by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 26, 2018 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Dax found his usual seat in the back corner of the cafeteria and unpacked his lunch.
He laid out a sandwich, a can of iced coffee, and an orange on the table in front of him, then fished a lock-blade knife from his jacket pocket and set about peeling the orange.
“Hey, army kid!”
There were snickers, and Dax looked up to see a crowd of the school football team gathered behind their quarterback.
“I’m not an army kid,” Dax continued slicing the orange, drawing the knife blade from pole to pole, reducing it to equal sized wedges.
“Well, you lost your arms didn’t you?” Again the laughter and the boys exchanging high-fives and shoulder punches in amusement.
“It was an accident, just leave me alone.” Finished with the orange, he rested his hands on the table, still holding the knife.
“They look pretty real army kid, I heard they tore off at the shoulders, that must have been gross!”
Dax twitched visibly, the memory of a summer job cleaning metal fabricating equipment, and a machine that jolted to life when it should have been offline was burned forever into his brain. The sudden searing pain, the shock, the blood-loss, and waking up in a hospital feeling like his life was over.
“Can you punch really hard?” The quarterback was talking again. “Can you crush things with your bare hands?”
The company, to avoid a lawsuit, had flown Dax halfway around the world and had him fitted with the latest in prosthetic tech.
“They don’t work like that,” he glared, just wanting to be left to eat his lunch in peace, “I’m not like that.”
From a table nearby someone spoke over the crowd. “Show him the knife trick, the one from that Alien movie.”
There was a murmur through the group.
“What knife trick?”, the boy was determined now, “Show me!”
Dax slouched, staring at his untouched lunch before pushing his seat back, standing up and walking around the table. He stopped in front of his tormentor who, wary of the knife, took an involuntary step back.
Dax turned and put his left-hand flat on the table, fingers slightly apart.
“Put your hand on top of mine, just like this.”
There was a moment of hesitation before the rising chatter of the crowd forced him, and the boy placed his hand on top of Dax’s.
Dax yanked his hand out from under, and slammed it down on top again, pinning the boy’s hand beneath his.
“What the…?” he started.
“Don’t move, or this will hurt,” Dax instructed, not looking up.
With his right hand, he tapped the table with the tip of the knife blade in a downward stabbing motion between the thumb and first finger, then lifted the knife to bring it down again between the first and second.
He repeated this, slowly from one end of their hands to the other, tapping the table lightly each time with the blade between the fingers, close but not touching flesh. He paused for a moment, looked sideways at the boy. The growing silence was suddenly replaced with a deafening staccato as he repeated the stabbing circuit, moving back and forth between their fingers with blazing speed and uncanny accuracy, tearing holes in the tabletop but never once looking down.
After what seemed like an eternity, he raised the knife to eye level and drove it down with as much force as he could muster, aiming for the thickest part of the back of his hand.
His prosthetics engaged full safeties, stopping the knife blade mere millimeters before breaking his skin, and freezing his arms in place.
The boy yanked his hand away, staggering backward.
“You’re fucking crazy man, you stay away from me you fucking freak!”
The rest of the group backed away, and Dax closed his eyes and waited for them to fade from his awareness, and for his arms to unlock.
After a few moments, he sat down, closed the lock blade and put it back into his coat pocket and stared, no longer interested, at his untouched lunch.
He didn’t want to hurt himself, he didn’t want to hurt anyone at all, not really. He just wanted that to be his choice.
by submission | Jul 25, 2018 | Story |
Author: David Henson
When I finally got my M-plant, I couldn’t wait to try it out. I went to a local cafe, approached a woman wearing a TP earring and touched my TechPath lapel pin.
She immediately raised her index finger. I held my fingertip to hers, and we both thought backwards from 100 by sevens. Once paired, we practiced sending and receiving simple images, mainly different breeds of dogs, to each other. I noticed her pooches all had dark, sad eyes and drooping tails. Then she shared with me that her brother recently had died. He hadn’t wanted to wait his turn for a qualified physician to insert the telepathy device into his cerebral cortex, but had instead risked going the trepanning route with some back alley charlatan.
