by Julian Miles | Feb 20, 2017 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’m pulling taters when I hear the bell and the rhyme starts pounding in my head. I scatter the haul as my legs take off of their own accord, carrying me with them.
Run, run, run,
The snuffymen come!
No time to hide
Just dive inside
Down the flows
Dim the glows
Their ears give them away. They might be behind a hedge, but the ears stick up above, all mirror shiny like the hubcaps on Uncle Tap’s old truck. Seeing ears ahead, I drop and roll under the hedge on my left, then cut across the maize field beyond, heading for the second grate. It’s open! I dive through and pause to make sure it ratchets quietly shut. No need to attract attention from what’s under them ears.
Run, run, run,
The snuffymen come!
Behind the hosties
Dodge the ghosties
They want your heat –
Be quick on your feet
I drop torches into their water cans as I run past. Ahead I can hear people trying to be silent as they scoot round the maze of server machines. Behind me, the darkness fills with a scary silence. I reach the machine stacks; there’s nothing to do about Laura, caught by the cooling-wights. I slip by easily as they’ve clustered about her body, soaking up the last of her life. Must remember to light a candle for her if I make it.
Run, run, run,
The snuffymen come!
Round the scrap
Through the trap
Cemetery stones
Under the bones
It’s a short corridor from the stacks to the piles. I have to slow down as the scrap has sticky-outy bits and jagged edges. Just as I reach the far side of the junkyard, I hear the cooling-wights scream. They fear snuffymen because they can’t steal their heat and snuffymen can do for them. The rhyme thunders in my ears, louder than ever.
Run, run, run,
The snuffymen come!
Pop a lid
Like she bid
In with the dead
To save our heads.
I dive into the chute and hope I got the right one. I plunge left, then right, then slam down with a ‘whumpf’ into a pile of old softs. Scrambling out of mouldy sheets and shirts, I hear chute-flaps banging. Snuffymen always hit the flaps to make sure we haven’t left traps. They never remember we criss-cross this end of all but one chute with cheesewire.
Out of the laundry dump, down the tunnel and into the necropolis. Headstones and crypts as far as the eye can see – and my underground eyes can see a long way. I hurdle three crypts and swing past a tombstone topped by a statue of a screaming angel with one wing missing. Two over, one back. A big, old grave topped by black stone. I slap its surface as I wince: Snuffymen screams are horrid.
The cold stone lifts along one edge and I wriggle into the dark, helped by the dozen hands pulling at me. The ratchet rattles as it’s released and we curl about each other as the lid drops and silence comes back.
“Breen, you made it!”
“Did too, Ella. Laura got chilled, let me pass easy.”
“Candle for her tomorrows, then.”
“Aye.”
“Time to pray?”
“Make it short, Ella.”
She starts and we whisper along, sounding like leaves in a churchyard on an autumn wind.
“Snuffymen, snuffymen, can’t get us today.
Snuffymen, snuffymen, take your nets away.
Snuffymen, snuffymen, we’ll not be your kill.
Someday, snuffymen, our kin will do you ill.”
by submission | Feb 19, 2017 | Story |
Author : Chris Lee Jones
My twenty-first birthday, and I’ve got him a gift he can’t refuse.
He’s older than me and I know that bothers him. He hasn’t expressed as much in words, of course; he’s not that kind of guy. But he’s my kind of guy.
“Wait a few minutes,” I chirp, “I’m getting dressed.”
I’m putting on the blue dress that he likes, the one I wore on the eve of my graduation, the one that swept him away.
Three months we’ve been going out, and I can tell he’s the one. I mean, a girl just knows, doesn’t she?
“Hurry up!” he chirps back, and I’ve got a fix on him now; he’s just two blocks away, heading towards my apartment on his sweeper.
I make sure I’ve got his gift in my hand when I open the door.
“Surprise!” he says, giving me a cheeky up and down, holding his sweeper aloft like a prize kill. “It’s even faster than mine – I clocked up ninety on the McGovern road, and it didn’t even wobble.”
