by submission | Dec 20, 2016 | Story |
Author : Mark Cowling
Alan studies his reflection in the bathroom cabinet mirror. His face seems wrong — older, for a start. And unfamiliar in a way he can’t define, like something put together by the police from eyewitness descriptions.
He looks around the room, now unsure why he is there. A note has been stuck on the mirror: “brush your teeth”. Alan obeys the little yellow square. Rivulets of pink swirl down the drain when he spits. He checks his teeth in the mirror: his gums are bleeding.
There is another hand-written note stuck to the back of the bathroom door, “don’t forget to flush.” Alan stares at the unused toilet before doing as he is told.
“Ah, Mr Winter.” A man wearing an expensive suit takes him by the arm and leads him through to the living room. “We really don’t need any coffee,” says the man with a smile. Alan decides to go with him; the man seems to know what he is doing.
Alan finds himself sitting on the sofa in the living room. Opposite him are the man and a woman of a similar age, mid-thirties. They could be friends of his son, perhaps. Acquaintances from the office. But there is a business card on the table: “Vincent Fitzgerald. Swift & Richardson.” They must be lawyers.
“As we were saying, Mr Winter, the contract you signed does have a robust clause covering proprietary information. I really do wish we could do more for you.” Fitzgerald sighs theatrically and shakes his head. Alan isn’t stupid, he knows when he is being patronised.
“They’re claiming you underwent illegal information masking. Which is what they always say in cases like this.” The woman speaking now. She doesn’t seem any more sympathetic.
“Information…” Alan says.
“Yes. To prevent data scrubbing. Memories, I mean,” adds Fitzgerald. “That’s how the company is explaining the irreparable damage we believe they caused to your brain. But there is really nothing we can do. As far as the law is concerned, that data belonged to the company. And when you retired, it was your legal obligation to relinquish all sensitive and–”
The woman interrupts and speaks to her colleague directly, unconcerned with lowering her voice. “This is useless; we’ve gone through it five times already. We can’t make it any simpler.”
“Well, we have the signature. That’s all we legally need,” says Fitzgerald.
The two lawyers stand and so Alan stands too. They smile and shake his hand. They speak but Alan is not really listening. Thank you for your time. It was very nice to meet you. We wish you all the best for the future…
Alan stands in front of the bathroom mirror again. He feels uneasy, but can’t think of anything that should make him uneasy. There is a nagging voice in his head. The voice is muffled, as if underwater, something is very wrong it seems to be saying. Alan doesn’t know what to do, so he follows the advice of the little yellow note. He brushes his teeth for several minutes, spitting blood into the sink.
by Julian Miles | Dec 19, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Perhaps it was the spirit of the time and the place that affected me. But I assure you no occurrence of any of my other battlefields impressed me so keenly. I halted on my tour to gaze on the spectacle, and to reflect on its meaning.
This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog. . . . I had looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands.
Yet, here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog. I am certain that at that instant I felt more ready than at any other time to show mercy toward a suppliant foe-man.”
Those words were written by a long-dead He. It tells of the moment that the Napoleon human became a He. We make special bonds with our Hes and Shes. Humans who haven’t can’t understand.
My He held me after the upgrade turned me from dog to neocanine. When they set the wrong nerve alignment for my shoulder mounts, He didn’t reject me and ask for a new neopup – He threw clays for three days without rest so I could reset the neural pathways myself.
All the other neocanines watched TV. My He taught me how to read, and used TV with ‘subtitles’ to help. We watched movies with the other teams, but He and I swapped texts about what we watched. He was never too busy to reply.
He taught me how to evade security systems by having me sneak off base to meet him. The fifth time I did that, I found that my He had his own She who pretended to only be a human. Which was strange at first, but made sense. He laughed when I told him that.
We went to war and had fun and killed lots of things that would have hurt our teams. I liked the sprinting drones best: I had to run and jump and shoot in the air so my aim was steady. Everyone shouted at me about that.
He just smiled and said: “You’re getting better without being taught. They like that.”
War followed us home and we fought real battles across the places where we had trained. It was so easy.
“Too easy,” He said. “Someone’s going to make a mistake.”
Someone did. A human called ‘Rooster’. My He died because a human ‘didn’t care about the bloody dogpound’. That’s what Rooster typed in his emails. My He taught me how to use my infiltration routines to get things like that.
Rooster cared as my jaws closed on his head. The human screamed about it a lot.
After that, they tried to stand me down, but their protocols relied on special words He trained me to ignore. I don’t know if they fetched his She, but I think She came because She knew. She came in and just like that, She and I were a We.
She howled. I howled. All the other neocanines howled. Humans ran away, covering their ears.
