by submission | May 13, 2020 | Story |
Author: Thomas Desrochers
There is a disturbance on Deck Four. The Pilot can see it plain as day in the readout, magnified by his attention, an atmospheric ammonia reading eighty times normal. It was pure luck that he saw it at all, one readout among thousands.
He calls out to the copilot. Nobody answers. He remembers, a recurrent pain, that Bradford died years prior. Freak malfunction in the cryopod, the chief mechanic had said. There’d been no evidence. There’d been no spare copilots. The Pilot had been moved to the rest shift, the last ten days in the ship’s hundred-day cycle. Everything but the reaction and life-support off. Nothing to break. Nothing to worry about.
He stares at the readout.
Ammonia.
And dust.
Bradford is gone. The Pilot will be alone for the next fifty years. He undoes his harness and stands, massaging his atrophied legs with his skeletal hands, and leaves the glowing cocoon of the two-man bridge.
The ship is empty, everyone tucked away for Recuperation. The Pilot makes good time. He steps off the ladder onto Deck Four. Quiet, a tomb but for the beating of his heart and the hiss of his breath.
The air should be still, but it brushes against the back of his neck. He shivers, starts along the endless curve of the hallway. A third of the way around, by a sub-hold, he hears it. A faint noise like the pipping of a dozen system alarms. The Pilot opens the door; his nose wrinkles.
The chief mechanic sits before a container, the lid propped open. Light spills out, painting him a golden idol. He closes the lid. Quiet.
The Pilot blinks. “Keelan?”
The chief mechanic nods.
The Pilot shuffles over. “What have you got in there?” He cracked the lid and peers inside. Birds. Three peeping babies sheltering under, next to, and on top of a harassed looking mother. She bup’s plaintively at him. A wattled, fearsome head shoots into view, one beady eye fixated on him.
He closes the lid, looks out over the dozens of containers. How many were mislabeled? How many tons of contraband? He turns to the chief mechanic. “We left seven billion behind.” A brief pause measured in aching heartbeats. “We left everything. My wife. My daughter.”
“I know,” the chief mechanic says. He looks down at his feet, then back at the Pilot. “I had to save something.”
“God damn you Keelan, you saved chickens?”
“What would you have had me do? Another worthless wealthy fool?” The chief mechanic snorts. “God damn me indeed. Those bastards said to leave the animals, the flowers, the bugs, that there was no way to keep them fed and no time to keep them frozen.” He stood, eye to eye with the Pilot now. “They condemned our children to hell to save twenty politicians. Instead of growing up with birds and meadows, they were to grow up with slime and tomatoes!”
The Pilot looks away. It seems so long ago. Five conscious years, hundreds of freeze-thaw cycles. He remembers, dimly, the corpulent tagalong whose cryogenic unit failed the first week. All life has a price, he thinks.
“Keelan. Did you kill Bradford?”
The chief mechanic looks stricken. “No. I would never.”
The pilot gazes down at the container. The mother hen inside, chicks nestled beneath her. A queer miracle; he’d thought them dead with everything else. The future he had accepted changed imperceptibly – was it still so empty? He wasn’t sure.
“I miss them all terribly,” he murmurs.
The Pilot begins to weep, his first tears in fifty years.
by submission | May 12, 2020 | Story |
Author: R.D. Harris
A young lady stood in front of me, waiting to vote like I was. Her glances in my direction were not rude but certainly repeated.
“You’ve never seen an android at the polls?” I asked.
“No, ma’am,” she replied in a thick twang.
Others in the library looked over. A great many frowned with unmasked disapproval. Change tends to scare the rank-and-file citizen. Luckily, people adjust to change. Humans had already molded their own acceptance of androids joining the workforce, owning businesses, and simply living untethered in society.
“I didn’t know y’all could vote to be honest,” she said, in a hushed voice this time. She was aware of outside interest in our conversation.
“We’ve been able to for quite some time. There were special voting locations before.”
The queue moved a bit.
“Never heard of that before.”
“We had to transfer data from our memory for inspection before we could vote. Even then, our votes were supervised. Not that any of us wanted our private information or pictures scrutinized. Most of us androids went through that because it was the only option. Having rights as you do is important to us.”
The friendly woman was lucky. She was just another human in the crowd. No cameras in her face or judgmental eyes upon her.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that. I really am. That sounds terrible,” she said.
I said, “it’s all right. People either empathize or disapprove. We don’t have feelings to hurt.”
Making it to the booth, I presented my personal identification before casting my ballot and walking out the way I’d come. The woman I befriended in the queue came up to me in the parking lot across the street.
“It was nice getting to know you.”
“I thought so to,” I replied.
She walked off to an idling car. There were two children in car seats with an older woman in the driver’s seat. Presumably her mother.
“I get funny looks too,” she called out before entering the vehicle.
I offered a blank smile and waved, processing…
by Julian Miles | May 11, 2020 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Massive wings beat the ground as it tears chunks from Devon’s body, the blue glow of its eyes turned purple by smeared blood. We’re all using laryngophone comms so as not to attract it’s attention.
