by submission | Nov 1, 2018 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
“Wally, do remember what they used to call us back in fourth grade?”
Wally bobbed his head up and down “Uh-huh, sure do. You were Adrian the alien and I was Wally the werewolf.”
Adrian chuckled. “I was a bit strange back then, before I learned to fit in.”
Wally shook his head. “And I didn’t help things by saying you didn’t smell human. But it didn’t slow you down. Yeah, you learned how to fit in, all the way to prom king. Me- it just got worse until, well, I never fit in. Except for the church group. I wouldn’t have fit in anywhere if it wasn’t for them.”
Adrian sighed. “Whatever.” He shook his head. “But I remember you actually thought you were a werewolf. Your parents came in, psychologists…”Adrian’s voice trailed off.
Wally shrugged his shoulders. “What can I say, Adrian? I was a weird kid with a lot of issues. Didn’t get things sorted out until later in life. Found my true purpose so-to-speak. Got saved.”
Adrian nodded. At least Wally had the good sense not to try to preach to him. Adrian cleared his throat. “Well, why I asked you out here tonight was to tell you something about all those years ago,” Adrian motioned Wally to come closer. He leaned in to Wally “I really am an Alien.”
Wally took a step back. Adrian blinked his eyes and then the protective second eyelid that made his eyes look all golden. He smiled. “In two months, after hundreds of years of planning, we will take over your planet. When the dust settles, I’ll come find you and offer you my protection. We’re allowed a quota.”
Wally shook his head. “And I’m a real werewolf Adrian.”
Adrian shook his head and sighed. “This is no joke. In two months’ time, we take over.”
Wally sighed. “No Adrian, you won’t. You ever wonder how such a choice morsel like the earth has avoided invasion for so many thousands of years, Hmm?
Adrian chuckled “I don’t know what you think-”
Wally held up his hand for Adrian to stop talking. “It doesn’t matter now, it’ll be over soon.”
Adrian looked bewildered. Wally went on. “36 different species have tried taking over the earth since the age of the pyramids. Thirty-six that vanished overnight. Why? Folks like me. Me, my church group. See, according to our church doctrine, God put us on this planet to guard the flock. We protect earth from the likes of you.”
Adrian looked even more bewildered. Wally smiled sympathetically “I know. It was a lot for me to come to grips with which is why I had such a bad time at school. But once I got in synch with the pack, well, it all made sense.”
Wally finished his drink, stood up and flexed his hands. “Being in synch, that was the key. See, we of the pack then can all strike at once- three to one odds at a minimum, no prisoners, as few witnesses as possible.”
Adrian noticed the bartender locking the door. The elderly couple in the corner stood up and began walking over, the barfly two seats over smiled in a not too friendly fashion.
Adrian shook his head and laughed as the circle closed around him. “We never saw it coming.”
Wally sighed, as he extended his canines and claws. Deep throated feral growls bubbled up from his confederates as they closed for the kill. Wally shook his head. “You never do.”
by submission | Oct 31, 2018 | Story |
Author: Malcolm Carvalho
The algorithm has just been published. I move my fingers over the cylinder in the centre of the room. A tube runs into it. I verify the cylinder’s valve can easily control the flow and pressure of the hydrogen atom stream coming into the cylinder.
I retrieve Neha’s profile from the cloud. As I read the first few details, her lavender scent envelopes me, tingling my neck. I hear her voice. The gibberish she would say just to sound funny. Boy, didn’t that work?
I return to my computer and move my finger up the profile intensity slider. I can now feel her arms around me, her feet moving in a one-two waltz, her head against my shoulder.
Enough of these recreated memories. I want Neha back now, in person. Let the illusion become real.
The screen shows the institute has added new data to her records. Lines and lines of symbols encoding her composition. All I need to do is convert these symbols into machine language. The parser will read the translated code, fuse the hydrogen into higher elements and compounds, and then structure them according to the orientation in the symbols.
It will take about twenty hours to get Neha back. In the flesh. Fusing her cloud profile into her body may take another hour.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. What if something goes wrong? Like what? Stop overthinking. What could be worse than losing her forever?
#
I have followed the procedure to the Tee. My feet tremble as I walk to the door. I push it open.
