by submission | Aug 9, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro
Large Hadron Space-Time Shunt, Saint-Genis-Pouilly/Global Broadcast in …3…2…1 – Transmitting:
“I’m no speaker. My life a desert of beautiful numbers, a place where words stick as I swallow. I haven’t been chosen, it’s but chance that I find myself blessed with the ability to calculate and decode this mad, brutal, gentle world.
I’m not a particularly brave man, but I do not fear this mission. However, I fear the privilege it is to afford this message. We’re few, we who find ourselves addressing not just our nation but the planet entire.
It a privilege generally delivered after the unachievable has again fallen to the ebullient progression of human achievement. Spoken in the afterglow of unprecedented success, in which we celebrate the advancement of our species as we reach into darkness and return with the grandest of tales to tell”, Dr. Francis Hing coughs into his fist.
“As I literally prepare to step into the future, I can but return to the children of your children’s children, and to them, I will speak and my words will be yours.
So, I ask of you one thing – stop. Address the self-destructive tendencies that have plagued our race since the first instant we formed groups and looked upon each other as rivals and not merely as mates.
Peace can no longer be talk tossed as uncaring coins into the hands of a curbside mendicant, no hollow resolutions, no cease-fires brokered on the backs of munition strafed children.
Cradle this world, smooth for me a destination worthy of return. Allow me to step from this pod and say it was you that built the paradise upon which the future now flourishes.
Shun territorial greed. Be first to slam your compromise on the table, shrug away entrenched bigotry as you dress the wounds of your enemies. Reflect religions inward, for they are personal and not able to be consumed readily by all. Listen to those who warn of the effect we are having on this planet and know – we’re human, we’re family and we’ve no place else to go.
I trust your ability to consider these words, again, they are not mine but ours – stop – listen – build. I’ll miss you all”.
The Hadron shunt fires and then…
Incoming Transmission:
“Dr. Hing, I realize you cannot reply to this message. The answer to your probable first notion is yes, there is a problem…
Eleven months ago a massive earthquake laid waste to your city, your home. That simple building that you instructed must never be entered until your return. And it never was, until the earth smashed and tore it to a shell.
The words of your parting address gripped and a global peaceful evolution miraculously replaced the violent revolutions of the past. Heralded as our greatest and most affecting of voices, oh how we awaited your return.
We cried when your hallowed shrine it fell to ruin and we cried again as the children were found desiccated and dismembered in its walls. You weren’t stepping into the future Doctor, you were running.
As result of the accords formed from your teachings execution is no longer an option, but we must heal, find due punishment for your crimes and the lies you set at our feet.
Our scientists have modified your course, infused in it a flaw. You’ve now arrived at your destination, but never will you disembark – entombed in these my words”
Terror scratches the doctor’s eyes and then, a confused smile as a voice breaks the silence.
“Dr. Hing, I realize that you cannot reply to this message…”
by submission | Aug 8, 2018 | Story |
Author: Irene Montaner
The pink young woman was followed by a green man. A deafening explosion and hundreds of sparkly green dots illuminated the night sky. His features could be properly distinguished against the darkness. A middle-aged frowning man; he wore glasses and was already going bald.
The people cheered and clapped their hands gladly, forgetting for a while the hardships of their daily life in this brand-new global autocracy. Tonight, and only for one night, was a time of celebration to commemorate the first five years of peace since the arrival of the Mayor to power.
Everyone marveled at those splendid fireworks that depicted human and animal shapes so realistically. Some said it was the Mayor himself who came up with this new powder mix that rendered such beautiful fireworks. Most people knew this wasn’t true, though, but they played along and passed on the lie. This is how you got by these days.
A pretty couple closed the show. A golden boy and a silver girl illuminated the sky one last time, their sad faces clearly signifying the end of the happy holiday. Everyone was to go home and be up tomorrow at 6 am, just in time for the pledge of loyalty to the Mayor’s government.
“Seems like people enjoyed the show,” said a coarse voice. Ton looked up to see Joris’ face emerging through the smoke that still hung in the air.
“Yeah,” Ton replied and continued cleaning the debris that was left after an hour of fireworks. “We’ll see what we can grind for next year’s celebrations. Each day there are fewer dissidents left.”
Joris shrugged. “Never mind, I’m sure the Mayor will provide us with some other useless souls. There’s always something unsettling about them anyway, the dissidents. They don’t sparkle as much as the rest.”
by Julian Miles | Aug 7, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The truck crests the ridge with a loud whine from the drive servos momentarily rising above the sound of tyres on rough ground.
