by submission | Aug 29, 2018 | Story |
Author: Leanne A. Styles
The day the parade came to town was the best day of my life. I remember jostling through the crowd to reach the front, before begging my mother to lift me onto her shoulders to get a better look.
My idols were even more beautiful than I’d dreamed. Seven angels floating by in seven glistening glass boxes. Each girl wore a different coloured dress – the colours of the rainbow. Every time they struck a new pose, their arms twisting and torsos bending into the most elegant shapes imaginable, the crowd let out a collective gasp.
“Aren’t they amazing, Mother?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “They’re very lucky.”
“She’s just like me!” I said, pointing at the redhead girl in the green dress.
Her smile was so sweet and pure, and I wished that someday I would feel that happy, so I could smile like that all day.
“I’m going to be one of them!” I said, drawing amused looks from the crowd.
My mother reached up and stroked my hand. “It’s a lovely dream, Katie.”
“I mean it. I’m getting out of this town.”
The crowd teased at the idea of a girl like me making it as an idol. If only I’d taken it to heart, then maybe I wouldn’t have ended up trapped… a prisoner of my dreams.
But instead, I watched until the idol with red hair disappeared around the corner of the old brewery ‒ the heady scent of malted barley floating on the breeze ‒ planning how I was going to become her.
Everybody I knew back then is dead now. The streets of my childhood town are lined with unfamiliar faces. A new generation of children sit upon their parents’ shoulders, gawping in awe as we roll by.
If I could speak, if I thought they’d hear me through the glass, I’d try to save them from this hell. But the glass is too thick, and my vocal cords are wrecked from the chemicals our handlers use to preserve our aging bodies, so any attempt would be pointless. Even if I could still talk, my face muscles are too weak to crack the lacquer they use to fix my phony smile. My legs tremble beneath my skirt as I strain to hold my pose. There was a time when maintaining the perfect pose, in the stifling heat of the box, and under the crushing weight of the dress, was a challenge I relished. But that game soon grew old. Like me.
The girl who dragged her mother along to parade all those years ago feels like a fictional character from a far-off land, a deadbeat town beyond my tank.
Without warning, we hook a left at the brewery, leaving the crowds, before stopping in front of a blue door in the side of the building. The door bursts open, and a young redhead girl runs out. She circles my box, caressing her prize. The handlers surround me, open the box door, and yank me out. I plead, silently, through tear-filled eyes for the other idols to help me, but they won’t, they can’t.
Two handlers hook a hand under my armpits and drag me through the door and down a dark staircase. The bitter aroma of burnt hops intensifies as we descend, and my perfect memory of riding high on my mother’s shoulders, her coarse brown hair laced between my fingers, marveling at my idols, plays over and over.
The day the parade came to town was the best day of my life.
And it always will be.
END.
by Julian Miles | Aug 28, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The bulb swings in lazy figure eights on its long cable. Somewhere in the darkness above, there must be a breeze. The shifting light is doing more to soften me up than the ministrations of the knuckledragger dancing round my chair like he’s fighting with someone who’s not tied to one.
“Talk!”
I smile carefully because my face already resembles mushy steak: “Pick a topic.”
He hits me again: “What I asked!”
I straighten up: “Must’ve slipped my mind.”
He hits me again.
“Oh, that.”
And again.
“I came to kill your boss like I killed Wallace, Kitson, and Gadro.”
Again.
“If you hit me whether I talk or not, I may as well not.”
Once again.
“No more lies! They took their enemies with them in a blaze of glory!”
I look up at him: “No need to shout.”
And again.
Every time, a gut shot followed by a cross. It may be cliché, but it gets the job done. I’m going to be on a liquid diet for a week, even after a nanorebuild.
Spitting blood and teeth, I grin lopsidedly: “A real leader wouldn’t cower in an armoured hideout, too afraid of his enemies to venture out without a swarm of sacrificial bodyguards and drones.”
He doubles up on the hits this time. I go with arching backwards, then slumping forward and hanging limp. He backs off.
