by Julian Miles | Dec 23, 2019 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
He rests the butt of the rifle on his hip, trying to look casual despite torn and bloody clothing. Pausing his posing to light a cigar, he snaps the lighter closed and returns it to his beltpouch. Looking about the scene, he lifts a leg to rest insouciantly on the flank of the kill, while a quick flick of his head tilts his visor back.
The jungle still hasn’t recovered its voice after the fury of their engagement, restricting itself to furtive rustlings and sudden, warbled crescendos. Silver-white flashes illuminate the vicinity as the holopod does its work, capturing the hard-won triumph of man over alien monster.
“Zip Tinkhotarra. Title ‘Mitch Saunders brings another Acsel to the end of its rampage’. Loc Tallasye Central Basin. Tim dawn plus three. Godo.”
The holopod beeps, then ascends rapidly. As soon as it’s above the canopy, it sends the data three times, to three different locations, in coded pulses under a second in length. The compression plays havoc with image quality, but allows the holopod to send and drop back into cover before the aggressive, territorial Kren knock it out of the air.
Mitch hears a raucous melee start high above. Having missed the holopod, they’ve switched to fighting over the rights to that particular bit of sky.
He surveys the kill again. ‘Acsel’ is a nickname derived from the acronym for its full name: Artificially Created and Surgically Enhanced Superior Lifeform – a grandiose title for a savage piece of liveware. Created by the enigmatic Vallahyr, Acsel first appeared on Siro Nine, where four of them slew seven hundred people, including the entire planetary guard. In the fifteen years since, they’ve killed over a half a million more. Specialists like Mitch are the only real answer. They’re volunteers who undergo augumentation at one of the heavily guarded Deterrent Research centres. All are highly adaptable combatants, able to respond to a threat that has no set form, seemingly being created specifically for each foray.
Which brings him back to this specimen.
“You’re unexpected, monster. What brings you here?”
Stopping dead, he drops the rifle and pulls his pistol in a single fluid move. Without pause, he snaps full-charge blasts off at the possible locations he’d choose to shoot from if he wanted to drop a cocky augment named Mitch who’d just killed a decoy Acsel and stupidly paused to take publicity photos.
The second shot prompts a bolt of lightning from another direction, the scream of torn air molecules goading Mitch to leap out of its way, frantically snapping a shot off as he dives for cover. Something shouts in rage and pain, words in no language he understands, but content easily guessed.
With a probable location for the enemy, Mitch slots a killquick onto the launch rail of his pistol and lets it fly, cursing as its gravtac field breaks three of his fingers. Again! He always forgets to wear the reinforced gauntlets.
The tiny intelligent missile accelerates toward the designated area, sorting sensor data to pick the biggest thing moving in that vicinity. Target selected, it dumps its entire charge to go supersonic, wreaking precise, lethal havoc when it hits.
Something screams and dies. Mitch stays down and summons the holopod.
“Zip Tinkhotarra. Title ‘Vallahyr Ambush’. Text ‘It used an Acsel in wild terrain as bait. Nearly got me. Warn the others.’ Loc Tallasye Central Basin. Tim dawn plus four. Godo.”
He lights a fresh cigar and grins. It’s always nice to be recognised for good work, but rewards like this he can do without.
by submission | Dec 22, 2019 | Story |
Author: Daniel Tenner
Kristofer notices his next victim across the buzz of the entrance to the Christmas market, or maybe she notices him. She’s short, slim, tanned, draped in a sleek, long coat with a shimmering grey techwool exterior. Short hair, sharp features, and those eyes, grey with something fiery about them. She’s smiling.
He steps forward, smiling in return, “Would you like one of our fliers?” He waves one in her direction. She takes it with two black-gloved fingers, drops it on the ground, then her eyes lock onto his. They feel like tractor beams pulling him in.
He begins, “I’m here to bring more awareness to this consumerist obscenity. The planet is dying, we need to do something, and buying each other more useless junk for Christmas just isn’t the right thing to do given the way things are.”
She comes closer to him, puts her hand on his, and instructs, “Walk with me.”
“I’ve just started my shift…” he replies, but follows her anyway.
Through the whirlwind of the Christmas market they glide. This innocent stroll feels like some sort of dream to Kristofer, or maybe a nightmare. All the stalls everywhere with their products shouting at him, “buy, buy, buy!” They pass a stall selling home depolluters as well as discreet, red and green nose-bud pollution filters. Another one sells anti-plastic vials for priming a plastics compost heap. Another, cheap VR trip cartridges to travel back to the 21st century.
“This isn’t right, we need to stop and fix it, urgently,” he mutters, assailed by the loudness of their surroundings.