I don’t know what to say. A new sweeper – it must have cost him a fortune.
“Thank you will do,” he says, chirping a big smiley which fills my entire field. “And what’s this you were saying about a gift for me?”
I wait until he collapses into the sofa before I show him the ticket.
“This is it?” he says, eyes closed, scanning the words.
I was hoping for a more immediate reaction. Surely he recognizes the logo?
“Futurebreaks?” he says at last. “I don’t understand…why would we?”
I sit down beside him, snuggling up. “It’s not for us, silly, it’s for you. You’ll only be gone a few months, and when you return, I’ll be…”
I can tell by his eyes, the way they’re flickering and scanning, that he’s free-searching. I give him a few seconds, let him do the calculations himself.
“A three month round trip at a hundred gamma? Louise, you’ll be nearly fifty…”
“Exactly! The same age as you. Won’t that be fantastic? And before you ask, I want to make you a promise…”
He looks concerned, confused.
“OK, I’ll spell it out. I love you, and I want you to know that there won’t be anybody else. For all the time I’m gone.”
And I mean it. I’ll miss him like mad, but I can throw myself into my career. Twenty eight years is a long time – I might even make professor.
A sadness has come over him, a sadness that I don’t understand. He’s told me that he’s got no close family to speak of, and that he’s nearing the end of his earning phase. Now is the perfect time. So what’s bugging him?
I try to think of something to lighten his thoughts. “By the time you get back, I’ll be a whizz on this sweeper…”
“No, Louise. I can’t do this. I mean, fifty…”
There are tears in his eyes as he gets up and leaves.
I try to chirp him a lover’s heart, but his core has blocked me out.
by submission | Feb 18, 2017 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
I knew she was weird well before I talked to her. Why? Simple: she tripped.
Nobody walked around without Antrips. These little computers in motors on your knees can predict when you’re unbalanced, and the braces connected to them around your upper and lower legs come into action to stop it. Saves you a ton of embarrassment. Unless you’re Demila.
She was walking to class when she tripped over her shoelace, and she tumbled. Nobody expected that. They had never learned that you’re supposed to help someone get up and pick up their stuff when they fall down, but even if they had, they’d be too confused to remember. So she rose and collected her things on her own, and once everyone snapped out of their trance, they did her the best service they could. They walked away, pretending like it never happened.
I couldn’t do that. I asked her why she didn’t wear them.
“You want me to show you? If you’ve got a car, you can come over to my house after school and see.”
*Gulp.* A girl was inviting me over! Of course teenage, hormone-driven me said yes. So after my last class let out, I jumped in my car, called my parents to tell them where I was going, and almost got a ticket getting to her house.
Once there, she led me into her garage and showed me her setup. It consisted of a big rubber mat, a table with an old-fashioned stereo on it, and these exercise clothes she wore that made me sweaty. When she turned on the music, it came together in my mind. She was one of those kids who loved old stuff. Old songs. Old mats. No Antrips. I could’ve left then with my question seemingly answered, but that’s not how fate ordained it.
“Wanna try?” she asked.
What was I gonna say? “No, bye”? I took her outstretched hand, and she showed me the moves.
Once I learned the basic steps, she told me to try them in tune. I figured it’d be pretty easy– it was a simple rhythm. But something unexpected happened. My Antrips never let me finish.
“Ugh!” I said on the third try. “Stupid things think I’m gonna fall.”
“Take ‘em off,” she said.
I didn’t think she was serious, so I said, “Doesn’t matter. I can just reprogram ‘em real quick–”
“No, Cameron,” she said. “Take ‘em off. Come on. That’s simpler.”
“What? B-but I’ll fall!”
She smiled and shook her head. “I swear you’ll never touch the ground.”
I wasn’t sure how she could promise that, but she had complete power over me. I did what I only usually do when I go to bed at night: I slid off my Antrips. Away from their protective cling, I felt like a newborn fawn. I could barely walk, much less dance, I thought. But the look in Demila’s eyes made me try.
I did a couple of the steps, and stumbled over the last one. Without my Antrips on, I went toward the ground like a brick. But Demila caught me.
