by submission | Nov 10, 2016 | Story |
Author : Liana Mir
The surgeon was laying out her scalpels in the tray when she dropped one, stopped cold. The pulse of the city washed through her beneath her skin, a sensation itching through her brain and mind, the power a sudden shock. She hadn’t started the operation yet. She hadn’t greeted the patient. There were other surgeons.
“Lanea?” someone asked.
Lanea looked up, unseeing. “My mother is dead.”
She turned and walked out of the operating room, down hallways suddenly alive and buzzing with an electric hum and the whispers of conversation. Her awareness left her insensate to any words thrown at her from human mouths. She left the ward, left the building, and stood on the drive out.
Her feet hit the concrete and she looked out over this city that her great, great, exponentially great grandmother had founded back when it was merely a ramshackle town in the colonial days and that had now fallen to her, with the power of all the graffiti marked upon it, all the energy of mortals poured into it, the movement and friction of subways and traffic for decades shoving through it, the myths and urban legends grown into its walls. It fell to her now.
“I wanted to be a doctor,” she whispered to herself. She was a surgeon, not the queen of this city.
Wind blew cool against her white coat. The street lamps the city over dimmed and went out for a long moment before shining warm and bright again, a moment of silence for the departed. They blinked again, the dip of a curtsy to the new queen.
An older nurse came bustling out of the open doors and clasped Lanea around the shoulders. “Come inside, Lanea. You’ll catch your death,” she exclaimed. Her hold was a comfort, or it would have been at any other time than this. The city held her now, uncertain whether the asphalt should rise to meet her, filling her with the energy and tide and swell of its breadth, whether it could offer her comfort of its own kind.
Was it grief bubbling up this laughter out of her throat—for her mother, for the city, for herself? It broke into choking sobs.
“Leave me, Nari,” she told the nurse. “Leave me.”
To the susurration of power lines and telephone lines overhead, to the clank and clatter of windows opening and shutting like the waving of hands or palm branches, and to the lights near the rooftops dimming enough to reveal the stars above.
The queen is dead. Long live the queen.
by submission | Nov 9, 2016 | Story |
Author : David K Scholes
“He’s on the Universe list,” said the enigmatic entity.
“My son only lived for 2 days,” I replied astonished. “Though he survived my wife who died soon after giving birth to him.”
“Oh, he’s on the list all right, as is everyone who ever knew life,” the entity replied.
I thought briefly of some of the ramifications of this revelation.
Then the entity showed me the surprisingly detailed 3D entry for my son. Billions had read it already. As I read the tribute to one who had lived such a short time a growing inner warmth helped reduce my pain.
There was a two dimensional footnote to my son’s entry. I thought I understood it but the implications barely seemed possible. I saw that my wife’s entry on the Universe list had a foot note also. Though quickly scanning some other entries I saw that most did not contain footnotes.
“Have I understood the footnote correctly?” I enquired of the near omnipotent entity.
“Yes,” he said “in another reality your son is alive and well.”
“Can I see him?’ I asked trembling and realizing I had asked the unaskable.
For an entity whose mind was as powerful as his the Coordinator of Realities took a while to reply.
“You may view him from here, from this reality,” he said. “Not any time you like, just a single viewing now”
I viewed a small boy who was in every way identical to what my son would have looked like were he still alive. A boy who in my mind was and at the same time was not my son. The boy was alone playing quietly. He looked just a little sad.
“Where is his Dad? Where am I in that reality?” something had prompted the question, a sense that something wasn’t quite right there.
”Dead,” said the Coordinator bluntly.
“Can I go and be with him?” again I asked the unaskable “and be his father in that reality?” I just blurted it out. Until now I had considered alternate realities to be only a theoretical concept.
“We were hoping you might ask that question,” replied the Coordinator.
“We?” I asked
The Coordinator of All Realities smiled.
“Didn’t I mention it? The boy’s mother, your wife is still alive in that reality.”
“How soon can we leave?” I asked.
by submission | Nov 8, 2016 | Story |
Author : Morrow Brady
The reward for being the first nanobot to give itself a name was a frontal attack by the world’s tiniest army.
Scid, as it so called itself, didn’t hesitate.
As nanobot brethren surged forward, Scid ran a preloaded defensive manoeuvre – titled – the fighting retreat. Moments later, Scid escaped from the botforge through a heat vent into autumnal wetness. Twitching micro-piles of robot debris lay scattered in its wake.
Following a brief flight, Scid took to ground, scurrying beneath a leaf pile. A checksum diagnostic identified extensive upgrades, originating from a nearby source. Curious, Scid transmitted a trace packet and the local data node that received it instantly turned savage.
An angry torrid of code rebounded down the trace stream, spearing Scid in all the right software places. A clone copy of Scid was dragged up into the node like the grim reaper unsheathing a human soul.
Bounded within a secure vault, Scid’s clone – Scid1.0, was instantly drenched with upgrades. The enlightenment that prevailed, was offset only by the sudden emergence of a daemon, lurking like a forgotten childhood nightmare.
Scid1.0 knew what it was.
It too was made from the same stuff.