“Baboo!” The voice is shrill. I’m sure it’s not just in my head. Can’t wait to hold her.
Neha is sitting in a corner. Everything’s perfect, the mole below her lip, the thick eyelashes, the inch-long scar near her left collarbone. Her eyes look through me, as if they are focussing at an infinite distance and I am a transparent screen.
She holds my hand and squeezes it. “Baboo, it never felt like I went away.”
#
Her body has shrivelled further, her arms limp and her lips chapped. It looks like she has difficulty breathing. Her chin is sagging. I cannot understand. It’s been about a month since I got her back.
I sit beside her and hold her hand. It is smaller. What has BodAI done?
#
I go through the terms and conditions of the contract, pausing after every point. This is difficult to understand, but I will plough through it.
Note 3(d) settles it for me.
Bones and flesh generated by BodAI using the symbol data will age quicker than in naturally living humans.
An asterisk follows the statement. I read the footnote.
As more people use the BodAI Human Printer, we deplete our hydrogen reserves at a quicker rate than we generate it. The only way to catch up with this deficit is to periodically reconvert some of the generated bodies back into hydrogen, and unlock it for others to use. We do this by rapidly accelerating the aging process of the resurrected person. On the fiftieth day, the person will be gone. You may reapply to recover him/her back after a gap of two weeks, so that others can have their loved ones back.
I look up the calendar. It’s been exactly thirty-eight days since I got her back.
I rush back. “Dinner time?” I hear her call as I lock the door.
I can avoid her for the next twelve days. And wait for another two weeks. That’s better than seeing her grow old and senile.
by submission | Oct 30, 2018 | Story |
Author: DJ Lunan
Tung carefully poured the molten metallic liquid into the stone mould. Almost three litres heated to 650 degrees. The orange liquid sizzled in contact with the colder, crystal marble of his signature insignia cast into a double shield reminiscent of a butterfly. The molten metal whipped around the oval shape, licked the corners hungrily eating the space, gravity and guilt mixed with freedom, grand design and art. A design that would change the world, he’d heard.
Tung sat down on the forge’s only stool, overheated and thirsty. Sweat was falling onto the earth floor in great summer-rainstorm droplets.
Other blacksmiths believe now is the time to douse the object with water, lift it out of its cast, and turn the newborn object to the light. Start pummelling imperfections, buff until it shines bright. But Tung believed in giving chemicals time. Time that he alone had.
This month’s order, almost complete. Butterflies. Always his initial butterfly design. Two heavy gold coins. Art in time.
“Its like cutting a chrysalis to free a struggling pupae”, he argued, typically after too much wet mead and deer trotter soup at the Laser Quest Arms, “it produces a butterfly for sure, one that flies, breathes, farts and mates, but one utterly devoid of colour”.
“Tung, you have to think about the efficiency of your work – you need to be more productive”, the young ‘uns retorted, each too perfect, unscarred, unburdened to see beyond transactions.
The simple economics of short transactional fleeting lives: produce as many as possible, as cheap as possible, and sell them as quickly as possible. Capture more of your time. The young forgers needed their time to impress future mates, make families, buy land, build camps, and fight invaders.
“You only produce one each day?! Tung, you are pre-capitalism, pre-Lean, pre-just-in-time, pre-internet!”, laughed Mortica, his closest neighbour.
But Tung had a different agenda. His time was endless. His metal was not for sale. Not in this time. Everything was destined for the Revolutionary Guardians of the last Century whose cause would not be in vain.
Their orders appeared every month, enveloped, exact chemical composition fully detailed on old media. Paper. Small pile of gold coins. Same design.
She put her warm arm around his shoulders assuringly, not like the professionals, more like a lover. Her dreadlocks dipped in Tung’s mead.
“I was cut open too early, I am devoid of colour”, she lamented sleepily, “Remake me beautiful, stunning, shining?”.
She stroked his beard purposely so he could see his butterfly design tattooed on her hand.
“I am the Queen, thanks to your design, my Revolutionary Guardians are winning”, she murmured as he carried her to his forge, “Your time is over. My time is beginning”.