“There!”
A slim figure leans against a rocky outcrop: shirtless, barefoot, a cigarette hanging from her mouth.
Sheriff Ron Cheadle slaps Deputy Cal Danvers: “We got her. Grab your gun and let’s finish this.” He grabs Cal’s shoulder: “And no staring. Y’hear me?”
Cal nods. His fear has already overridden his usual interest in a lady wearing only briefs. He exits the vehicle and brings his pistol to bear: “Brigitte Noma, place your hands behind your head and kneel on the ground.”
She holds up her cigarette: “Couple of minutes.”
Ron’s not having any of it, leveling a shotgun: “Now.”
She shrugs and flicks the half-finished smoke toward them. Moving slowly, she complies with the instructions.
“Happy?”
Ron nods his head toward her.
Cal steps wide, then approaches from behind. As he reaches for her wrist, her head whips round and her grip somehow twists. She pulls Cal into her. When her head swings back, she tears Cal’s throat out. He collapses next to her, blood spurting.
Ron shoots her.
“Had to have one last kill, didn’t you?”
Tears in his eyes, he takes three steps closer and shoots her again. An arm still moves.
“After nine years, you’re done. There’ll be no trial.” He moves in, racking another shell.
Her other arm flashes over and she shoots him with Cal’s pistol.
He drops the shotgun and topples, eyes wide in disbelief.
She rolls over, wounds closing before his eyes.
“I landed here when you lot were still killing the natives with cavalry charges. The idea was to weaken you before our invasion. But you breed so fast. The planners got it wrong. By the time the leaders accepted the inevitable and aborted the operation, you were too numerous and technically capable for a covert retrieval attempt. My leash-master suicided out with the rest of the infiltration team. They left me, their weapon, behind. Therefore, I do what I was made for and ordered to do. I will do it for as long as I can.”
Ron watches as she kisses Cal’s eye. His mouth opens and air escapes with a shriek as their features start to warp. Hissing steam obscures Ron’s view. When it clears, a shirtless Cal kneels by a dead Brigitte, a bullet wound clearly visible in her throat.
The new Cal talks as he swaps clothing with the transformed cadaver: “Good shot, Sheriff. Remarkable, actually. She ambushed us, overpowered me, and fatally wounded you using my weapon. Yet you still managed to bring her down before she finished me off. It’s so sad. I’m going to be shell-shocked with grief for a long while. May never recover. Might have to move on. Or, I might commit suicide after I start living with someone who helped me through my grief. Such a shame, everybody thought I had gotten over the guilt of your death. My heartbroken partner will be unable to stay, will have to leave the area.”
He smiles, stands up, takes six steps back, and aims the pistol at Ron.
“Now for that fatal wound. You can try and survive if you must. It makes no difference.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 6, 2018 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Walter moved purposefully around his small kitchen, pulling out bottles and tins, each marked with black ink on hastily applied white labels. Jasika read them while he worked; garlic powder, dried dill weed, flour and bread crumbs, and a jug of what looked like cooking oil beside fresh lemons and a strange leafy vegetable she didn’t recognize.
“Parsley,” Walter said, “here, beat these with some water”. He handed her two brown shelled eggs, and a moment later a ceramic bowl and whisk.
Walter turned his attention to a plate of raw chicken breasts, which he dutifully pounded flat as paper, before depositing a stick of frozen butter in the middle of each and carefully wrapping the meat around it.
“Do you cook?” Jasika shook her head. She boiled noodles a lot, mixing in packets of tofu or dried meat and powdered sauce, never anything like this.
“This helps me think” small pieces of bamboo were being carefully inserted into the meat and butter, preventing it from unraveling. “I’ve been trying to figure out how best to test the wetware processor Torva stole.”
Walter starting mixing bread crumbs and spices in another bowl “Suppose you needed to do calculations with a terabyte of floating point numbers, what sort of processors would you use?”
Jasika didn’t hesitate “I’d build a massively parallel floating point array”
“Ok, let’s say they were fixed point numbers instead” Walter dunked the chicken bundles one at a time in Jasika’s abandoned egg mixture before depositing them into his bowl of bread-crumbs and spice.
“Then I’d build an integer fixed-point array instead” Jasika was visibly puzzled by this line of questioning.
“What if you didn’t know what you were going to be processing?” Walter turned his attention to a cook-top where he was heating oil, and in a second shallow pan tossed a handful of onion shavings into a pool of melting butter “Or what if what you were processing changed as you processed it. Could you fabricate a cluster that could handle that?”
