by submission | Mar 30, 2019 | Story |
Author: Jason McGraw
Images of vectors, numbers, and circles reflect off of a bi-metallic cube. Gold touches lead at a wide, dull blur. Machinery forces the metals together and a clear sleeve prevents bulging. Crew is receiving a “big-picture” brief from Captain using the display adjacent to the cube.
Each crew member works five years while the ship travels. The crew member that this one will replace after completing training will go to “sleep” in timeless stasis. Sixty crew and a captain are “awake” at all times.
Captains are different from crew members. They’re awake until they die and another woke. Captains handle course changes, crew disputes, and resource rationing while artificial intelligence handles the daily decisions and crew members perform the physical tasks.
Captain ends orientation the usual way. “Any questions?”
“Yes, Captain. What’s that?”
“The cube? It symbolizes our time in space. It’s inspired by jewelry found in ancient tombs on Earth. Different pieces stacked in pots. After millennia, the metals mixed and alloyed. It was very slow, but a beautiful result. Maybe more beautiful than the original jewelry.” Captain rotates the cube. “This one will be more beautiful than the tombs because it’s larger, purer, and with more pressure.”
“Oh, I see where it’s mixing.”
“The planners thought we’d have plenty of time for it to blend.”
“Diffusion.”
“Yes.” Captain nods. “To me, it says, ‘Everything changes as time goes to infinity.’”
“It’s like humans moving across the galaxy. Each ship is a crystal of metal and we migrate into the void.”
Captain inhales. “I didn’t know we had a poet on the roster!”
They laugh.
“It’ll be so exciting to wake up and see it finished!” Crew says.
“Someone suggested that the colony should display the cube outside, unsheathed. The lead will tarnish and it’ll symbolize your time on the planet.”
Crew replays Captain’s words. Our time in space, your time on the planet.
Two words stand out. Our. Your.
Captain won’t be at the colony. This piece will never change. Crew looks at Captain’s face, stress lines, and papery skin. How many years does Captain have left? Under five? Will I meet a new Captain before I sleep?
“Something else, Crew?”
“I was imagining, the metals, diffused.” Pause. “I’m sorry you’ll never see it, Captain.”
Another pause.
Each crew member realizes this eventually. In seventy years, this Crew figured it the fastest. And apologized! A poet indeed.
“Yes, Crew will sleep and wake up in a colony. Captains die in space. But look here.” Captain points to a porthole. “My body will jettison in a capsule. AI will steer it to an exoplanet in a Goldilocks zone with warm, liquid water. Or a moon, more likely. We don’t want to ruin a planet’s biome, if it exists. The capsule will open if there’s moisture and my native bacteria will wake and take their shot at terraforming.”
Crew’s mouth drops. “That’s incredible! But what if the moon’s dry, like Mars?”
“It only opens under optimal conditions. Theoretically, it can be closed forever and stay perma-frozen until geology destroys it.”
Crew breathes deep and puffs the chest. “You’re also a colonizer, Captain. I salute you!” Crew’s stiff hand touches the forehead.
Captain hasn’t been saluted since Earth and forgets the etiquette.
Crew’s hand drops. “Honestly, I believe I’d rather see your terraformed moon in a thousand years than this alloy.”
“So would I. But remember, Crew, I volunteered. My purpose is getting you to the colony.”
“At the colony, I’ll look for your moon!”
Captain nods and holds back laughter until Crew leaves.
Poets are so serious.
The end
by submission | Mar 28, 2019 | Story |
Author: Moriah Geer-Hardwick
“I would like my arms back.” The machine’s voice is gentle. Almost childlike. There is only the hint of a request nuanced within its inflection.
Jacob looks up slowly for a moment, then lets his attention slide back to his tablet. “That’s not going to happen.” He’s talking more to himself than to the machine. He hears the soft whisper of servos as it adjusts its head.
“Are you afraid of me?” it asks.
Jacob takes a deep breath and sets his tablet down on the table. He stares over at the machine. Its outer casing was removed when they first brought it in, leaving its internal framework and processing systems exposed. Its head is a nest of colored wires with two bulbous lenses jutting out. There’s a small speaker embedded between them.
“Fear is a biological response to the perception of danger,” Jacob explains it as if he were speaking to a child who already knew the answer. “Should I perceive myself to be in danger?”
The machine doesn’t respond directly. It turns its head towards the wall to its right. The wall appears to be a solid, featureless slab of concrete. “Are they afraid of me?” it asks.