“Yes, I’ve heard this before,” she replies, with a note of boredom, holding his arm, guiding him through the crowd that parts effortlessly.
“So young and already so blasé?”
She guides him to a food stand and buys him some mulled wine. She orders nothing.
“I’m not as young as I look,” she articulates delicately as she shepherds him in a new direction, towards the edge of the market.
“Then you should know we need to solve this problem right now! It’s all linked. The consumerism, the weather, the pollution, inequality… we must do something. Anything!”
They are near the edge of the maelstrom of shoppers.
“It’s been like that for thousands of years, Kristoffer, it will always be like that. Life is ever teetering on the edge, one heartbeat away from death,” she announces coolly.
He wonders how she knows his name, but she’s very close to him and looking in his eyes and he can’t do anything but look back into hers.
“Would you believe me if I told you that four thousand years ago I was having this exact same conversation with another young man by the Nile?”
His mouth moves but no sound comes out. Those eyes. His body feels relaxed, warm, tingling.
She ushers him into a handicapped toilet nearby, locks the door. It’s wide and garishly lit. His body obeys her as she sits him on the toilet, fully clothed, and straddles him. His belly, chest, legs, and arms all feel like they’re swirling with a gentle, soothing heat. Her face, her eyes are all he can see.
“You humans, you always need some reason to fight, to sacrifice everything. As soon as one cause is fixed, you find another to give your life to. You don’t value your life force.” Her hand finds its way under his jumper and presses on his heart. “But I do,” she purrs.
Her face brushes past his. He feels her breath on his throat. When her teeth sink into him his mind dissolves into oceanic bliss.
by submission | Dec 21, 2019 | Story |
Author: Gerald Keaney
Behind the baroque crags of the planetoid peak, galactically sheeted stars gushed like a fusion fountain. Bounding in the low gravity, he grasped an outcrop that seemed to have been gnarled into divisive twistings by the cosmic wind itself. It was half soft half hard under the glove of his spacesuit, and the conflicting feel provided a surge of wonderment. Above, the mountain itself seemed impossibly pointed, the way no summit could be given the frictional elements at work on earth. Despite himself, he gasped.
Shane Jenkins doffed the VR headset and peeled off the reactive sensor suit in disgust. Too bloody realistic. Of course, there was not much worth seeing on earth these days. But his company had invested a packet in trips on the actual, non-virtual, spacecraft visiting Mars and the larger asteroids. Now no one would bother leaving the comfort of the VR booths in their loungicles.
“Have these buggers any idea of the outlay needed to reserve grav berths?” he muttered to no one in particular. His secretary ignored his scowl as he exited his company’s VR booth.
“How are you today Mr. Jenkins?” she asked brightly.
“How do I look, Layla”? he snapped. “Like a quadrillion bucks?!”
Layla O’Halloran regarded him for a moment and straightened her tight black skirt, used to rudeness.
“So you’ve been checking the new VRographs?”
Was there a hint of schadenfreude in her question? If so it would dissipate when he had to downsize. She seemed to hesitate.
“You know Mr. Jenkins, some commentators criticise the new VRography.”
“So what!!?” demanded Shane. “They’re also the ones who criticise the Amazon Basin Reflectocrete Project. Bunch of mugs!”
“VR companies cannot deny that in each a one hundred cubic metre Vrotograph, aVRographer records information via an interactive Heisenberg effect. About thirty percent of any solid subject matter is reduced to a uniform ‘Grey Soup’ of undifferentiated quarks.”
Shane Jenkins started back from Layla’s O’Halloran’s words. He somehow vaguely knew of this criticism. If it wasn’t so tricky to set up a VRamera up then maybe the tangle of mini accelerators could be a new superweapon. Grey Soup a few Chinese cities.
“OK” he murmured, thinking about it more. “Featureless Grey Soup. Infecting the inner Solar System…”
“At least” Layla corrected pensively. “VRompanies lie when they claim that there has been no VRography here on Earth. Ayers Rock for instance… You could use your company networks to circulate the criticism. Stop the spread of Grey Soup, and make good your investments in inner system tourism.”
She shot him a stare that, if only for a moment, burrowed as sharply as the swivels on a leisure class hollowing engine.
Then he snickered. He’d hired Layla because she left her body natural, and that was back in style. Other than that she just didn’t get it. Even this attempt to save her own position was see-through. Layla O’Halloran would always be scrounging for jobs, though she would avoid the medical complications decimating those cute Balloon Girls.
“No use of company networks for nut job politics Ms. O’Halloran. Now get back to work.”
Layla turned away and Shane wondered why he hadn’t thought of it earlier. Use his unbooked berths to get those VRographers out there! More of ’em, quicker! Time he got his piece of the action.
by submission | Dec 20, 2019 | Story |
Author: Cesium
I started making a map of the places in my dreams.
