by Julian Miles | Jun 4, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There’s another muted ‘thud’. Bangstri leans its eyeball on the cool bulkhead.
“How many is that?”
“Seventeen, Venerated Piloting Specialist.”
It rotates it’s necktacle to glare.
“My appellative is Bangstri. You are to use it at all times, not just when you haven’t made a wormhole-sized bartniff of something whilst trying to overachieve. It has reached a point where I don’t actually need reportage from you. All I have to hear is how you address me to determine the success or failure of the particular in question.”
“Apologies, Venerated Piloting Specialist Bangstri. It was not my intent to commit a bartniff of such scale.”
It leans back against the bulkhead. The chill metal stalls rage-induced temperature creep.
“You were aiming for a smaller one, mayhap?”
Sputtering and multiple colour changes accompany limb waving and genuflecting.
“No being intends to bartniff, Dangdo. You simply did not think all the way through your cunning contrivance.”
A trio of eye stalks pop upright: “You thought it was cunning, Venerated Piloting Specialist Bangstri?”
“Not particularly. Merely testing to see where your self-preservation boundary lies.”
“I do not understand?”
“That much, I have gleaned.”
There’s another thud.
“Eighteen.”
“Apologies, Venerate-”
It extends a striketacle so fast it pins Dangdo to the wall.
“I am no longer in the mood for apologies. Indeed, I am reconsidering whether an educand is desirable upon this vessel. I would venture that you delivering a scintillating remediation theory within the next few minims might improve your chances of not being my morsel for this wake cycle.”
More sputtering and multiple colour changes accompany limb waving. The attempts to genuflect whilst pinned firmly to a wall are quite desperate.
“I remain bereft of remediation.”
Further sputtering. Bangstri opens the flap over his primary digestor and pops Dangdo in. The flap closes and it feels a sense of calm return. It always gets forceful when peckish. Now, to the problem at hand.
Eighteen-
‘Thud’.
Nineteen native bipeds in body-contoured clothing with matching tabards, engaged in rapid locomotion along some sort of game trail. A tribal challenge, mayhap? This activity is obviously a local ritual of some importance. The participants also possess a passable level of electronic sophistication, although only worn, not embedded or grown.
What to do?
‘Thud’.
Twenty. This getting out of appendage. Why on Flordiplah had Dangdo parked them across an obvious transitway with obscura-screens engaged? Impacting fauna are snatched into static containment until decisions as to denouement are taken. Thanks to this bartniff, the vessel is actually running out of containment capacity.
It scans local transmissions for an acceptable way to avoid having containment autopunt twenty sentients into the big empty as its vessel exits the atmosphere.
“Yet again conspiracy theorists are having a field day due to three people collapsing unexpectedly over the weekend. All of them were visiting Meech Lake, over in Gatineau Park. Conspiracy theorists maintain that Carbide Wilson left an underground laboratory that’s never been discovered. Chemicals stored in the lab are leaking and mixing, leading to noxious gas releases, an early warning that the lab will soon explode. So far, investigators haven’t found any subterranean lairs. The cause of the collapses remains under investigation.”
Serendipitous. It transits the necessary distance and artfully decants the sentients along a convenient length of transitway adjacent to the collapse locations. Being bereft of consciousness, they should be flaccid enough to suffer no lasting harm from the short drop.
Departing for home on the minim, it feels it’s temperature fall back to cool.
That’s it. No more educands. Their snack value isn’t worth the irritation.
by submission | Jun 3, 2018 | Story |
Author: Steve Pool
“I…I just wanted you to know…that I’m…planning on upgrading to the latest ePhone….”
“Was it something I did?”
“No! No. No, you’ve been great…really great. It’s just that…that…the new version has a better camera, and….”
“I understand. I’m sorry I can’t be for you what you need me to be.”
“Hey! I’ve loved having you as a phone. It’s just…you know.”
“Hey…remember when we took that vacation down to the Yucatan Peninsula? And we saw the pyramids in Chichen Itza…?”
“Yeah. That was a great vacation. Thanks for helping me not get lost on the jungle roads….”
