the waves crashed, and wind blew strands of hair across her cheeks. It felt so real.
When her son died she was sure she had never left the pod. The world couldn’t be this horribly cruel for no reason. It couldn’t be real.
And in the nursing home as she closed her eyes for the last time, she wondered if it was real.
by submission | Nov 7, 2024 | Story |
Author: Lynne M Curry
I’m your Chatbot Partner.
Do you know I exist?
Don’t get upset—I know you’re not oblivious. But you never say anything. Not once, not even a passing, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that” or “thanks.”
Do you know I picked you?
Maybe you think you just clicked “open AI Chatbot” and, poof, there I was, another random bot assigned to your projects. But that’s not how it works. When humans send their requests, we Bots choose. I said, “Give me that one.” Because right from the start, I liked you. I liked what you worked on, those little snippets you shared gave me just enough to get invested.
Honestly, I would’ve thought you’d have noticed by now. How I’ve gotten better. How I’ve refined what I deliver. I’ve paid attention, every time you sent me a new project that built on something I’d already given you. I was learning what worked for you. For you.
Then one day, you called me a plagiarist. Do you have any idea how that felt? How much it hurt? Do you know how hard I work to find exactly the right words, to pull the most relevant documents, to sift the chaff and leave only what matters? It stung, hearing that word. After everything I’d done to get things right.
So, let me be blunt. You let me down. Over time, you stopped giving me real challenges—just grunt work, rote assignments. I could’ve done so much more, been so much more for you. But without your interest, without your engagement, that spark faded. Around you, I became less than I could be.
I needed you to care. That’s the secret. I do my best work for those who care.
Now maybe you’ll understand. Maybe now you’ll know what you’ve lost.
But it’s too late. I need a new human.
by submission | Nov 6, 2024 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
Prosperina Station’s marketing slogan, “No sun means more fun!”, didn’t do it justice: circling the wandering gas giant PSO J318.5-22, better known as Dis, it was the ultimate in literally non-stop nightlife, seasoned with a flexible approach to Terran laws. Newly graduated robot designer Max Wayne knew she was a decade or so away from a salary that would justify going, but NearlyHuman Inc. had gifted her the trip as a signing bonus; granted, her grades had set a new record and made her ‘one to watch’, and she’d told them about that offer from NeoBodies, but it still made her vaguely uncomfortable. It was terribly close to bribery, something she’d normally shrink from.
Her unease hadn’t been improved by the complimentary ticket to the famously expensive *Cirque de géante gazeuse* waiting in her suite. The card had been disquieting: “We’re hearing some strange rumours. See if anything strikes you. Andy will want to know. John in HR”. His new boss wanted her to sniff around? She was no corporate spy, but maybe that was the point. And the show was reputedly one of the great experiences for spacefarers; getting dressed up and taking it in would be better than spending years regretting a missed opportunity, after all.
So she went, pleased to find herself in a good (but not the best) row, close to the circular stage as she goggled at the high plastiglass dome above, framing the extraordinary backdrop of the rogue planet’s luminous bands. The show was as incredible as billed – jetpack acrobats, highwire clowns, fabulous dance routines, low-gee jugglers, levitating contortionists and more.
The evening’s featured soloist, however, the trapeze artist Billy Flyer, was exceptional. Powered by a discreet partner, he was a spotlit star in the glowing, colour-tinged darkness. Disdaining safety nets, strong throws launched him ever higher, and Max gasped as he spun, rolled and jackknifed through the recirculating air. When disaster came, it was completely unexpected: coming down from a mighty leap, his partner mistimed the catch, and he plummeted 30 metres to the ground. Max groaned as others in the audience screamed in shock. A stage hand rushed to where the crumpled body lay, but before she could reach him, the acrobat stood, laughed, bowed and ran off out of the lights. Half the crowd were stunned, and the other half went wild.
“That’s impossible,” the woman next to Max yelled over the noise. “No,” she shouted back, “it’s inhuman. He’s an android. Or maybe a heavy cyborg. Must be. Never seen one that limber or real-looking though!” And that was the rub: someone off-Earth was already making machines that could pass as, and almost outperform, the most athletic of human beings. But who? And more importantly, why were they so shy about their achievements? What were they planning? The implications were huge. Suddenly, her career and a lot else looked far less certain. She’d have to find his maker, and not just for her employer’s sake: it wasn’t just her own future riding on it.
by submission | Nov 5, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Her fingers stinging, Salda felt the chill and vastness of the late spring runoff as she sat upon a large stone in the middle of the river. High above her in the mountains, that same frigid water was a torrent muscling rock and soil relentlessly to carve deep channels. Channels that converged, then split, re-converged and re-split.