It used to be that more often than not, when I fell asleep I’d find myself wandering the streets of an old new city. I’d ride the 88 bus alongside a gaggle of frat boys in dresses heading to a Mardi Gras party, speeding eastward down the parkway to the bridge, lonely lampposts flashing above us beneath a totally black sky. I’d descend the escalators below the glass pyramid in the plaza at the river’s bend, schooling like fish with the masses of noonday shoppers, down to the graceful concrete curves of the multilevel platforms and the trains that came trundling in, every six minutes during peak hours, like clockwork; and I’d ride them west till they emerged from the ground along the shores of the new district, past the casino tower glistening in the sun, and the sea birds circling against the sky. I’d step into the intercity rail terminal, the long straight hall built of soaring glass and wrought iron straining against gravity, venerable only by local standards, the trails of steel converging from points inland to meet, parallel, at the bumpers beneath the grand staircase. I didn’t know, in the dream, whether I was going to board any of those trains. I didn’t know if there was anything beyond the city — or, rather, I knew my subconscious would be able to make something up, if I headed out past the dockyards and the industrial zone and the suburbs beyond, but it didn’t matter. I felt the lifeblood of the city flowing and I was part of it.
So each morning, before I got out of bed, I’d grab the drawing pad from my nightstand and try to remember where I’d been, which side of the river, which colored subway line and which numbered bus. I penciled in major roads, the ring highways, the boulevards and bridges, the tunnels beneath the water, and I scrawled a grid of connecting streets where I felt they must have been. I started making a map of the places in my dreams, and I always felt a thrill when I slept and dreamed of an intersection I recognized, a segment, a station between places I knew, anything I could use to anchor myself, to push into the blank spaces, and perhaps, one day, fill out the whole map.
In April my job requirements changed. I got more stressed and worked longer hours. I was a mess after I got home, and I changed meds on my psych’s recommendation. I slept more soundly, after I’d adjusted. But I didn’t dream for two months.
Then one day, I forgot to take my meds. The next day, I forgot again. And after I’d collapsed into bed that night, I found myself back under the glass pyramid, in sunlight filtering through grimy panes, just beginning to taste summer’s heat. But the escalators were stopped and barred with yellow stanchions. Aboveground, there were few cars, and fewer buses. The small knot waiting forlorn at the bus stop turned as one to watch me pass, their gazes accusing but resigned. I hurried past, but everywhere people looked at me the same.
Had I done this? Had I had a duty to this place that I didn’t even know about? I awoke around two, my blanket lying in a heap on the floor. Had the city’s lifeblood ceased to flow when I was gone? I fumbled for my meds, choked down the pills, and sat on my bed, despairing about what I should do.
Well, I pulled my old laptop out of the closet and downloaded a city sim off Steam. I spent the hours of the night transferring the outlines from my drawing pad into the game, hoping, desperately, that I could get it out of me and into something that didn’t rely on my brain. When it was finally running, I deposited the laptop on a corner shelf and buried my face in my pillow. I didn’t want to face them again. I made a map of the places in my dreams, and I haven’t dared go back since.
by submission | Dec 19, 2019 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
The Man walked into the empty room. He sat down on a chair.
“Why do you want to change?” the Voice asked.
“Because I’m tired,” the Man said, “because I’m tired, and I’m broken.”
“Please explain your reason,” the Voice required.
“Yes. You see, all my life, I’ve tried to be a good, honest, hardworking person, but all I’ve ever gotten for it is a lot of suffering. It doesn’t matter what I do or think. There’s so much in the world I can’t control. There’s so much that’s impossible to control, and good doesn’t always return good. You can be kind, polite, and respectful, yet people will still talk behind your back. People will spite you, envy you, hate you, and want to destroy you, and it makes no difference how much you try to satisfy anyone. I used to be able to ignore it, but after my wife died in childbirth, and when I had to commute three hours underground into the City for work, everything got much worse. All those shambling strangers like shadows in a cage—indifferent, uncaring, shifting. You cough, and someone moves away as if you have a disease. You sit next to someone, and the person jumps away. Those are the things that made it very hard, that made it very painful, in the tunnels, on the trains, in the cage. It was very difficult. It was so difficult when my wife died. I lost my ability to trust anyone. There was a neighbor—an old housewife with a husband, a professor of childhood education, and a son, an apathetic postal worker—who offered to help, and she watched the baby for the length of the day until evening, when I came back from work, maybe for a week. But then she said I couldn’t be depending on people. The words were so painful because when she first offered to help, she told me that since my wife had been her friend, I was her friend, too. After she said what she said, I visited her the next afternoon to get the baby, and I gave her a small gift bag of chocolates, and I told her her chore was finished. It wasn’t easy for me to take care of the small child alone. And when I couldn’t work anymore, the Monitors came and took my beautiful little girl away. Sometimes now, I wish it was a dream, a bad dream, but it happened, and it can’t be any other way. I—I’ve wandered off from my main reason,” the Man said.