“That’s not my vulture.”
I glance toward Cat.
“Not anymore. Used to be. You can see faded roundels on the tail feathers.”
She nods: “A Calliapteran Model Four. Based on the Cinerous Vulture.”
“Calliapteran? Isn’t that the company who did those mad-dog hyenas?”
“Mad cat, you mean. That would be their Model Two. Seventy kilos of tailored nightmare built from the Spotted Hyena. If the rumours are true, the different strains of Calliapteran faunatech can work together. Imagine that flying horror with ground support.”
Miguel whispers from where he’s watching our six.
“Not funny you should mention that. I’ve got a trio of heat signatures, warm like faunatech, a quarter-click south. They’re problem-sized and coming this way.”
Cat rolls closer to me: “That’s not good. A lone Model Two could do for the lot of us.”
“What are they hunting out here? The front line’s in France. This is Spain.”
“This isn’t Spain. This is the Basque AC.” Miguel points south, “Spain’s over there.”
Cat makes a happy noise and snaps her fingers. Then she stands up and vaults over the edge of our comfy crater.
“Where the bloody hell are you going, Sergeant?”
“Had an idea, Cap. Worst case, you lot can bug out while they eat me. Model Twos always pack an appetite along with their nasty.”
Sam and Col slide into the crater.
“The fuck she goin’?”
Col punches Sam’s shoulder: “Use all the words, big man.”
“What I meant to ask was ‘where is Sergeant Catalin off to now?’”
I grin: “Fucked if I know.”
Miguel sounds astonished: “She’s standing right in front of that threesome and they’re sitting there like it’s some sort of obedience class. Not eating her, for sure. Her mic’s off but I think she’s talking to them.”
Command privilege: I open up a listening line on Cat’s comms. Sure enough, she’s talking, but it’s no language I’ve ever heard. A rare moment of genius drops in and I run a query on her family. It pays off: Cat’s mum was born in the Basque AC.
I waive her muted mode: “So, when did mumsie arrive in the Kingdom?”
“The year before they had to take ‘United’ off the front. She’s been in Scotia ever since dad died.”
Major-General Duncan Catalin is the most recent posthumous recipient of the Victoria Cross. He’s the reason the Calais Crater doesn’t have a twin in Kent.
“These are some sort of territorial guardians, aren’t they?”
“Yes. They thought we were sent by factions who still consider the Declaration of Arnaga to be a betrayal. Seems there’s room for a lot of backstabbing while the war rages across Europe. Someone at Calliapteran made an offer. This reassigned faunatech is operated by a Basque subsidiary of Calliapteran. They’re not combatants: they’re testing ‘long-term autonomous patrol protocols and dynamic response scenarios’.”
Sounds a lot like hi-tech gun running with a coat of shiny bullshit to me.
“The hyenas told you that?”
“No, the nice people at the other end of their C&C comms did. They also offered a passably sincere apology and free passage out of the area.”
Arse-kicking revenge aside, surviving to whinge about not getting arse-kicking revenge – and how bloody dangerous the opposition was – is always a winner.
“Get them to stop the birdie eating Devon. We need to bag what’s left of him and get gone.”
“On it, Cap.”
by submission | May 10, 2020 | Story |
Author: Jennifer Breslin
He awoke on the pavement, lifted his head, and felt warm liquid pool in his eye. Must be blood. Six months of chemo and six months of radiotherapy had taken their toll. The blood-clots in his legs meant it was a slow, tortuous walk to the shop to get essentials. But he couldn’t live without his rum. This time the pain got the better of him and he had blacked out.
A car drove by. The car’s sensors scanned him. It gathered his exact GPS coordinates. It assessed whether he was a hazard. It deducted that he was stationary. In that second it was maximum 245mm above the ground and 150mm from the edge of the curb. It was not a hazard – the car drove on.
A bus approached along the quiet street. It scanned him. It assessed if he was a potential passenger. It gathered his exact GPS coordinates. He was 2500mm from the bus-stop and stationary. He was a not passenger – the bus drove on.
A slim woman with buds in her ears jogged passed him and didn’t register the fragile heap on the ground, as she focused on beating her friend’s distance record. Her Fitbit logged her exact GPS coordinates. It logged her heart rate, how many steps it took her to pass him, the time it took to pass him, and how many calories she lost.
As he leaned on his bloodied hands to push himself upright, a wave of nausea ran over him. A digital billboard nearby scanned him for age and gender. Its facial recognition malfunctioned because of the blood dripping from his forehead. Its algorithm suggested an advertisement for life insurance.
Five CCTV cameras had picked him up. Their microphones captured his language as he agonisingly stood upright. The wifi tracking attempted to connect to a smartphone but didn’t connect because he was a “luddite” – so his friends said. They recorded the precise time and exact GPS coordinates. They continuously pinged information from the street to six satellites whizzing around the globe, feeding them data on the weather, wind speed, wind direction, humidity, temperature, number of passers-by, and number of cars on the street. They couldn’t detect his face or gait. They were confused by blood. They sent an alert of a status yellow threat to the nearest police car.