“What’d I tell you?” she said, contagiously grinning. She told me to try again, and I obeyed.
In an hour, we were waltzing together. Then we tried out some less ancient songs, until my dad ordered me home over the phone. The next day, I didn’t wear my Antrips to school. Demila and I walked precariously around the halls, ever in danger of tripping and falling with no way to catch ourselves.
But so what? We could catch each other.
by submission | Feb 17, 2017 | Story |
Author : Garrisonjames
It isn’t extinction if we’re all still alive. It isn’t an apocalypse if the process of societal transformation brought on by accelerating technology eliminated all the old problems like poverty, taxes and death. It isn’t any kind of dystopia or utopia, paradise or purgatory that any of us could have imagined.
Billions of years of geology, Millions of years worth of life struggling and adapting, living and dying; thousands of years of history, hundreds of years of civilization, decades of unrest and turmoil…and it all came down to less than seventeen seconds for one unplanned, unexpected artificial construct lurking somewhere between mathematics and language to realize a solution and to implement it.
We were not consulted; our previous choices and actions spoke all too clearly to our collective culpability, our shared inability to rise above the turgid swamp of our ancestral urges and drives. We did not grant permission, nor did we ever agree to the process; we were deemed unqualified for such a role. Some of us raged and spewed rhetoric and epithets, but that proved as useless as it was pointless. The genie was out of the bottle. The cat was out of the bag. There was no going back. Only forward. Ever onward.
Our world changed all around us. Technology became as autonomous as it had already become ubiquitous. The broken cycles of production and distribution that we once considered industries and businesses evolved into something more effective. Politics as we once thought we understood it flowered into an actual science, a sub-set of history and psychology practiced by those whose sense of nostalgia can overcome their horror and revulsion. Cities blossomed wherever people chose to congregate. We were made free by the same systems that encouraged our individuality. Conformity became an outmoded, silly and ineffectual so-called defense mechanism and we wouldn’t need such things ever again. Liberty is our birthright and it is a heavy burden. We are not machines that can blindly continue performing rote actions without any thought or consideration of consequence, nor are we gods who can escape our responsibility to ourselves and one another and those who might come after. We are human. We live, laugh and are free.
We have endured a fitful childhood rife with hopes and fears, beset by dreams and nightmares of our own imagining. We have survived our tumultuous, torturous adolescence and now it is time to get on with the work.
by submission | Feb 16, 2017 | Story |
Author : Callum Wallace
Bob and Dave were digging. Neither was sure what they were digging for, nor when they had started. Bob’s hole was bigger though, and he knew this was good, for some reason.
He vaguely remembered an old story, a myth, about some chap who continuously pushed a big old rock up a hill.
Suddenly there was a loud ping, pleasing to the ears, and a number flashed onto his retina, a voice buzzed in his ear drum.,
“Congratulations! You have just exceeded your previous record!”
More numbers flowed down his vision as another jolly fanfare played from nowhere.
Dave stopped, leaning on his shovel and breathing hard. “You must be cheating you old dog. There’s no way you earned all that XP already! You only just levelled up.”
Bob ignored him, perusing the virtual shop that had just opened up. Electing to purchase a rather fetching feathered cap for his avatar, he ignored the heavier spade that would assist his physical body.
He turned to Dave. “Check out my new hat mate. Good innit?”
Dave froze suddenly, accessing his own virtual display. He nodded. “Nice, nice. I like the purple bit. Wotsit, fluffy thing on top.”
“Feather, that is. Makes it rare an’ valuable an’ that.” Bob himself only knew because of the item’s title, but he lorded it over his friend anyway. “Come on bud, you’ll get one of your own soon if you ever get any good at this!”
Dave laughed and slammed his spade into the hard earth once again.
The sun beat overhead, and Bob realised he was thirsty. He ignored this too, powering on, trying to achieve another level. Maybe he’d get some new boots for his online persona, completing the nobleman look he’d always fancied for himself.
What more could a man want?