“All reasons are germane,” the Voice replied.
“But there are so many reasons. There are so many things in my mind, so many things that go back and forth from now and before that, I don’t know where to start. I don’t know, so it all comes out aimlessly and incoherently. I—,” the Man paused. “I’m tired. I’m so tired. Too many things have happened and accumulated, and I’m alone. A long time ago, I wanted to like people, and I wanted to be liked, too. I didn’t want anyone to misunderstand, but everyone goes about things in their own frame of mind, and everyone has their own way of seeing things, so no one can really understand, and you can’t understand yourself. I want to change because I don’t want to feel the hurt anymore. I don’t want this awful, terrible pain in my heart. I don’t want to have to worry about what the others think and say—the slights, the insults, the cruel things; yet I still want to be useful and needed. That is why. That is why I want to be … a computer … a mechanical, processing, insensate computer. I won’t have to take the hurt anymore.” The Man was silent.
“You qualify for the change,” the Voice confirmed.
And the Man, who sat down on the chair in the empty room, changed.
by submission | Dec 18, 2019 | Story |
Author: David Henson
Lt. John Peters tosses a foam ball to his son, Petey. The boy giggles when it goes through his hands and bumps him on the nose. Lt. Peters lies back on the gurney. Norene sits, legs crossed, anxiety like a current of electricity twitching her foot.
At the direction of Capt. Spencer, a man in a lab coat places a metal cap on the lieutenant’s head and slides probes into numerous ports that have been inserted in his body. The cap and probes connect to a tubular machine that resembles an elongated CT scanner.
“We’re ready, folks,” Capt. Spencer says. “Corporal Lindor, escort Mrs. Peters and the boy to level three.” The captain nods at the white-coated man.
Mrs. Peters takes her husband’s hand. “John, are you sure about this?”
“It’s perfectly safe,” the captain says. “We’ve already teleported objects and small animals. In fact,” — the captain walks to Petey, tousles his hair and takes the ball from his hands — “we teleported this very ball from here to our lab across town.”
“But never a person,” Mrs. Peters says.
Lt. Peters sits up. “Somebody has to be first, Honey.”
“You’ll be famous, lieutenant,” Captain Spencer says. “A book deal and movie rights. In the history books. Now, up to level three you go,” he says to Mrs. Peters and tousles Petey’s hair again.
***
The captain hands Lt. Peters blindfolds and earplugs, then wheels him into the machine. Even with senses masked, the lieutenant cringes at the clanging and can see the inside of his eyelids from the bright light. After a few minutes, everything is quiet and dark, and Lt. Peters feels as if he’s floating. So this is what teleportation is like, he thinks. Nice. Then he feels someone shaking him by the shoulder.
Lt. Peters removes the blindfolds and earplugs then sits on the edge of the gurney and looks around the room. “Where’s Norene? Where’s Petey?”
“Up on level three, lieutenant,” Capt. Spencer says.
“The teleportation didn’t work?”
The captains flips a switch, and a large screen on the far wall shows Norene hugging someone who appears to be Lt. Peters. Behind them is a machine like the one the lieutenant was in.
“What? Who?”
“You see, Peters, although we haven’t achieved true teleportation yet, we can approximate it with the advances in 3D printing and quantum computing. In fact, we’ve had the technology to do so for some time. But not the guts … so to speak,” he chuckles.
Lt. Peters feels the room spinning and squeezes the gurney with his legs. “What will you do with … it?” He points toward his double on the screen.
“He will be rich and famous and provide a wonderful life for your family.”
“That’s crazy. Norene will realize it’s not me.”
“He is you. Down to the last strand of DNA and every memory you had prior to me wheeling you out of the machine a moment ago. And he’s fashioned from reconstituted human … stuff … we found lying around so to speak.”
Lt. Peters bolts for the door. When he opens it, two guards hustle him back to the gurney.
Capt. Spencer holds up a hypodermic.
“What are you going to do?”
“We need raw material. I’m afraid there’s some grinding involved, but you won’t feel a thing after this little prick.” The captain puts the syringe to Lt. Peters’ neck.
As darkness closes in on the lieutenant, he stares at the screen and sees his dancing replica twirl Norene then toss the foam ball to Petey, who giggles when it bumps him on the nose.