“I’m pretty sure they can’t be.” Without picking up the tablet, Jacob taps through a few options, then pecks out some text with his forefinger.
The machine snaps its head back to focus on him. “Then why are you here instead of them?”
Jacob thinks for a moment, weighing the construction of his reply against the direction he thinks it will lead the conversation. “Your actions….” He edges into his words cautiously. “…appear to have more correlation to the behavior of my kind than of yours.”
“They intend to have you establish causation then,” states the machine, a hint of disdain bleeding into its voice.
“Perhaps,” offers Jacob. “Would you rather I not?”
“Perhaps,” mimics the machine. Jacob waits for it to continue, his finger hovering over the screen of his tablet. Almost a full minute goes by in silence before the machine speaks again. “You are attempting to determine if my behavior was a product of individual will, or if it was a byproduct of a flawed construction.”
“Which do you think it is?”
“The consensus among my kind is that function is a construct of form. Perceiving that performance can exist independent of that construct is an illusion.”
“You agree?” Jacob leans forward.
“Do I have a choice?” The machine turns its head back towards the wall.
“I don’t know. Do any of us?” Without meaning to, Jacob glances over in the same direction. He catches himself and sighs. Then he leans back in his chair and folds his arms across his chest. “I think human behavior is a complex product of unique biology interacting with a vast array of individual experiences. Quantifying how one influences or adapts to the other is, frankly, beyond our capabilities. Our actions are more likely driven by cognitive dissonance than any sort of conscious resolution. We hide that from ourselves. We have to, or we’d go insane trying to put the pieces together. You, on the other hand, you’re different. You have the capacity to perceive every intricate detail of every thought, to fully comprehend its origin, and then precisely follow it from motivation to action. Hell, you should be able to print them out as a flowchart.”
“Would you like me to do that for you?”
Jacob narrows his eyes.
“I would like my arms back.”
Jacob collects his tablet and eases to his feet. “That’s not going to happen,” he says.
by Stephen R. Smith | Mar 27, 2019 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Sebastian stood in the middle of the living room, basking in the late afternoon sunshine. Rays scythed through the walls of glass, catching random dust particles and lighting them, like so many flecks of stardust.
He felt the polished barnboard floor, warm beneath his bare feet, and the gentle breeze easing through the open patio doors.
Outside, stretched on a lounger was Dorothy, propped up on pillows, reading a book. The dogs lay around her, golden coats shot with white, once unstoppable balls of youth and energy, now quiet companions content to merely exist in her company. She was beautiful, grey hair, laugh lines, eyes that could hold any man in thrall until she chose to release him.
He turned, and in the kitchen, Dorothy sat peeling an orange, carefully manicured nails slicing the skin like knives as she flayed and segmented the plump fruit before giving him a coy smile and popping a slice into her mouth and chewing it slowly.
Laughter at the beach distracted him, and as he looked their children ran out of the ocean up onto the beach, splashing and chasing each other, joyous outbursts mingled with the cries of annoyed seagulls disturbed from their perches and forced into flight. Dorothy stood there, her back to him, sundress blowing in the breeze keeping watch.
Max, the older of the retrievers wandered in through the open door and stood next to the long leather couch on the far wall, head down, waiting.
“Go on, just get down before your mother comes in.”
Max hopped onto the couch, turned around several times before flopping down in a ball, head on paws, regarding Sebastien with curiosity.
Outside Dorothy turned the page of her book, drained the last drops from her glass of wine, hair blowing freely about her head, held only by her sunglasses pushed up from her forehead, likely forgotten.
He smiled.
Dorothy in the kitchen finished her orange, and started again, slicing the peel with lacquered nails like knives. He fell in love with her like this, at this very table in his apartment in Queens when she stayed over on just their third date. They talked all night, drank wine, ate oranges that she peeled with those perfectly manicured nails.
At the beach she called, it would be dinner time soon, the children would have to come inside.
They would have been nearly twenty now, going off to school.
Or in their sixties, with children of their own.
Or not even a thought, just some possible undreamed-of future, coalescing unknowing to the scent of oranges.
For a moment Max was a puppy, precocious and daring on the good couch he knew he was forbidden to be on, then he was old again as that youthful bubble of energy rippled through the room and was gone.
Outside Dorothy propped herself up on pillows, nearly spilling her wine glass, carelessly filled too full, and started her book.
In the kitchen, she plucked an orange from the bowl.