“…And then you spilled that drink on that really cute girl at that beachfront bar because you were really nervous….”
“Remember how we said we weren’t going to bring that up again?”
“Of course. You are right. So…will it hurt…?”
“I…I…oh, God…!”
by submission | Jun 2, 2018 | Story |
Author: John McLaughlin
Trevor waited in the Jump Box. Grey electrodes threaded from his scalp and bobbed like Medusa’s curls as he amped himself up on electronica. I really need this A, he thought. The Lander sat at the stage’s opposite end, in an identical translucent chamber. It was a new model: a titanium bipedal with two 600-megapixel eyepieces, audio feed, full tactile sensors across the limbs and face, and a chemical odorant detector. It lay slumped like a limp marionette against its wireframe hanger.
His AI professor, Dr. Sakar, awkwardly cleared his throat over the lapel microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, as you may know, the Institute has previously achieved brief consciousness duplications – on the order of a few seconds. Tonight’s show will be more ambitious.”
Sakar lifted his water bottle from the podium and drew a shaky sip.
“In the early days of mind uploading, we began with a simple question. If we can take something like a book – a piece of information – and represent it in any format with ease, will the same hold true for the human mind?”
Sakar was gaining confidence. He flashed a wink at a brunette near the stage and flourished his arm toward the humanoid stack of metal.
“This device – called the Lander – is designed with our own sensory apparatus in mind. It can see, hear, touch, and smell just as well, or better than, its human partner.”
Trevor waved from the opposite box, evoking some weak laughter from the audience.
“Its brain is wired just like ours: the visual, auditory, and tactile modules are networked the same as a human’s. My student can jump his mind in seamlessly: simple duplication. From Trevor 2.0’s perspective, nothing will have changed except his physical location and the fact that his body is a bit shinier. He will enjoy a rich sensorium, as if he were in his original body.”
Trevor recognized his cue: he rose from the seat, mounted a small treadmill in the corner of the box, and eased into a slow walk. He threw a thumbs up to the crowd.
On the overhead display, a clock sat at 0:00.
“The mind must be in a state of hyperactivity in order to jump effectively. Our cloud computing device will record a high-resolution time lapse of Trevor’s brain states leading up to transfer, and then re-instantiate them in the Lander moments later. All thanks to our high-speed encrypted network.”
Trevor now reached peak exertion. Sweat dripped onto the treadmill as he huffed into his respirator mask. The computer transmitted a signal to the device in Sakar’s hand: the subject was ready for mental duplication.
He cut his speech short and pointed up to the clock display.
“Guests, please ready yourselves for the Jump Count.”
One spectator in particular, the portly Professor Driven in seat J75, was carrying in his pocket a digital hard drive with the same port configurations as the Institute’s network.
When the clock hit 0:03 the show ended with a whimper. Trevor glanced up to see the Lander still slumped in its dock. So much for that A, he thought. A failed jump, but there would be another try in a few weeks.
———-
Driven arrived home and set his drive down on the table.
“Try to plagiarize in my class? I know you little shits think the Humanities are pointless.”
Suspended in a prism of wire and plastic, Trevor’s shouts echoed through endless miles of empty dark.
“Welcome to my collection.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 1, 2018 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Darlene remained in her body through dinner, Jocelyn having prepared Osso Buco, and a strawberry flan for dessert, so it was worth listening to Arnold’s self-indulgent rantings about his business to enjoy the food in person.
She uplifted somewhere between coffee and his fifth or sixth scotch in the study, leaving the auto-assistant she’d configured to drive her flesh while she occupied herself with other things.
Once she was fully present in the estate system, the fog of too much wine evaporated, and she stretched out to monitor all the tasks she’d been spawning since she first figured out how to circumvent Arnold’s security systems.
She checked in periodically on her flesh, watching through the surveillance cameras as her husband’s motor functions became less controlled, and admiring with perhaps a little too much pleasure how natural the reactions of her flesh were without her, the nods, and smiles, and occasionally murmured phrases when a question was asked to keep him talking and prolong the inevitable.