Jasika thought for a moment before answering “You can engineer a processor grid with any combination of integer and floating point units, and a controller to regulate the flow, you’d just have to determine what the likely ratio was up front so as to optimize the array”
“That wetware unit – do you know what it does?” Walter was now pouring heavy cream into the pan with the onions. Jasika shook her head as he continued. “It’s a processing engine, but it makes what it needs of itself as it processes. It’s kind of like a pot of stem cells – each one is nothing to start with, but could be anything. As the data flows in, the cells adapt to it. Each cell conforms to its own bit of the data, and they cooperatively formulate the appropriate response to it.” He stopped and turned to face her “Any data, no matter what type, no matter how fluid, it adapts and processes, reshaping itself in real-time.” The smell of hot vegetable oil filled the small room as he turned again to the range, and the coated bundles dropped in series into the fryer.
“With your processors, you have to predict what they’re going to be used for. You put data in one end, it’s acted upon in a predefined way, and you get data out the other end. If the data changes, you have to run it again, maybe on a different configuration of chips.” Walter picked up a tin of red curry sauce “Watch this” he motioned to the white creamy sauce thickening in the second pan “think of the sauce as three streams of data, onions, cream, butter, the pan is the processor, and the heat is the energy causing it to percolate through. I get out exactly what I expect, but what if I add another stream of data, one with its own inherent potential for change” he began pouring the curry into the sauce, stirring, the white sauce quickly turning pink “all of the data is changed, almost in an instant to reflect this new input, each bit is still cream, and onion, infused with butter, but now it’s all tempered with curry. The existing data adapted to the new input all on its own, I didn’t have to know about it in advance, or change the pan or start from scratch, I just poured in something new and the entire equation changed. That’s organics, your binary machines can’t do that, no matter how sophisticated, they can’t expand multi-dimensionally of their own accord just because someone poured a new stream of data into them.
Walter turned off the cook-top, and fished the crispy chicken bundles out of the smokey oil, depositing them on a nearby towel.
“That beautiful little unit in there – that’s my sauce, fluid and infinitely adaptable – I’m going to be the curry.” Jasika stared at him, struggling to wrap her head around this sudden shift from food to his metaphor “I’ll need an inhibitor to make sure it won’t fry my brain. I could use your help with that, I’ll want something solid state, not anything that little beauty can rewire on me. Then I’m going to jack that right into my head, let it have access to all the data I’ve got up here” Walter paused to tap his temple “and let it do what it does. We’ll see what a super efficient computational engine can do with everything I know. This is mind expansion the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Timothy Leary taught at Harvard”
Jasika didn’t have a clue who Timothy Leary was, and she wasn’t sure what to think of any of this “Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?”
Walter divided the food onto two plates, smothering the chicken kiev in the curry sauce “No, I don’t know yet, but once I’m jacked in and stabilized, I’ll know beyond a shadow of a doubt. I’ll know everything beyond a shadow of a doubt. Then we’ll do some serious cooking!”
by submission | Aug 5, 2018 | Story |
Author: Ian Hill
Farmer Hoggins stood bent in his field, working over a particularly embedded knot. Sweat dripped from his brow and mixed with that of the ground as he repeatedly scratched at the sinuous snarl with the jagged end of his plow. The fibers before him were so terribly intertwined, and already he could feel his tool protesting; the cable that ran from his plow’s handle back to the house pulsed with quick trembles, and each scratching strike to the knot felt stiffer than the last.
Then, with a terrible rending sound, one of the tool’s four prongs snapped. Farmer Hoggins swore and straightened up. A withering sigh escaped him. The sun was high overhead, and he could already see the flabby lowlands beyond his property flooding. Soon, the ground on his hill would be too wet to work at all. The farmer bent his eye to and fro, scouring the lumpy hills about his estate. Plenty of puffy red lines indicated that the tilling process had seen some success, but it still wasn’t enough.
After he had rested enough, Hoggins hefted the plow and brought the working end close to his face so he could appraise the damage. The poor tool had convulsed into a fist, and it remained spasmodically clutched, digging nails into its own seized meat. Drops of blood trailed down the bony handle, and the sustaining vein that snaked back up the hill was weak, almost dry.
“Alright, then. Easy does it,” Farmer Hoggins soothed as he teased the hand open. Slowly, his coaxing prods and kind whispers relaxed the overworked muscles, and the plow opened up. The farmer winced when saw that one of the four fingers had been denuded of its nail, leaving an inflamed, soft bed behind–totally incapable of disentangling the cramped knot of flesh at his feet.