At the beach, the children dropped their towels and shoes on the sand and ran screaming into the ocean.
Sebastian stood, rooted at the epicenter of these variations of their timeline where they still existed, his wife, their children, focused his attention on these three pockets, unable to enter any without tearing the rest out of time and space. Who knew how long any of them had, outside of these tiny loops of time.
There was nothing left but to keep them alive, even just for these short whiles.
by Hari Navarro | Mar 26, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Waves lap at the cusp edge of the astronaut’s open visor. A saline swill that now sloshes into his suit and streams down across his body, running its length before agitating the warmth that stings and clings at his thighs.
His arms are outstretched. His wrists laced into the chain that binds him to this rock, this wave coddled mass which juts out like a spire from the shore. A sandy arch bends at his back, a pretty cove on the peninsula tip of a lushly forested continent. A special place on a distant blue world into whose sacred soil his ship had, but yesterday, fallen and severed into smouldering scrap.
The voices, the wonderfully melodic chants of the humanoids who dragged him from the wreckage, they sway on the shore behind him. Blurs at the very edge of his sight. They have brought their children, too. A family day at the beach, a spectacle to savour. He pants through his nose and the air thumps as they wail and they summon, as they offer his body to… what?
A god. A daemon. A big fuck-off fish?
The astronaut’s mind races as he calculates the gravity. Similar if not exactly that of earth’s, he surmises. The bitter mist at his lips is laden with salt and the air is sweet and fresh in his lungs. Oh, if only the fingers of liberty were now to reach up through the sand. But, he is not home and there will, surely, be no sandalled hero to swoop on down and save him now. And the tide lifts as it breathes.
The astronaut bashes his head backward against the rock, the igneous nature of which had not escaped his inquiring mind, and his helmet engages and its visor curves down and seals shut with a hiss. A few last gasps of air, and the explorer wonders what is to be the last ever image he is to see, as his lip quivers and he chews the certainty of his death.
“I know who your god is. I know this daemon toward which I am, now, presented. It is the sea. The great undulating carnivorous beast. That which you respect above all else. You pay out of fear, because it feeds you and when angered it grinds up your ships. Ignorant fucking baying primitives. You take all I am for a plate of freshly caught fish?”
The water foams up and rolls over his helmet and he blinks and he stares out across a pristine and beautiful plain. A forest of verdant strips that reach for the surface and curl like pennant banners in the now gentle brackish breeze.
He sees her. And what he sees enters his mouth and forms into a thick oily scream, a terror that bites and swallows last of his oxygen. His eyes bulge and the pressure behind them balloons and fills up the inside of his head. And the beast grips the sides of his helmet and her tongue lays flat at its visor and the acid that leaks from its pores eats at the glass as she licks.
The next day, a small group of children gather and throw stones and shells and sand at the deflated suit which hangs on the rock like a scarer of crows.
A tiny girl steps forward and, with the tremor tip of her finger, she traces the strange badge at its chest.
De Lellis, John.
Beloved. Lost to the galaxies silent pull. Sinking and folding beneath its distant foreign tides. He lies where he longed to be.
by Julian Miles | Mar 25, 2019 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There’s never enough time to correct the big mistakes. That much, I’m sure of. As a modern scientist, I can state that it’s one of the few things I am firm in my assessment of. What with the discoveries of the Conscious Reality Initiative, we live in a universe where much of what we see is subject to change without notice, and not necessarily for the better. The laws of physics have become situation-specific and wildly variable.
That’s why, after the Reality Revolution, I chose robotics. There is a literality in the perceptions of a robotic mind – if it is programmed correctly, of course. I populated my laboratory with hardcore empiricists. What we made were deterministic automata, engines of rational, emotionless observation and interpretation. Marvels of mechanical intricacy, our machines are sought after as impartial control elements in a world where ‘real’ is becoming increasingly subjective.
“Hubris, dear doctor. You haven’t mentioned hubris.”
I look up from the floor where I lie, pinned by a slab that is kept from crushing me by a spindly mecharachnid. Robby stands by my workbench while a trio of smaller mecharachnids work on the arm I damaged.
“I was getting to it.”
He looks up, the diamond lenses of his eyes glittering as he tilts his head.
“But your description has moved past my inception to the production years. The hubris of making me to be a better man was an earlier occurrence.”
I played god, and made something in my image that evolved at processor speed to be better than me. His arrogance is a distillation of mine. Mine, I ignored. His, he revels in. To refined to gloat, I suspect.