He threw up. An alert was sent to council street cleaners that wastewater was on the street with the exact GPS coordinates.
A police car edged past. The cameras mapped his face and instantaneously collected all photographs of him that had been uploaded online. They cross-referenced them with their databases and found his address, national insurance number, and criminal record. They located his court case from ten years ago for speeding. He was not speeding now, so the police took the view that he was not a threat. They drove on.
At least his bottle of rum was intact. He made his way slowly, gingerly home.
If a tree falls in a forest of algorithms, they will hear it, but will they care?
by submission | May 9, 2020 | Story |
Author: Tom Prentice
I shuffle onward, clutching my side. Blood splatters the snow and the ice. Red, white and blue.
They’ll be coming. They could follow a blood trail blindfolded if they had to. It’s how they were made.
It was Russia that made them, to fight their arctic war. Mountains of unadulterated dread, veiled head to toe in thick white fur. We stopped short of calling them werewolves. We’ve never had a sense of humor about them at all.
Snegs was the name that stuck. From the Russian for snowman.
The pain is dull, thanks to the cold. I stumble into the grotto, back the way I came. But I won’t reach help before they’re on me.
Damned Russians. They won their war but their toys refused to go back in the box. Snegs turned on their masters and then the rest of us. They nuked Greenland to alter the Atlantic currents. The ice is returning. Earth is theirs now, and they’ve taken control of the thermostat.
It’s funny. Mankind, just like these snegs, was born in the ice. I read about it, before all this. Before everyone’s career became war. A huge volcanic eruption, eons ago, triggered an encore of the ice age that wiped out all but a hardy handful of us: the cunning, bloodthirsty lunatics who would go on to annihilate all the other human species and dominate the planet, all the while fighting among ourselves.
Kindness had no place in the ice.
You can never hear them until they’re right on you. They stalk so silently in the snow. But I know they’re there. Call it instinct.
We’ve been searching for that lost kindness, I think, all this time. We built cultures that rewarded it, told stories that sanctified it, to remind ourselves each day to be kind.
Violence, though, has never needed a story. We’ve been writing that one every day, in blood and bone. It’s our nature.
The opening ekes into view. I fall to a crawl and scrape my face through the blown-in snow. Their coded chirps and whistles bounce around the walls like the soundtrack to a nightmare.
I wonder what we were like, before that long winter hewed us into the vicious beasts we became.
Out in the frigid sun, I slump against the snow dunes. Snegs spill from the mouth in swift soundless bounds and fix their rifles on their prize.
Boom. I detonate the charges. The fissure collapses, swallowing up the entire patrol like the Pharaoh’s army.
Deception, too, was something we learned in the ice, a thousand centuries ago.
The dust clears. Just one sneg this side of the rubble, whimpering pathetically. I yank up its bloody mane and slit its leathery throat.
They’ll inherit the Earth eventually, but not today.
When they do, I wonder if they’ll think about us. What we were like. Their forefathers that perished in the ice.
If we were kinder.
by submission | May 8, 2020 | Story |
Author: Ben Fitzgerald
Right on cue, Morgalith’s robotic guards escorted in the tax agent. The king was sitting on the other side of the throne room, and he bellowed to them as they entered: “Approach!”
The tax agent complied. He could see the king more clearly now, the mechanical townspeople assembled before him. The king was in full fantasy garb: a dark blue robe with the price tags poking out. He was smiling nervously, drumming his fingers on the arm of his throne.
“I trust your journey here was favorable?”
“Very,” the tax agent said, inwardly regretting his choice of career. “Now, if we could get down to business…”
“I’m glad,” the king said loudly. “The kingdom of Morgalith leads no traveler astray.”
“Well, as I said, I’m here for business. I sent you an email on the subject…”
The king quickly cut him off. “Because the kingdom shows its subjects great mercy. Unending, everlasting, unconditional…”
“You can’t get out of this, Mr. Smith…”
“I know no one with that name.”
“I think you know what this is about.”
“Oh, I most certainly do!” the king cried, standing up. His eyes darted desperately around the room. “This is… this is a plot. This is the work of the Nestaphinians, trying to delude us with fabricated promises of business. They will not stop until they have devoured every man, woman, and child in our kingdom. Well, Morgalith shall not allow them. We shall fight them until our dying breath. We shall raze their cities, plunder their lands. We shall never surrender, and Morgalith shall prevail!”
The robots went berserk. They started a chant– “Mor-ga-lith! Mor-ga-lith!”– and the king received it, basking in the awe of his subjects until the tax agent couldn’t stand it anymore:
“Mr. Smith!”
The robots went silent.
“Ever since you moved off-world, there have been numerous gaps in your financial history. Off the record construction costs, unaccounted spending on sentient robots… well, we’ve been forced to conduct an audit.”
The tax agent unbuckled his briefcase, pulling out a pen and clipboard. The king’s face was blank.
“Shall we get started, Mr. Smith?”
The king opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He sighed, resigned to his fate, and began:
“I had a bit of a mid-life crisis.”