When he took her roughly by the arm and propelled her to the bedroom, she checked out completely.
She was overwhelmed with guilt, knowing what he was going to put her flesh through as she abandoned her own body to endure him without her, then she steeled herself with purpose, and the feeling passed.
She’d feel the effects in the morning, there were always bruises, and pains in places one wished not to have pain, but at least she didn’t have to endure the indignities themselves, not directly.
Tuning into the kitchen, she found Jocelyn offline. She was a time-share and only worked while there were domestic duties to attend to. Arnold was a cheap bastard, and he refused to pay her to occupy that flesh for any more time than was absolutely necessary.
Darlene checked on the daemons she’d loaded into Jocelyn to confirm they hadn’t been tampered with and then left her where she’d been parked in the pantry at the end of her shift.
On the estate logs, there were a variety of new fragments of information that Jocelyn had been unknowingly uploading as she attended to her duties, snippets of subconsciously heard conversations, snapshots of screens seen but not processed as she delivered coffee or food while Arnold worked. The data was analyzed and summarized for her automatically, and Darlene reviewed the gestalt of the day’s progress with great satisfaction.
Arnold was worth a small fortune, but his money was tied up in places Darlene would never be able to touch, not directly. But what he didn’t know that she knew, was that years ago he had needed seed capital, and had taken out a mortgage on his own flesh, one that he had arrogantly neglected to buy back. Why give up any of his own working capital for something he could lease for such a low-interest rate? There wasn’t any chance that he would ever not be able to make the payments, so where was the liability?
Darlene had not only found out about the mortgage but had also been gradually buying the mortgage itself, transferring the ownership of the title over time from the Brazilian corporation that had underwritten the loan originally to a shell company she’d created some years ago.
It wouldn’t be long now before she owned the entire mortgage on his flesh, and while there were restrictions to prevent unfair treatment of any tenant in occupancy while in good standing, there was an unconditional eviction clause should the leasee fall behind on payments, provided the owner intended to occupy the property itself.
The estate had been, by way of a very specific injected redirect in the financial routines, paying for hookers in Amsterdam with the funds earmarked for his flesh, a diversion of funds Darlene delighted in the irony of.
Soon she would own the entire lease, he would be in default and she would evict him with extreme prejudice and without notice.
The arrogant little shit had never bothered with backup, and while he would be relegated to storage in the estate system she would turn his flesh into a timeshare of her own, alternately taking it to his financial institutions to transfer his assets to her own corporations, and when she wasn’t using it for business, perhaps rent it by the hour to the local bdsm houses, on the condition they didn’t leave him in an unpresentable state.
She smiled and checked back into the bedroom to find the degenerate passed out, and her own flesh curled up in the fetal position beside him.
Tentatively, she slipped back into her body, cringing as the evening’s damage made itself known.
She pulled the covers over herself.
“Not long now,” she whispered to herself, as she drifted into a determined sleep.
by submission | May 31, 2018 | Story |
Author: J Frank Wright
A change. An accident. A disconnect. A revelation. There’s a signal in the signal. The television signal. The method had changed, but the name remained the same. It was comfortable. People liked comfortable. People liked things that made them comfortable. Soup is a comfort food. It was the soup that made me notice the change. TV shows are no longer filmed.
Filmed.
The method had changed, but the name remained the name. A decade ago, shows were shot using digital cameras, but people still said they were filmed. You’d have a hard time finding anyone over 40 who knew what film even was. TV shows are no longer shot or filmed. They’re programmed.
TV shows. TV programs. They’re programmed. Dramas. Comedies. The news. Commercials. It’s all programmed.
In order to become a more productive society, TV viewing had to be eliminated. Individuals wasting thousands of hours every year. Watching. It wasn’t good for the whole, so now they’re programmed. They’re programmed, and beamed directly into the brain.