Irene and I finished our coffees and agreed to meet again. I felt I was going to enjoy life as a TP. I think everyone did. On my thumb.
There were growing pains as techpathy spread through the population. One was Pink Elephant Syndrome. You know, try not to imagine a pink elephant, and it will pop into your mind. Well, before you sent a thought, you had to picture your transmission image. Mine’s a monkey with a plate of spaghetti on it’s head.
PES struck me one evening when I was having dinner with Irene. I’d developed deep feelings for her, but wasn’t ready to let her know. Don’t think of a monkey, I told myself and immediately pictured a baboon with a big red butt. Don’t imagine a plate. White porcelain with a gold ring. No spaghetti, no spaghetti, no spaghetti. Linguine with marinara. That’s ok. Linguine’s not spaghetti. Spaghetti is thinner. Mmmm, spaghetti. No! I knocked over a waiter with a tray of food when I jumped back, too late, to get out of range. That’s how I learned Irene wanted to be “just friends.” We still are. In fact, I probably owe her my life. On my shoe.
Eventually, there was a backlash from the Protectors Of Optimal Privacy when rumors of a gen-2 M-plant circulated. People with a Thought Snatcher Implant, as the POOPers called it, would have true mind reading capability. No pairing. No transmitting. The TSI would snatch thoughts from anybody with an M-plant. Fear of the TSI drove some people to have their devices removed. On the tree.
Then the POOPers hacked the HUC — the “impenetrable” Heisenberg Uncertainty Cloud, which every techpathic thought flashed through as it went from one person to the other. Now we’re suffering a plague of nursery songs. For nearly a year, every person with an M-plant has been humming This Old Man, Mary Had A Little Lamb, Alouette, Alle meine Entchen — whatever their earworm dictates. People can’t sleep, eat, or work. Suicides and divorce rates are up. There’s a global depression. On the door.
I’ve learned that by deep breathing and concentrating on something — math exercises, playing my clarinet, telling a story like this — I can keep my earworm at bay a few minutes. Then it bores its way back until I can muster the strength to tame it again.
There’s a long waiting list to get M-plants removed. I’m trying to hang on till it’s my turn. I almost went to a trepannist, but Irene talked me out if it. Sweet Irene.
… I just realized I should go back.To the beginning of this story. I left out something important. Breathe … breathe … No use. I can’t continue now.
All I can do now is give the dog a bone and go rolling home.
by submission | Jul 24, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro
I crawl through the flap in the folds of my midnight sheets and touch her again. I touch the cold stipple of her naked skin and it is not the hollow caress of dreams. I am not in that place where images scatter and reform into half-remembered fragments, this is not a dreamscape deprived of the tactile – this is real.
I cradle her, enveloping her in my arms in an embrace that has me clutching for the shifting sinew beneath her flesh as it gently detaches, molting from her frame. I hold her together. I must hold it together. I kiss her and taste her death, the crunch of scorched flesh that lines the ripped gape of her mouth.
She died speaking to me, filing a field dispatch from the desert of some fucking planet the numeric classification of which now escapes me. A number that will soon be forgotten too by those who sent her there, her massacre mediocre and but one of many.
I was the battalion surgeon, but, unlike the brave of the past who forged my profession amid the chaos of battle, I struck a more civilized stance. Boldly stepping into battle, vicariously in the form of a medi-drone, one I controlled from a deep-buttoned leather clad hell many light years from the boom and spark of war.
I had developed the diagnostic and surgical probes that lived inside the exo-armor within which she had sat in the desert and waited for the call to surge.
Impenetrable war suits that relayed vitals back to me in an instantaneous cheat of time and distance. Of course, we could have sent drone-soldiers to fight as well, but we humans we just love the crunch of boots on the ground.
So, she’s talking and I’m interrupting. It was dawn and the sun had just spilt across the endlessly undulating dunes, sucking the nights’ shadows back along the wind-carved waves that fingered their every surface. Then a sound, like the crack snap of thumb against finger…
The round hit her just below her left breast, slicing through the impenetrable and exploding next to her skin. Ripping upward the entirety of her shoulder plate erupted beneath her chin, severing her face in two.