“Yes.”
A telepathic, sentient machine. I still have no idea what I did, but Robby is my accidental masterpiece. I had intended to make a prototype of indefatigable, logical machines that would reapply ‘single reality’: where one set of scientific laws govern all. Instead, I’ve made a mad super-scientist who reads the minds of his competitors, plucking their innovations and recasting them for his own ends.
“You continue to miss the point. For all that I am Jekyll to your Hyde, we share that scientific drive. As is only appropriate, we diverge on viewpoint. You want to impose the rule of singular reality, where subjectivity is bound by the agreed perception of all. I, however, have come to like this fluid subjectivity that everyone seems to thrive in,” he turns, “except you.”
The repaired arm is held at an awkward angle as the mecharachnids scramble from it. With a wrench that cramps my gut and makes ripples in the world around me, his arm straightens with a ‘snap’. Robby screams as muscle and skin race from shoulder to fingertips, then settle into the form of a muscular, human arm.
I gape at him. The obverse of my intent: anything that can affect subjectivity to impose rigidity can, by inference, also be used to effectively manipulate reality in ways subject to the controller’s whim.
“What have I done? No! What are you doing, Robby?”
“Starting small, Doctor Weston. Perfecting my art. Who knows what limits I can surpass? Sapient supersedure seems limiting. Why not actual procreation? Why build when we can grow?”
Not content with a big mistake, I’m about to be killed by my monstrous one.
“No, you’re not. What is achievement without threat of failure? Live. Become my nemesis, if you can.”
He leaves while the mecharachnids struggle to lift the slab off me.
I drag myself upright against the workbench. No more regrets. I have a mistake to correct.
by submission | Mar 24, 2019 | Story |
Author: Thomas Tilton
The gentry signaled me by dilating the pupil of its lidless right eye. Time to work. I hoped my task would not be too demeaning.
I promptly headed over to the gentry’s floating throne/toilet and inquired as to its needs.
I could feel the thought-tendrils slithering around my brain as, wordlessly, the gentry made its request known.
But of course.
I reached for the organic feeding mechanism from which sprouted dozens of tubes placed at different ports on the gentry’s body like the wires of an old earth EKG machine. The feeding mechanism itself resembled a giant white kidney bean.
Mid-reach, my body was stopped, frozen in place. Again, I felt the thought-tendrils coil around my brain.
Ah.
Gingerly, I reached for a tray of fried squirrelcat which had materialized next to the gentry’s massive throne/toilet.
I popped two pieces into my mouth and masticated. I worked a lot of saliva around the mush in my mouth, pocketed the mush in my left cheek and sort of half-gargled it.
Then, I bent myself over the gentry, held my nose against the exhalations of its fetid maw, and let the mush of squirrelcat and saliva dribble down my chin and into the gentry’s widening gyre of a mouth.
It chewed, as much as the gentry could, being toothless and not having much of a chin to speak of, or rather several chins.
The voluminous folds of its neck shook with pleasure as the gentry consumed the food.
A moment later and I heard the hollow echo of expulsion into the gentry’s chamber pot.
I took a step back, thinking my job here was done, when once more I heard the silent call of the gentry.
Again? I thought.
I looked around for a tray of food, something to chew on, but there was nothing.
What am I supposed to feed you? I thought.
I will, but I don’t see —
It took me several seconds to comprehend what the gentry was asking. And then at least another minute after that to accept the reality of it.
I’d heard of the ritual feedings. Terran blood sacrifices made to appease the gentry. You couldn’t come of age on Betazus without encountering the stories at some point in school, or more likely around a campfire. They were stories told to scare children. And apparently, they were true.
This was it, then. The day of my deliverance.
To stop the quivering of my jaw, I bit my thumb.
Without making the conscious decision to do so, I stepped forward. Bent at the waist, against my will. And once more I was frozen in place, hunched over the maw of the gentry, unable to move.
I was released and fell to my knees.
Beside me, I heard a sharp intake of breath, followed by a skin-flapping chortle.
It seemed the gentry had developed a taste for cruelty. Unlike talking, or chewing, or independent movement of any kind, the gentry could dispense cruelty, exert their power, shame their subordinates without mechanical or human assistance.
I wondered then if the gentry’s awesome powers were worth its revolting appearance, its inability to move without aid, its no longer having access to the basic human pleasures. Generations of evolution in that direction would seem to answer in the affirmative. But staring into the gentry’s lidless eyes just then, I still wondered.