There’s a voice in my head: “Jimbo, you idiot. Did you have to get caught?”
I mutter: “Cara, how else was I going to get in so you could work via my cyberwear to hack the digital underside of the den of this cautious capo? He knows his rivals didn’t go out in blazes of glory. He’s hyper-paranoid because he’s terrified.”
“Give you that. So, I’m in and I have the trigger sequence. You ready?”
“Ready to collapse in a drooling puddle. Send Suzy.”
“That bad, eh? Okay. Cue your crazy daughter in three, two, on-”
High in the darkness, something breaks. My sparring partner steps across to stand by me, looking upward curiously. As pieces start to land, he dodges away from me.
A chunk of girder crashes down between us, barely missing him.
“Close!” He grins.
Something purple drops behind him and the blade she wields cleaves him from sweaty crewcut to the crotch of his baggy tracksuit. Without even two halves of a startled look, he goes down.
Suzy brings the blade up and performs O-Chiburui while her left hand picks a pale cloth from her sash, allowing her to flow through a deft chinugui before sheathing her sword.
She smiles, then frowns when she sees my stare.
After looking down at her graphene and latex bodysuit, she grins: “It’s comfortable, protects well, and lets me move properly.”
“You might as well be wearing bodypaint.”
She raises a hand: “We’re not doing this again. Say one more word and I will do the next mission wearing nothing but purple bodypaint, so you can get a close look at the differences – along with everyone else.”
I know when I’m beaten, so I shut up while she cuts me loose, secures the drop line, and gets us both whisked up to the already ascending gravsled.
“We’re clear, Cara.”
The building below us trembles as flames belch from its windows and other weak points. Seems like every criminal boss has their headquarters rigged to explode or implode. It’d be rude to not take advantage of all their hard work, and save public funds, by skipping the trial and going straight to execution.
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 27, 2018 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Jodie climbed into the passenger seat of the big sedan, the door closing itself with enough force to remind her never to leave anything in its way too long.
Jacko was already behind the wheel, flipping switches and bringing the old turbine engine to life, mumbling the startup sequence under his breath.
She twisted the rearview mirror to make sure her facemask was still in place and caught a glimpse of B sitting in the back seat. She blinked, then reached and tried to hold the mirror steady, but everything was vibrating and trying to focus on him made her nearly vomit.
She pushed the mirror back towards Jacko and opened the window, breathing the cold morning air and the thick smell of aviation exhaust.
“What’s the deal with him?”, she waved a thumb back over her shoulder, not taking her eyes of the horizon, “he creeps me out.”
Jacko, having gotten the massive engine settled into a steady throbbing squared himself in the seat and pushed both throttle sticks forward before answering. The carbon fiber giant lurched into motion on a cushion of air towards the city.
“B’s not a he, it’s an it,” he corrected her, “just because it’s built on a bipedal biochassis, doesn’t mean it’s human.”
They reached the end of the long driveway, leaving the decrepit barns and old farmhouse behind. They drove in silence along the regional road, then the interstate, then finally exiting into the maze of inner city roadways that would lead them to the office tower they’d been studying for the last few weeks.
Jacko pulled along the curb at the intersection of Fifth and Twenty Seventh streets, stopping just long enough for B to climb out of the back seat before continuing to a midrise car park a half block further on.
Jodie risked a look in the side view as they glided away, watching as B disappeared into a crowd of pedestrians, a blur she could only almost see if she looked away from him. It. Looked away from It. When she tried to look directly at where B should be, she found it impossible to hold her gaze there.
She turned back, her eyes and head aching from the strain as they turned into the skyward cover offered by the old parking garage.
B followed the pack of pedestrians as it was programmed to do. Beside, never in front, and vibrating at a range of frequencies from head to foot so as to be virtually impossible to look directly at.
Cameras and sensors along the pedestrian walkways would pick B up as merely a blur, but with no electronic signature, no alarms would be raised. It would only be after, should they review the recordings, and only if it were to be flagged up for human attention that B may be noticed. By then it would be too late.