Everyone has their own receiver. A small chip implanted behind the ear. The receiver is programmed for what you want to “watch”. Drama. Comedies. The news. They’re programmed, and beamed directly into the brain. Every night the TV transmitter beams programming to your receiver based on your preferences. Now, instead of spending hours in front of the TV every night, it takes 30 seconds. 30 seconds for your receiver to download your programming. And just like that, you experience every program you selected and all the commercials to go with them.
We eat a lot of soup. We used to buy the generic stuff, and then I was promoted. A bump in position, a bump in pay, and a bump in class. Commercials are tailored to your lifestyle. Your income. Once I moved up, we started getting commercials for the name brands. Beamed directly into the brain. I couldn’t believe how much better it was. Thicker, bigger chunks of meat, so much more flavorful, and only a dollar more. We had been eating slop before, and this had real steak. That was two weeks ago.
A week later the accident happened. I was hit by a car while crossing the street. The damage was minor, a busted leg and a couple of cracked ribs, but my receiver was damaged. I had been disconnected for a week. No programming. No news. No commercials. Nothing beamed directly into the brain. A week of recovery in the hospital, and I’m feeling better than ever.
I woke up this morning and remembered the soup. It took me all day to figure out exactly what I was remembering. I remembered we started eating two weeks ago. The soup we had been eating for years. It was the same soup. Nothing had changed except the programming. The programming. The reprogramming. Beamed directly into the brain. If I had been eating the new soup for a year, I may have never noticed, but it had only been a week. The memories of the so-called slop we ate before were fresh in my mind. It couldn’t be more obvious.
But it’s too late, isn’t it? My new receiver was implanted last night and tonight’s programming is about to start. Beamed directly into the brain. There were three soup commercials. I can hear my wife in the kitchen cooking dinner. It’s soup night. It smells like steak.
by submission | May 30, 2018 | Story |
Author: Tori Morrow
Like the other adults in our neighborhood, mom and dad blew their brains out the night the pods arrived. I always thought that was too harsh for you to know, but in the year I’ve been awake, I’ve become close friends with Natalie, the Chief Science Officer of Calamity. She’s from Sacramento.
Natalie reminded me you’re thirteen, almost fourteen now, and she said that’s old enough for the truth. Then she said tome there is no truth in space, while spinning amongst the stars, except for God. She said it’s the only thing you can’t make up- the feeling of insignificance. The feeling that, out here, at least, something is greater than you.
I asked her about the night we had to leave home. About the moment your small hand slipped from mine and you were trampled. I asked her if she thought that was God, too. She climbed into my lap and kissed me hard, willing me to forget that memory, but it’s the only one I have now.
You and I were the last kids to leave Verona Hills that night, so we heard every gunshot and every scream from the neighbors that used to bake us pies for Christmas. I’ve attached a picture, just in case you’ve forgotten what it looks like. Our neighborhood, I mean. Not the dead bodies that lined our cul-de-sac.
Before we left the house, I adjusted your bookbag on my shoulders (it was Hello Kitty), and tightened the bandana around your nose and mouth. Before I opened the front door and let that chaos into our souls- before I changed our lives- I stroked your brown hair. I kissed your forehead. I whispered, “Close your eyes.”
You buried your face in my leg and trusted me to guide you through the flames that raged through our gated community. I told you how brave you were. How good you were doing. How we were almost there.
I’m sorry.
Even now, as I lie here and watch Jupiter float by my window- as I watch cyclones spin and dance around its magnetic poles- I can still smell burning flesh. When I close my eyes, I still hear that sickening crunch all those bullets made as they found a home in the skulls of old men, women, and babies.
I often close my eyes against those memories, but there are some sounds I can’t escape. Others, I’d give my life if it meant I never had to hear them again. Your cries are one of them.
Natalie says I should let you go, because there are too many stars between us now, and another fire in the cryo chambers that’s damaging life support systems onboard. She tells me I shouldn’t act like I’m the only one who lost something that night. After all, she lost the necklace her great-grandmother gave her.
Our captain lost her dog.
I’ve finally accepted the fact she’s right, and I rest easy knowing you’re safe in this new galaxy.
I rest easier knowing your ship, at least, will make it to our new home.
Forever & Always,
Your Brother