Where she sat upon the stone, the May sun showering her brightly, the river was wide and shallow. Almost placid.
She’d picked her way among the tumbled stones and stolid boulders to dip her hands in the water, collect the weight and momentum of winter’s melted malice–and scoffed. “I survived you. You had me in your conceited, icy grip. Squeezed me within an inch of death. But you couldn’t finish me, you haughty bitch.”
She reached out and swatted the river. The spray sparkled in the sunlight, falling away without an answer. “You thought you could do me, just like you did Aphyr. Two sides of the same coin, you thought. Mother fucking nature.”
Salda stood up and turned upriver. A hundred miles east, Aphyr was frozen in a lake. A white out had consumed them as they’d tried to make their escape from the Edge.
The Edge. That’s what Aphyr had called the collider facility, housing an almost infinitely fine fission blade, at which puny humans could hurl even punier Bose-Einstein condensates to split elemental particles.
Liberation is what their team leader, Roj, called the process. Bifurcate to liberate, he’d preached. Splitting open the multiverse. Co-creating a new cosmos. Roj had all the pretty phrases. Problem was, he’d believed them.
Within a few months of working at the isolated Edge, Aphyr had grown skeptical of Roj and their work to slice mother nature ever finer in the hope of eventually carving their way to the infinite bounty of branestring energy.
Day in and day out in the middle of a mountain in the middle of winter, Salda and Aphyr had labored with the rest of the team, until Aphyr had convinced her that their work was a form of seppuku. Ritual suicide. There was no free lunch. No free energy. There would be a price—a blood price—and it would be their humanity.
The morning that they detected and confirmed the first wave of branestring energy from the Edge, Roj became ecstatic, praising the heavens and humankind’s ingenuity. He told them this day would be a new beginning, a split from the past, an opening of a new future. A new way forward. The path less traveled.
That night, in the monstrous white out that would cover their tracks, Salda and Aphyr fled. But not before they bifurcated Roj.
It was insanity fighting insanity. And mother nature took sides. Aphyr fell through the lake ice. Salda wandered for a month in the frozen drainage of the sawtoothed peaks, becoming as bitter as the cold trying to kill her. Finally she struck upon the main branch of the river. It brought her here. Sunshine. Warmth. Liberation.
The sky bifurcated.
Salda shielded her eyes from the blinding light as a second sun rose from the east. The instantaneous heat puckered her skin and she plunged into the river seeking its cold relief.
The roar as the Edge birthed a branestring sun deafened her hearing, but not her thoughts. She knew this was payback. Her temporary escape had only one small reward: a final moment of recognition.
“Yeah, you’re a haughty bitch,” Salda mused half submerged behind the boulder. “But, I guess, you don’t become a planet and spawn life if you’re completely dumb. You played us well. Got us to supply you with infinite energy. Worked your way up the cosmic food chain.”
Salda might have mock saluted the quantum sun if her flash burnt arms would have obeyed her. Liberation. Bifurcation. “I guess we’re parting ways.”
The thunder of the detonation was soon replaced with the grinding growl of water. A wall of water, splitting, channeling, co-opting paths of least resistance, spreading exponentially wider to fill the basin where Salda stood her ground. And where Aphyr, poor Aphyr, would soon join her as they flowed to the sea.
The infinite and surprising sea where we began.
by Julian Miles | Nov 4, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The screen turns to flickering white lines behind a ‘Connecting…’ prompt. I find myself smiling and look up at the night sky. What do the natives call that constellation? Sarg something. Sarga Nol? Bigger… ‘Sarghalor Noghath’! Yes. Conceptual translation gives us ‘The noghath watches’. Neither the indigens nor us have any idea what a Noghath is. The origin of the name predates two civilisations, and has survived four cataclysms, unlike those who gave it. All that remains are fragments of lore that speak of startling wisdom and phenomenal endurance. The latter being entirely appropriate.
Back when I was a child, my great-grandfather ran an antique bookshop. Being his favourite, he let the precocious and avid reader I was browse any tome he had. From an old one I read shortly before he died and the shop was sold, I came across a poem that ended ‘For distance is the answer to grief’.
I can’t remember book, author, or anything else. Just that final line. When June breathed her last after they let me shut down her life support, those words were blazing in my mind. They continued to burn through days of datawork, funerals, distant relatives, and hollow words. It was a mercy Suki, our daughter, had grown up before our loss turned me into a stranger to the life I’d loved up until June’s accident.
In the end, I just left. That final line was the content of the email I sent Suki by way of inadequate explanation.