At the banking tower, B followed the lunch crowd through the detection panels without incident, lost in the flood of staff returning to their offices.
B resonated through every bandwidth, echolocating and triggering passkeys and code fobs, and storing the respondent code in memory cells grown just for this purpose within its chassis.
In the elevator, one fidgety intern looked B directly in the eyes for a moment, instantly regretting it as he convulsed into a mild seizure. The elevator cleared as his coworkers, concerned, hustled him back out into the lobby, leaving B alone.
This simplified things, as B now had the elevator car to itself. It thumbed the datacenter level, oscillated an extended digit in response to the passkey challenge, and the car descended without complaint.
The data center itself presented another series of doors, each unlocked with a previously stored key, vibrated through the hardware without contact.
Once inside, B walked slowly between the rows of racks, soaking up the electronic traffic as barely perceptible oscillations in the atoms around it until it located the specific server it was sent to find.
It then pinched the network cable between two fingers, synchronized with the host and uploaded its code payload directly into the wire.
Its job complete, B walked to one of the large exhaust vents at the end of the aisle, stood on top of the grating and vibrated itself into dust.
From Jacko’s vantage point at the garage up the street, he could see the sudden gust of black dust blow up from the sidewalk grating before it was lost in the early afternoon bustle.
“We’re done,” he turned and climbed back into the sedan, “Vatican dot local has chosen a new benefactor. Funds should be fully diverted by the time the markets close.”
“What about B?”, Jodie asked as they pulled back into the street, heading away from the bank.
“Don’t you worry, after today, I’ll grow you an army of Bs”
by submission | Aug 26, 2018 | Story |
Author: Lance J. Mushung
I tightened my grip on my black mini tote and stepped out of the elevator on the top floor of Parasol Corporation’s headquarters. The CEO, Kal Shakti, used the entire floor for his office.
A few steps brought me to a human receptionist with trendy long blue hair like mine. She said, “Ms. Eriksson, Mr. Shakti will see you immediately.”
A portion of a mirrored wall slid open and she motioned me toward Shakti. He was wearing his trademark white turban and sitting behind a walnut-colored desk on the far side of the floor.
The wall closed behind me as I crossed an expanse of sandy colored carpet to him. He’d set the window glass surrounding him to privacy mode. That deprived us of a panoramic view of Geneva, but suited my purpose.
When I stopped in front of him, he pointed at the wood guest chairs without looking up from a screen built into the desk. I didn’t want to think about smoothing my skirt under me, so I perched on the edge of one.
He looked up. “So, Elsa, why do you want to see me?”
“It’s sensitive.” I took a surveillance detector out of my tote. It signaled clean.
“We’re alone. My system checks continuously for any spying and recording.”
I put the detector back in my tote. “I figured, but better safe than sorry. I know what you did on Geras.”
His eyebrows rose, but only for a moment. “What are you talking about?”
“Like most, I figured pirates destroyed our research site. But then the Virgo Cartel told me you’d contracted with it to destroy the comm tech of the long-gone species there. Was comm using quantum entanglement such a big threat to your wealth?”
He nodded. “Parasol manufactures huge numbers of courier drones for interstellar messaging. The tech you found would soon make us like the proverbial buggy whip manufacturers at the beginning of the automobile age.”
“It turns out Virgo’s raiders collected what we’d found before wiping out the site and most of my team. I’ve been developing the tech for the cartel since being told about you. I can now entangle sets of nanoswitches, resulting in each being in the position of the one last changed.”
He sighed. “So, what will it take to suppress the tech?”
“I entangled four of the special nanoswitches used in replacement hearts and Virgo got three of them into the one put into you last month.” I pulled a black fob with a single covered button out of my tote. “The fourth is in this remote. When the nanoswitch in it opens, your heart stops. It’ll look like an act of God. I could have pressed the button from anywhere in the galaxy, but wanted to see your face.”
Singh sputtered as I flipped open the cover and pushed the button. An astonished look flashed over his face, after which his head fell forward to hit the edge of his desk with a thump.