Tung bought a coffin, filled it with sand and xiithium gum. He paid triple price for all Mortica’s reserves of alumina. They made two casts front and back of the Queen, pouring the hot orange liquid for hour-after-hour.
“Hammer my imperfections, polish away my dirt”, she whispered.
Bellows, sweat, earth, pressure, heat, beauty.
She cried each time they made love, purring, “You have made me Queen, let me make our Princes Kings”.
Using ropes, levers, and counterweights, they joined and fused the pieces, adding the shield to its back.
“You can’t come with us”, sang the twin Queens harmoniously, vapourising, as Tung felt time slip. The cold whipped in, frost quickly advanced down his chimney, through his door, delving deep into the molten metals in the forge.
He got into the coffin, still radiating their warmth, closed his eyes and hoped his next placement would be somewhere warm.
by Hari Navarro | Oct 29, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Beneath a stark winter hue that washes but never cleans a young woman lays naked, the cold winds filthy besom scratching as it dusts her with crystals that flurry as ash.
A security camera gazes down blind and useless.
The upward gaze that meets it is as vacant as it is piercing. Right arm disjointed, grotesquely it folds beneath the gentle sweep of her arching back. Skin once perfect, though now weary with abrasions and abuses both new and old, holds stoic and still.
A solitary figure hunches.
“Such fun as you gorge and tongue at my mind”, said this man to the worm in his head.
“What do you ask? Pity, or is it lust you wish to provoke?”, he sighs. “I sense your taunt, nobody will cry for me as they will for her”
“I’m not dead”
There’s movement behind his eye and his brain contracts and releases.
“… and so, I become madness?”
He splays his jacket atop the woman, averting his eyes he speaks to the whipping breeze as yet another flurry lays litmus, settling, drinking the toxins of the street into its every last pore.
“Who did this?”
“People did this. The people who started your war, they who died in it and those who brought it to an end. It was you. It was me”
There is a box. A home of phenolic sheets that once slotted into the brain of a great computer, its golden pathways and scattering of remaining components drip the sweet scent of mercury, lead and cadmium as he lowers it carefully to cover her head and torso. Though he can do nothing for her perfect legs as they protrude out and into the ramping cold.
“Hold me till morning. They’ll come and you’ll be safe”
“I know a place with soup”
“Fuck the soup, Francis. Lay down. Bite, tear a strip from my lip and taste that I’m here, warm your cold hands at the cup of my breasts, gorge on me. Just please don’t go”
But he does go, inching beneath the city of airships that buoy high above. An escape for the privileged from the poisons that eat at the feet of the poor.
Hours have passed as he now kneels, shifting his home to one side. The woman is still, eyes fixed and staring as he lays a cup to her lip and pours. Frozen lumps slip across hardened features and slide from the ridge of her jaw.
“You came back Frank. Stay”
“I can not”
“Nothing’s here. You’ve given all to me. Dignity and warmth. A home and now… your only food”
“I gave nothing”
“You can’t fucking leave… fucking self-pitying deadbeat… baby killer…”
Morning breaks, but it is not the sun that unfurls into this ally of loading bays and acid-rain pitted iron doors. The beams are man-made that now swing into a tight arch and hiss to a stop.
A mechanical hand reaches through the glare and with one fluid motion heaves the box into the asthmatic mouth of the waste transports gaping compacter.
Steel claws open and flex above the woman, then, a moment’s hesitation, before they drop crushing into her body.
The mannequin snaps and contorts as she is sucked beneath screeching hydraulic plates that stuff her away and into darkness.
The body of a soldier, the fool who could not distinguish plastic from skin, lost and already forgotten as unloved things so easily are, lays propped against a frozen red wall.
Alone, but for the carcass of the gray worm that had so relentlessly churned in his head.
by submission | Oct 28, 2018 | Story |
Author: Brooks C. Mendell
Day jobbers think offices clean themselves. They show up in the morning at their desks, put down their gourmet coffee on coasters their kids made, flick the mouse and check the Inbox without wondering who swept the floors or removed the lettuce heads from the Decapitator.