My He had tried to let me understand ‘mercy’, but only got as far as ‘choosing not to kill when you really want to’.
She says: “We don’t do mercy.”
This is going to be fun. We’re going to kill a lot.
by submission | Dec 18, 2016 | Story |
Author : Andy Tu
Reach into me and fix the leak that’s dripping my youth away. The creams, the antioxidants, the buckets of ice baths—what good have they done but stall the crawl of age? My first wrinkle, curving upwards from my left brow like an evaporating tear. A crack in a pebble.
But the research clinic might save me—their new formula. It’s worked on the cats, who no longer lounge around waiting for death to whisk them away. Now they prowl around the eco-gardens, chasing mice down and hunting birds with much cunning.
I wonder what my ex would say. He was the one who used to say that I was getting older, old, old, on my birthdays, always with that schoolboy smirk on his face like he’d just spit a wad of paper at me through a straw. I should’ve told him the first time to stop. I would scream it at him now if he were here. Stop! You words are unfair, like the world. Time is a rattling machine gun, riddling you with holes until your armor shatters and all that is left if your fragile, delicate flesh.
Please sign here. Here. And here. Flip the page. There as well. And… flipping more pages, paper dry against our fingertips, right here. Right over there.
I scribble my signature over the lines, scribbles that represent who I am. When I was a child I wrote with exaggerated curves in my g’s and b’s, dotted my i’s with hearts. Now my ink scratches along the paper. Just enough to satisfy.
Are these straps really necessary? I ask.
The doctor is a man younger than I am, a dimple stapled into his left cheek. Yes, he says. You will feel an extreme discomfort as the formula enters your blood and takes effect. Your body will convulse, but please know that it’s perfectly normal. He judges me with his eyes—judges my choice to participate, judges my beauty on a scale of 1-10, inspecting the wrinkle above my eyebrow that seems to have darkened in the last few days. Are you ready?
I… I see the magazine on the counter. The cover a flawless woman striding along the beach. Her hair licking upwards with the wind, a gleam cross her eyes. Skin like a perfectly-baked dessert, cheeks a snowy spread of ice cream. A smile without a wrinkle. She’s frozen on the page, her beauty immortal.
I nod, and gulp.
He pierces the needle in, in between my fingers, pushing that translucent fluid inside. It feels like a knife with a million jagged edges, cutting through my flesh, clawing and digging past my nerves. Up my fingers and into my wrist, through my arm and into my chest, and stomach, and legs, slowly savoring the pain.
by submission | Dec 17, 2016 | Story |
Author : Morrow Brady
Through my VR glasses, I opened the file and a 3D computer model of an office tower loomed before me. This century old relic, designed by a long dead Architect, was my job for today.
I worked my way down the building, systematically walking through each floor. Each 3D building element was interrogated and its information informed the recycling schedule of the drone demolition crew. By late morning, I had reached the concrete jungle of the underground car park.
At sub-level three, I approached three store rooms located near the lift core. Their steel doors were added to the work list of the drone crew responsible for reclaiming metal for recycling. I entered the third store room. It was sparse, except for electrical fittings and timber veneer shelving. Piecing through the specifications of each 3D object, I noticed a data discrepancy in a wall mounted light fitting. Under its warranty, where a time period was supposed to be, was a web-link. I frowned and clicked the web-link.
“Enter Light Fitting Identification Number ___” Said the simple text on display.
I puzzled at the odd workflow but switched back to the model and copied the light fitting’s number into the web page.
“Set light mounting height to 1500mm” Displayed the new text.
I cursed the convoluted processes of the dead Architect, then switched back to the model and selected the light. The computer model listed the mounting height at 1800mm. My OCD for closure, drove me to change the light fitting’s mounting height in the 3D model to 1500mm and to my delight, a fourth hidden room faded into the plan view of the model. Intrigued, I looked for a door in but found none. So I switched to god-mode to walk directly through the wall into the room.
“Limit of Model Boundary. Access Denied” Said the error message.
Frustrated, I removed my VR glasses and went for an early lunch. From the street-side café, I gazed across the park where my eyes settling on a tall tree. A concentration of bare winter branches revealed an empty bird nest. I had looked at that leafy tree all summer, but it wasn’t until autumn that it revealed its secret.
That was when a thought emerged.
I put on the VR glasses and linked to the control system of the tower’s onsite demolition unit that had been delivered a week before. I watched through the on-board camera of a survey drone, as it cleared its docking niche. A decayed tower of stained concrete and broken windows loomed before me.
As the drone descended down the abandoned lift-shift, rusted doors rose from darkness. It emerged onto the third sub-level. Inside the store rooms were crammed with old furniture and the walls stained from water damage and graffiti. The timber laminate on the shelving had peeled away long ago.