I muttered, “Enjoy hell,” before putting a shocked expression on my face and running back to the receptionist while screaming for help.
by submission | Aug 25, 2018 | Story |
Author: Katelyn Goule
Traveling along a lesser known path, she found Hope idling at the side of the road. He was dressed in all blue and white, and the reflection of the sun smoldered in his glossy eyes. Hand outstretched, he beckoned her closer, sunlight gleaming against the pavement around him. At first she took a step forward, however she faltered and quietly said: “I’ve seen you on many different roads, but how do I know I can trust you?”
Hope looked at her with concern, knowing well the reasons she’d taken this walk, and then offered warmth in the softest of smiles and replied: “I take countless forms—sometimes I leave just as quickly as I appear. I do not ask for trust or commitment—not even belief in my existence, but I am what you wish to see, and if that’s a hand to hold, then a hand to hold I’ll be,” a solitary drop of rain rippled through his voice, “but if what you wish to see is nothing at all, then just as easily, I will recede.”
by submission | Aug 24, 2018 | Story |
Author: Carolyn Myers
A well-dressed woman flung the office door open and collapsed onto the sofa across from me. I pretended not to stare at the woman whose body appeared completely artificial. She had cosmetic work done to accentuate what I supposed were her good features. Whoever performed the surgery did a poor job because she looked like an overstuffed model.
“Welcome, Ms. Barkley. You have put in a request for a daughter,” my boss said.
“I want you to make me a superstar daughter!” Ms. Barkley yelled. My boss frowned but maintained her composure.
“Let’s start with the appearance,” my boss said. She nodded at me. I pressed a button that displayed a three-dimensional baby on the screen.
“Blue eyes,” Ms. Barkley snapped.
“Ms. Barkley there is no blue-eyed genes in your DNA,” I said. Her face contorted into the most disgusted expression like it was my fault what was in her DNA.
“Do you think I care? I am paying for the most expensive package,” Ms. Barkley said. I quickly pressed a few more buttons taking the blue-eyed gene from our gene bank.
“Tan skin, tall, thin but not too thin,” Ms. Barkley rattled off traits that she did not possess.
The baby was nearly finished but Ms. Barkley appeared increasingly upset the closer we came to completion.
“Make her a superstar,” Ms. Barkley whined.
“What traits do superstars possess?” I said.
“She has to be famous,” Ms. Barkley said. I sighed and looked into the lifeless eyes of the simulated baby. She gurgled on the screen.
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“You have to help her. Give her best chance of being somebody!” Ms. Barkley begged.
“I’ve been designing babies all week and I hope to God they become somebody. Unfortunately, I can’t make your daughter famous it isn’t a gene.” I said. The woman looked depressed and angry at the same time.
“Fine. Give the child a good memory, make her fearless and…and…give her the ability to be an actress,” Ms. Barkley said. I quickly typed in several commands giving the child a memory was easy but the other traits were harder. I motioned for my boss. She quickly rushed to my side.
“Can you make someone fearless and have the ability to act in movies?” I whispered. Ms. Barkley began to tap her foot on the hardwood floor. My boss shook her head.
“Ms. Barkley we can’t guarantee that your child will be fearless or an actress. We can try to generate those results but there isn’t a specific gene. What may cause one person to become an actress can make another a pathological liar,” my boss said.
“I am willing to take that chance,” Ms. Barkley declared without blinking. My boss typed in a few letters and numbers across the screen.
“Your baby is finished.” My boss said.
“Superstar,” Ms. Barkley demanded. I pressed a few commands aging the baby into a beautiful young woman standing on a movie set. Ms. Barkley smiled.
“Yes, that is a star waiting to be born,” She breathed. I pressed a button that displayed a pie chart across the screen.
“Five percent of her DNA comes from you, Ms. Barkley. The remaining Ninety-five percent comes from strangers in the gene bank,” I said.
“That does not matter to me. She is everything I have ever wanted,” Ms. Barkley said. I clicked the big blue button labeled create. Ms. Barkley had not noticed the fine print on the bottom of the screen. Computer generated imagery may not be anything like real life.