“That’s no good,” Hoggins murmured. The fingers twitched before him and then, as if eager to prove his disappointment unfounded, returned to the crooked-knuckle plow posture. The farmer was impressed with its tenacity. Still, it would never do.
“More like this,” Hoggins said, holding his free hand up. He made a claw with three of his fingers, but bent the pinky to his palm to protect it. After a moment, the tool matched the shape as best it could, shielding the raw, nailless appendage against its palm.
“Hold fast there,” the farmer encouraged before hunching back to work. With greater caution, he lowered the rigidly bent plow to the unruly sinews below. He carefully maneuvered the three tearing points between two sheaths of meat, twisted, felt for the hooking bite, and then tore out with a great heave. All at once, the bunched node broke apart with a rupture of mucus and sweat. The farmer reared back as the swollen flesh at his feet voided and paled to match the rest of the field.
“That’ll do,” Hoggins said at length. He held the plow aloft and admired its drained, slack hand, all smeared with blood and pus. A muscle along its heel twisted painfully, and ribbons of shredded flesh dangled from its almost dislodged nails. It hurt, but the farmer was pleased.
As the irritated lesion continued to damply unwind, Hoggins set the plow down and watched as its innervating vein retracted back up the hill to his bony house. The tool slid wetly over the humped ridges of his property before disappearing into one of the many pores at the sloping, skin-stretched base of his home. Hoggins mopped his brow. It was hot work, but someone had to do the planting.
by submission | Aug 4, 2018 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
Tight bindings held her fast to something upright and cold. She stood blindfolded before her captors. Sweat trickled over her eyebrows, infiltrating throbbing eyes, and then eroding mascara into rivulets over her black cheeks and paralyzed quivering lips thwarted from screaming. Her flash memories were of a comforting living room couch beckoning after a trying day delivering news headlines from a national broadcast center in New York. Unusually vicious August heat had exhausted her in a short walk from a parking garage to her air-conditioned apartment. Everything was going to hell, providing red juice for blenders drawing violence voyeurs. Her ratings were skyrocketing.
“You may speak soon.” A mechanical voice filled her like an implanted speaker in her head. It shook her body with bass and authority. Was this death? She wondered in agony.
“No harm will come. Be still.” A new woman’s voice soothed her, like her grandmother’s solace on an Atlanta porch when summer lightning rumbled windows.
The male voice took over. “This place is far from Earth. We will return you, but you have a task to perform. You are chosen above all others. Listen carefully.”
Sarah Jefferson did not listen. She shook her head violently, mumbling, cursing and pleading. She prayed to Almighty God. She felt her bladder failing until something warm touched outside her waist. She calmed. She breathed normally.
“Sarah, you are heard by many people on your planet. We could interrupt every radio, television, and phone on your sphere, but it would simply be called a hoax by your governments. That would leave people unprepared.”
Sarah felt drugged as her inner terror dulled…but these kidnappers, whoever they were, knew her name. That alarmed her, but she soon sank back into a dull swamp of buffered fright.
“Here is what you must do, dear one.” The gentle voice returned. Sarah could feel granny’s hands on her neck—safe and soothing.
“In early December of this year, a comet will appear. Your scientists call it 46P/Wirtanen. It will draw attention to the Pleiades. Visible first at night, it will later appear brightly even in daylight. People worldwide will be watching skyward. Then, on December 24th, our mother ships arrive. There are hundreds of them waiting now beyond the planet you call Jupiter. There will be no doubt then that we, as many others before us, have been among you. Now you may speak.”
Sarah felt her lips free. She was still bound and blinded. “How dare you…bastards! Let me go!”
Disturbing silence was the only response. Another feeling of warmth filled her mind as something rubbed against her forehead.
“We anticipated your fear, Sarah. Let us continue, please.” Again, the soothing tones of a female voice gathered Sarah’s composure.
“Your role, child of Earth, is to communicate to your audience that we are coming. They need to know our intentions to help after the chaos they will experience starting now in August. We can bridge their passage through the coming changes. We are embedding words for you to share. You will remember later. You will speak for us. You will do this to help your people be ready for a new Earth.”
Sarah woke on her settee, soaked in sweat and with soreness around her mouth, eyes, wrists, and ankles. She did not know why, but she felt she had something to do…something urgent. Her widescreen TV was on with her station colleagues covering something about multiple massive quakes across the U.S. and in other countries. She rushed to her bathroom to vomit after realizing her blouse and dress were on backward.