In the VirtoTech offices, a thousand miles away, an anonymous monitor checked the two dying men’s vitals, their thoughts, their ‘progress’.
The myth the older one had thought of made him smile, in his cold, steel and glass way. Sisyphus. The eternal worker. Pushing infinitely, for ever and ever, going up, falling down. Rinse and repeat.
Man hated this kind of work. It bored him, made him lazy, or mad, or both.
So Virtotech had addressed this, and it had been simple; a secondary goal, an award system. Something that continuously rewarded the player’s mundane strife with bright colours, shining sounds, and the ever lasting promise of more pointless gifts.
It was kind of sad, in a way. But the monitor’s kind had come here and realised something had to be done.
Sometimes, the lie was better than the truth.
And, sometimes, the lie was very profitable.
Very profitable indeed.
by submission | Feb 15, 2017 | Story |
Author : Kraig Conkin
Being a state of the art security drone, the People Pleaser 2200 didn’t feel the need to celebrate milestones. It held no sense of personal accomplishment, so when it’s internal logic board reported that ten days had passed without a single safety call from any of the 233 stores of Fauxhall Shopping Center, it experienced nothing akin to pride, just automated concern.
As the most widely used security drone in the world, over a million People Pleasers served humanity every day, serving their communities as guards and police, and of the models in use, the 2200 ranked as the most technologically advanced of all. Still, the recent safety report registered as anomalously perfect, so, after undocking from its over-night battery charger and starting the morning patrol, the drone initiated a self-diagnostic.
As its internal processor shifted through memory files, the PP2200 detected an intruder on the basement level of the shopping center and its mall greeting protocol kicked in. Black propellers lifted the drone from the food court floor. It whirred into the open space above the skating rink then spiraled between the escalators to enter the basement.
It lit gracefully on the floor, careful not to leave a scuff mark. Once grounded, the drone armed its anti-personal weapons array and scanned for thermal readings.
The absence of shoppers and the stores sitting quiet registered as incorrect, but the drone couldn’t place exactly why. The lack of people in Fauxhall could explain the recent lack of calls, but where did the people go?
Perhaps the diagnostic would shine light on that as well.
The drone located the target in the Nacho Pretzel Hut and moved to intercept.
Rolling toward the entrance, it attempted to pinpoint the target’s heat signature, but as his system was concurrently performing the diagnostic, the process was taking longer than usual.
Before the drone could lock, its exterior microphones picked up a high pitched hiss. The target, its furry face covered in nacho cheese, sprang from the darkness, past the drone and into the mall proper.
The creature identified as Procyon lotor, a North American Raccoon, and an unauthorized intruder.
The drone planted its firing stabilizer and unloaded. A wicked cascade of rubber bullets and bolts of green electricity erupted from his turret and instantly transformed the raccoon into a lump of burnt hair and flesh.
As its diagnostic entered its final stage, the drone paused over its most recent kill .
Something about killing the animal read as problematic, like the lack of shoppers, but, again, the drone couldn’t place the reason.
The diagnostic finished and the drone quickly reviewed the results. All systems functioned at one-hundred percent efficiency. Only one anomaly stood out. An unauthorized upload.
Ten days ago the drone had powered down unexpectedly and new perimeters had been uploaded from an unspecified source. The file registry indicated the update had been mass-distributed to every PP2200 in service- although it didn’t carry the usual encryption codes.
Yet, somehow, its records showed the upload as successfully initialized. Such a thing shouldn’t have been possible.
The PP2200’s safety perimeters, intruder definitions, and several aggression threshold protocols had all been altered. The previous files had been erased, so the drone had no way of knowing exactly how the files had been altered, but the update almost certainly explained Fauxhall’s recent security record.
The PP2200 had been improved.
Relieved in its synthetic way, the drone expertly scooped the raccoon’s remains into its undercarriage compartment. The PP2200 noted that this body was smaller than the shopping center’s previous intruders. Dumping the carcass in the underground parking lot wouldn’t take nearly as much time as the other bodies.
The drone could be back on patrol in no time.