She came to me six days after she died, I thought she a dream, one shredded from the shock that kneads behind my eyes and steals the moisture from my throat, but I could smell her blood as it soaked into the sheets. I could smell it and I smiled. I knew it was her but I didn’t reach out. I didn’t want her to scare and leave, and though the next day she was gone I knew she would return.
Her body lays still on the sand upon which she fell, forgotten, her suit still transmitting data as she rots in the sun. I watch the incoming feed every day, noticing the subtle changes as she gently breaks away.
I search for her every night, lost and tangled in the sheets. She is always there, though her skin is now stretched and purple. I hold her close and I weep as I feel her bones afloat in a sea of petrifaction ooze… Our marriage was far from perfect but she loved me… right?
She wouldn’t have come back if she didn’t love me. If she knew about what I did… she wouldn’t have come. She’d have stayed there crumpled and dead on that stained desert plane of a seven hundred and thirty-five gralloched souls.
But she came back, she came back for me.
by Julian Miles | Jul 23, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“‘The shell is the key’? He said that?”
“Yes. The carapace is the most remarkable aspect of this truly unusual species. In layman’s terms, it’s a pico-honeycomb that has all the useful properties of a hybrid of Kevlar and graphene. Add the light-diffusing filaments that cover it and it’s a perfect natural armour against our weaponry.”
“I always thought the ability to resist our weaponry was a bit too convenient.”
“The ‘tailored genocide’ and ‘monsters under control’ rumours? Scientist-Commander Greven says they’re nothing but conspiracy theories. Even with humanity on the brink, civilisation still needs urban legends.”
“So what has he come up with?”
“It’s an ultra-low frequency sound weapon, derived from some obscure Third Reich research.”
“Good grief, he went a long way back.”
“That’s why Scientist-Commander Greven leads us. He’s brilliant and committed; humanity’s best chance.”
“So when do we get this new super weapon?”
“It was deployed last night. Take your position, Sergeant. This should be quite a show.”
Silence falls and the thunderous noise made by the approaching legions of mutated six-legged death becomes clearer.
The vibration starts at the edge of perceptibility. It rises to become something not-quite audible that shakes everyone’s guts and makes fillings in teeth dance. Cries of pain cut the silence as the oncoming horde pauses. Suddenly, each of the coupe-sized creatures starts to rotate in place, their legs beating a frenetic rhythm as they spin faster. Screams of disbelieving horror rise as the creature’s movements synchronise and their bodies bulge and contort. With chitinous concussions, each monster expands and extrudes knobbly tentacles from under distending carapaces. As one, they all stop spinning. Triangular eyes glow on the truck-sized outlines just visible through the swirling dust
Sergeant Maxim slaps Captain Leon hard to break the man from his wide-eyed paralysis.
“It would appear someone has decided where their best chance lies. Of course, it could be a diabolical piece of combat holography by our enemies, but as they’re supposedly a mindless destructive force, what possible use could they have for tactics?”
“Sergeant, as we’re about to pulped by an unstoppable foe, let’s drop the veiled speech.”
“Works for me. Those monsters are under control. They’re being used by something else and Scientist-Commander Greven is either an idiot or a traitor. Whether his actions were guided or misguided, I would dearly like to take a squad of our most dangerous and have a pointed discussion with him to clarify his position.”
“Will this ‘chat’ result in his death?”
“Of course. Whatever he is, he’s no use to us. We’re going to need to form a resistance and develop some new tactics.”
“To the devil with only taking a squad.”
“Pardon, Captain?”
“All units, this is Captain Rufus Leon. Fall back, get airborne and re-rig for counter-insurgency. All transports to use stealth mode and reform post-sundown on my beacon.”
“Sir?”
“I’ve had a suspicion that you’ve clarified, Sergeant. How did he know the exact frequency to trigger their growth?”
“Could be coincidence. More likely, the highest treason ever.”
“Precisely. Move out!”
by submission | Jul 22, 2018 | Story |
Author: Kristin Kirby
You get coffee. You glance around. A dozen people sip beverages or talk or stare into their computers.
You sit. Then you spot him.
He’s at the counter. He looks at the menu board. You watch him order, watch him pay.