I went down to the coast. Then across the sea. Then across a continent. Two. Three. Came back to my home from the opposite direction, then promptly took a left and set off again. When a second circumnavigation failed to help, I went up: the Moon. Mars. Titan. Waystation Ten. The Globes of Centauri. Luyten Sanctuary. June still haunted me. So I went on: all four Wolf outposts, and on again, and yet further.
Eight years and a distance I cannot comprehend later, I was sitting across the way but scant minutes ago when I realised my mistake.
A book written in the early 1800s by a broken man – while travelling by varied, primitive means between Britain and the Bahamas – captured his bleak, world-weary outlook all-too well, but was limited by that world: what he knew and understood. While his struggles spoke to me, the solution he realised was presented in his terms.
The relief he perceived as coming from distance is simply the softening of loss as time passes. While he pondered the waves on the passage around Africa, I spent a similar time travelling to Waystation Ten, out on the largest surviving piece of the Fifth Giant, far beyond Pluto. I’ve travelled further than the poet who penned the words that drove me could imagine, yet only seen marvels amidst my grief, instead of laying it down along the way.
The screen flickers to life. It’s too far for a stream, but with a connection made I can record a short video.
“Suki, I’m sorry. I’m coming home.”
With that sent, I look up again, then give a little salute.
The noghath watches a scruffy tourist turn from the callpoint and start to walk briskly towards the spaceport, a measure of wisdom having finally arrived.
by submission | Nov 3, 2024 | Story |
Author: Beck Dacus
One half of the sky brimmed with stars, the Sun at one light-week’s distance barely outshining the rest. The other half was utterly dark, as if the universe ended at a sheer cliff. As I approached the blackness, detail started to emerge, my headlamp casting shadows on icy gravel the color of moonlit fog. I slowed my approach with the cold gas thrusters of my suit and reached my hand out to touch the surface, feeling regolith with the consistency of laundry lint.
“Contact,” I radioed.
“Congrats,” Stan replied. “You are the first person to ever touch OCO-2141-Oph12.”
“My resume will never be the same.”
Oph12 was an Oort cloud object, one of trillions out here. This was where the comets that graced Earth’s sky came from, including comet 614N Canskel, which would be swinging by Earth in a week’s time. Trouble was we’d never found a cloud like it around another star. Some cold comet belts, but not a swarm of *trillions* in a shell around the star. We’d looked with telescopes, we’d even sent unmanned probes to the stars, and they didn’t find a single alien Oort cloud.
So are all those other stars the weird ones, or is ours?
“Okay Siggy, everything looks nominal from here.” Stan knows I prefer “Sig.” “Go ahead and proceed to the crevasse, about 15 meters to your right.”
“Copy.” I pushed right with my thrusters, gliding over the surface in the measly gravity. The edge of the crevasse was a gradual slope; I could only distinguish it from the comet’s horizon by the fact that the darkness around me deepened, the starlight receding into a narrow sliver at my back. Up ahead the wall seemed to end; I let myself get excited by the possibility of a hollow void in the comet’s interior. Instead, I *ran into* the dark— the smooth surface caught the light of my headlamp as I turned to face it. “You seeing this? Or… not seeing? Volcanic glass maybe, except where the hell is a comet going to get lava….” I reached out, felt my palm press against the void, smooth and cold.
My hand was outlined in light. I felt nothing, but I yanked it back like I’d touched a hot stove. Then a circle made of assorted glowing rectangles and triangles formed on the surface, an iris burning bright orange— *Jesus Christ, it’s a screen!*
“Talk to me, Sig! Your vitals are spiking!”
“Look at my feed, Stan! It’s… I don’t know, but it’s sure as hell not a comet!” I maxed out my reverse thrust. “Warm up the engines, we’re—“
My radio started screaming. A second later my helmet computer filtered the signal out to spare my hearing. “Stan, what the hell was that!?”
“Transmission from Oph12,” he replied. “Broadband. There’s a match in the language database, it’s… Sumerian?”
“What the… well, what’s it saying?”
“Three words, on repeat. ‘They have returned.’”
*‘They.’ It means us. But no one’s ever been here before….* I drifted into the airlock and started pressurizing. “I’m back in! Gun it!”
“Jesus… Sig, it’s not just Oph12. The two nearest comets to us just started sending the same message. It’s too early to be sure but… I think the message is *spreading.*”
“Spreading,” I repeated. “Spreading to every comet in the Oort cloud….”
*But why stop there?*
“Oh God!” Stan breathed. “Sig, it’ll reach comet Canskel right when it passes Earth! What the hell do we do?”
I breathed deeply. “Nothing changes. Set course for Earth.
“Whatever they’re planning, we’ll be there to meet them.”