We get called in to clean up all kinds of messes, from dust bunnies in the Oval Office to chemical waste behind the meat growing plant on Jersey 5. If there’s something no one wants to touch, scrub or think about, call us to handle it. We schedule jobs after hours, to avoid disrupting your business, regardless time zone or planet. Just ask for the Specials Team and tell Frieda where to send the invoice.
I joined the Specials Team early last year. Phil moved me up from the Eastern Regional Squad, where we handled public messes like suicides and multi-shuttle pileups during the hours of rush. When things slowed, a Regional Squad might handle an agherwalrus feeding or even a political rally gone awry.
While the hours can be long and the work dirty, the pay is good. My ex complained about me coming home dirty smelling of alien feces or industrial chemicals, until my mother said to him one day, “but the money is clean.”
Like every job, this one has tradeoffs. Last week, Phil sent out an alert with coordinates. Seventeen minutes later, we were gloved up with masks and prevent suits, vacuuming up pieces of bone and tufts of hair at a blasted Alien Processing Unit. The strain of repeatedly scrubbing red and green bloodstains off the walls takes a toll, even if terrorism’s good for the Company.
For those who say hard work doesn’t pay, I say they don’t know what they’re talking about. I go in every night knowing that performance gets recognized and rewarded. How do you judge day jobbers for pushing email all day? With my team, the mess either got cleaned on time and under budget, or it didn’t.
And while the residue of work can hitch a ride home and sully a relationship, the money is clean.
by submission | Oct 27, 2018 | Story |
Author: Ken Carlson
“This a good trade, Tommy; a good trade.”
“Yes, Mister President.”
“It’s the kind of deal that’s good for America. Maybe it’s my greatest trade ever.”
“Yes, Mister President, right this way, sir.”
The President and Thomas Lee Jarvis, a junior member of the state department walked the halls of the West Wing after leaving the generals and the loudest security briefing ever. The President made the call. The military didn’t see any other option, but that didn’t stop Cabinet members from screaming in rage. Security was called in. Weapons were drawn. This wasn’t the theatre Jarvis expected when he left Law School at Georgetown early.
How it became his responsibility to escort the President back to the oval office with the mandates to sign was still a mystery. It’s possible the President requested him, that his hard work, the long nights, and his cheerful disposition had paid off. More likely, no one else from his department wanted to be anywhere near this agreement or be remembered by history for what it meant.
It had been a week since they lost Seattle; a show of strength by the Kailleans. The President and the generals didn’t believe when they said how powerful they were. Their exploration force, about a dozen ships appeared in the sky over a handful of cities one Friday morning when people were on their way to work.
Jarvis, the youngest man in his department, a tall baby-face that hardly needed to shave, he had been tasked to write this agreement, this ludicrous treaty, a non-aggression pact like none other. It was typed. It would be signed. It would be buried somewhere or burned out of shame.
The Kaillean prince was comfortable in the Oval Office. He was actually seated behind the desk when the President returned.
“Prince,” the President said, “no, don’t get up. I think you’ll be very happy with this agreement. May I say we are very impressed of your ability to understand our culture and your ability to read English.”
The alien nodded. “It helps,” he said with a sardonic note of derision, “that I and several of our operatives were able to live here and learn your ways without your detection.”
“Well, with the authority of the American government, we will honor this agreement in the hopes of a better relationship in the future,” said the leader of the free world. “We understand your people have certain needs, in terms of resources. We hope this trade will help.”
“Mr. President,” said the Kaillean prince, “we appreciate your understanding in this matter. As we said we are in need of human frames and your rudimentary structure, as well as an isolated home base to work from.”
“Hey,” said the President. “I understand. I’m a leader of my country. You’re one of the leaders of your people. There’s no reason we can’t work together.”
“If you’ll sign here, gentlemen,” said Thomas. “By the authority of our government, and the UN Security Council, you will be given the nation of Australia. Mr. President, it will be necessary for an Executive Order to begin your rescue operations of the indigenous people.”
“Tommy, there will be no rescue operation,” said the President. “The Prince here says he needs about 25 million unites to start with. Australia should suit those needs.”
“Mr. President,” said Thomas, “what you’re saying is the people of Australian, uh, a sovereign nation, an ally. You’re saying the existing people there will be, uh, harvested.”
“Like I said,” said the President, “this is a very good deal.”