“Thank you,” he says with a smile. “Have a great day.”
You press buttons on your device.
He’s terse the second time. “Thanks.” No smile.
You watch him take his coffee and sit. He drinks his coffee, scrolls messages on his phone. His movements are fluid, natural. Whoever built him did a good job.
After a moment he raises his head and looks at the people in the coffee shop. His expression is open, friendly. He smiles at a mother and child sharing cocoa.
You press buttons on your device. His expression turns blank. He goes back to his phone.
Eventually, he stands, walks to the recycle bin. His hand hovers. You press buttons on your device. He moves to the other bin and drops his cup into the overflowing trash.
Outside, cars move like sludge, trapped by traffic lights. The sidewalk throngs with busy people, eyes straight ahead or on their phones.
You watch him fall into step with the other pedestrians, walk briskly. You follow a few feet behind. His gait is seamless, no noticeable errors there. You send a note to your supervisors telling them you’re impressed with his construction.
He walks by storefronts and gray towering buildings. Then he slows and swivels his head. There’s a bird in a tree, singing. He’s listening with a rapt expression. You sigh and press buttons on your device. He strides past the tree and doesn’t pay attention to the bird.
Ahead, the sudden blare of a car horn, the squeal of brakes. A shriek of pain cut short.
He hurries toward the growing crowd of onlookers. In the street, cars have stopped. Behind the wheel of one car, a woman sits dazed.
Partway under the woman’s car splays a little girl, bleeding, moaning. The onlookers pull out their phones, snap pictures, gawk, snap more pictures.
You watch him push through the crowd. He pulls out his phone. But he doesn’t take pictures.
You watch him rush to the street.
You watch him kneel beside the moaning little girl and punch 9-1-1 into his phone, talk urgently. He leans down to check the little girl.
You inform your supervisors this one will need a complete rewrite. He isn’t acting like a human. Then you delete him.
by submission | Jul 21, 2018 | Story |
Author: Antoinette Constable
A three-year-old boy stumbles along the streets, long after bedtime, holding his
mother’s hand. They are skirting barricades, guns, uniforms. The mother longs to lie
down and sleep a long sleep somewhere safe, somewhere dry, yet she keeps trudging, pretending it’s not raining, pretending that soon, she’ll be home for dinner in her house, with her dark-haired child and his father. At dusk two days ago, the boy’s father suggested that she and the boy rest inside a covered cart on the road. Without warning,the cart was driven off with them as he tried to jump in. They saw him run, screaming to wait for him at the next village church, until the currents of the crowd absorbed him.
Three days and nights on church steps. Unwashed, with her unwashed boy sleeping,
nestled against her hip. She wants to go back. She has no map, no friends, nowhere to go.
Chaotically, people flee south, ditching cars that ran out of gas, discarding luggage,
pets, furniture pell-mell along the road, tramping ahead on foot away from advancing
armies rumored to slash women and children’s throats after shooting the men. When
Enemy planes or hail slash the asylum seekers, they take cover under planks, under
Cars, inside cars. In the next nearly deserted town, the woman and the boy who no longer talks. Late afternoon, she finds a church where an old priest says mass alone among candles. She rummages inside her purse and scribbles the boy’s name on a scrap of paper which she pins on his pocket, telling him to sit right there on the parvis and wait for her. He must be very good, she’ll soon be back. Wait, she says. Wait for me. Understand? Kisses both his cold cheeks. No looking back. No goodbye.
He can’t tell his full name or where he comes from. His parents have lost him, yet it is
he who must live in an orphanage. They shave his head against lice. No food is given him until he calls, “Mother,” a woman who never bore a child, “Father,” a celibate in black, “Sister,” hairless women with wings over their ears. At city hall, eventually, someone assigns him a last name, a birth date. At playtime, he draws planes, bombs, and people broken into pieces with blood spurting sideways. He sometimes draws houses, tongue protruding from his mouth. Houses with roofs and chimneys and walls of evenly stacked bricks and stones. Then school, anonymous in a dull uniform. Fights. Foster homes.Prizes. Scholarships. He’s an architect with a patient, consuming urge to build a house in which to live with two familiar strangers.