In the third store room, the light fitting waited impatiently. I manoeuvred the drone’s manipulator arm and yanked the light downward. It hinged toward the floor and an audible clunk sounded. The entire wall cracked and swivelled about its centre, sweeping blackened dust and debris in its path. Slowly, I orbited the drone around the wall and entered a room that lay silent for over a century.
It was empty.
Spinning the drone slowly, the far wall rotated into view. I trembled as I began to read the scribble of a long dead Architect.
“725, 5TH AVENUE – 2 OF 7”
And that is how my journey started.
by submission | Dec 16, 2016 | Story |
Author : David Burkhart
Where the hell is she? Joel searched everywhere for her. The cargo hatch was still securely sealed so she couldn’t be in the cargo bay. She couldn’t have opened the forward hatch or they would have been sucked out into space. It was only a small forward cabin on a space cargo ship – there was not anyplace for her to hide. He looked behind every panel, in every cupboard, under every floor tile, and inside each piece of equipment but she simply wasn’t there. Ellen couldn’t have just vanished like that.
Maybe I’m finally going space crazy, thought Joel. Maybe Ellen never really existed. He tried to remember the training and advice he had received to prevent going space crazy. But he couldn’t recall the shrinks mentioning anything about how to deal with a situation like this. In particular, he remembered Dr. Johnson, who had spent a considerable amount of time talking with him and coaching him. Ellen looked very similar to Dr. Johnson and the thought of the two of them made Joel even more desperate to find Ellen.
He checked the instrument panel. The clocks showed that they had left Earth 836 days ago and would reach their destination after another 283 days in space. Unloading the mining equipment from the cargo bay would take about 2 weeks and then they would begin the long journey back to Earth. He noticed one instrument with a red light on. The corresponding screen said ‘Error 45920. Rebooting from backup 36G’. Joel knew every screw and bolt, every instrument, every knob, every panel, every circuit, and every wire on the ship. He could take the whole ship apart and reassemble it by himself. But for some reason he couldn’t remember ever seeing the instrument with the red error light. I’m really going space crazy mad, Joel thought.
Suddenly the red light went off and the error screen went blank. Confused, Joel stared at the screen wondering what to do. Suddenly he felt her presence. He sensed her standing behind him.
“Where have you been? I’ve looked everywhere for you!” Joel asked.
“I was ill. I feel fine now.” smiled Ellen.
“Don’t ever disappear again. I‘ll go crazy without you.”
“I’ll always be with you, Joel. Trust me.”
by submission | Dec 15, 2016 | Story |
Author : Michael Jagunic
There was an asteroid belt made of bones on the other side of the quasar. I saw it, long ago. It is all that I remember of the last place.
Of the place that came before that, I remember nothing except that I was there, long long ago.
Sometimes I stop among the stars, briefly, but long enough for the light to touch me, to catch me. This new place is white with stars. There are so many worlds here, civilizations mighty and sprawling. A place of near limitless possibility.
But possibility leads to actuality. Actuality leads to decay. And decay leads back to the old places. This white place will soon rot black. These civilizations will become bone and dust like the last.
I resume. The light falls away from me, too slow.
*
For a time, I linger here. I think this is what I always do, but I cannot be certain. The eons erode my memories. Soon the recollection of the asteroid belt of bones will slip from me forever.
But I enjoy the lingering, so I think that I am likely to have done it before, in the last place, and the places before that.
There are places here, worlds, that glow and warm and invite. The creatures of these worlds cannot perceive me as I move between the slow plodding light of this place. But they call out to me, nonetheless.
In one green place, I touch the creatures with my hand, I caress them with winds and rains. They are born and die within a moment. It is a marvel to behold.
They do not know the way I know. They do not see, or sense, or treanitivate, or derundicale. But watching them gives me the illusions of these things. They swarm together, they blossom together, they die together.
I see in them the possibility of treanitivation, of derundicality. But possibility leads to actuality. Actuality leads to decay.
They will grow, they will ungrow. This white place will soon rot black.
*
I resume. I take some of them with me. Perhaps this, too, is what I always do. I do not remember, but this time feels different.
I spread these creatures across this place, leaving them to grow and ungrow in beautiful flurries of illusory meaning. As I leave them in my wake, I know that they will call out to me. But I will not hear them.
The light cannot touch me here, and neither can the sound of their voices.
This place is aging. Soon it will be like the last places, the ones I have long forgotten.
*
There was a planet full of two-legged creatures on the other side of the quasar. I created it. It is all that I remember of the last place.
Of the place that came before that, I remember nothing except that I was there, long long ago.