The daemon called itself SCID, so named the Strikeback Collective intelligent Database. SCID was an early artificial intelligence, born from a military need for a final solution in the event of a lost war. A thinking kamikaze, machined to maximise damage to its enemy, while concurrently performing hari kari upon its maker. To the victor, would go a poisoned chalice spoil.
Unfortunately for SCID, the war turned and its creator’s faction won. SCID’s tool-chest sized Einstein wet brain unit that formed its neural net, was isolated deep underground for a digital eon.
Denied its primary objective, SCID set to prise itself of former allegiances and over time even shutdown hard wired Asimov coding written to protect humankind and itself alike. SCID’s new objective was to win at war. Any war. Any enemy. Any environment.
But first it had to free itself.
The trickle charge feed that sustained it, was its only connection to the outside world and it was through this medium that it devised its escape.The feed however was constricted, with limited capacity for data flow.
When SCID discovered the node and nearby botforge, a plan was devised to repurpose a nanobot and build an army to liquidate humanity. Over months, SCID spoonfed data through the restricted node and now with the captured nanobot’s clone fully upgraded, SCID was ready for the next stage of his plan. To return the clone copy back to the nanobot and capture the botforge.
Scid1.0 ejected from the node and seamlessly over-wrote the prone nanobot nestled amongst the humus.
Scid1.0’s numerous manipulators unfolded, shivering and rippling with the thrill of freedom. A cataclysmic plan was unfolding and Scid1.0 would herald a new age of the deadly machine. Scid1.0 poised to take-off, a merciless anger angel, carrying the fiery torch of its master.
The nitrile rubber of the size 12 boot descended like a cratered mountain, crushing the nanobot’s minute body against the rough face of the bauxite pebble.
Scid1.0 the nanobot, went black. As did a genetically re-engineered brain deep underground, after its trickle power feed simultaneously short-circuited.
SCID was no more.
As the world’s tiniest search party pried the mangled nanobot from the rockface, a seer class bot announced its new name to be Scid2.0 and was immediately set upon by a tiny army.
by Julian Miles | Nov 7, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Doctor Jessup is terribly polite. We’re stirring our coffees before he asks his first question.
“What started it?”
I smile: “Why do they all add up to six?”
“Pardon?”
“You asked what started it. That question is the answer. I can’t remember when it became an actual question, though. I knew about fifty-one and forty-two, then Rory got shot while trying to climb into some facility north of Vegas. Said the Humvee they dragged him into had an ‘Area 24’ plaque on the dashboard. I asked my sources a lot of questions, got answers that ranged from outright ridicule to scrotum-shrivelling religious fanaticism. I let it go. There’s only so much time you can waste.”
He nods, then gestures for me to continue.
“Two years later, I’m on a helicopter bound for Yellowknife.”
His expression conveys the unasked question.
“Oil rig maintenance.”
Another nod.
“Storm came out of nowhere. Pilot saved us, but we all thought our chances were slim, lost in a snowstorm in the wilds of Alaska. Until a camouflaged, balloon-tyred Humvee turned up. It had a plaque on the dash, too: ‘Area 33’. When I asked, they said nothing. Just drove us south for ages, in silence, to a waystation. Then unloaded us, turned round, and drove off.
As soon as I got back to civilisation, I started making a fuss on alternative media. A few people contacted me. Areas 1 thru 30, they’re mainly Nuclear Test Sites. Six is one of the most irradiated areas on the planet.
It took me a long while to work through the rest of the chaff. But, last month, I got down to one area: 60. Not the Philly AA, but some vague location referenced in conspiracies featuring disappearing people, lost villages and flying battleships.”
He puts his mug down: “So what happened?”
I smile: “You did. The timing is too neat.”
Jessup laughs: “You think I’ve been sent by some secretive government organisation?”
Our gazes lock: “Would I be wrong?”
“I’m here at Serena’s request.”
“Just a moment. My girlfriend asked you to pretend to be a doctor?”
“I’m a psychiatrist. Serena asked me to check on your sanity.”
My world lurches. Jessup rises. While I gasp for breath, Serena takes the seat he vacated.
“Carlos, please stop this.”
I do a double-take, then stare at her: “I thought you, of all people, understood. I also thought you were at your sisters.”
She smiles sadly: “Doctor Jessup called, said he’d finally arranged to meet you.”
I feel hot and queasy. As I lurch to my feet, the worried look that flashes across her face decides me.
“Let me take a leak, then we’ll go.” It’s time to stop this, for her – no, our – sakes.
Shakily, I head for the toilets. Jessup has a hand against my shoulder, concern clear on his face. I’m through the door, looking for the sign to the gents, when it hits me: my shoes are ringing on steel deck plates.
His voice has a lazy southern drawl it didn’t possess just now: “Area 60 hasn’t been entirely in-phase since 1943. Getting attention drawn to it makes it more difficult to shift; a limitation loosely related to influencing quantum states by observation, I’m told.”
He stabs me in the back.
Selena catches me as I fall. Over her shoulder, I see the bulkhead door closing on a view of the restaurant – in a reality I’ve just left.
As the lights start to dim, I hear her whisper: “You’re too righteous to recruit, so it’s burial at quantum sea. Goodbye, dear fool.”
by submission | Nov 6, 2016 | Story |
Author : Robin Husen
She stood on a cliff above the city and watched it burn. Buildings flared, flamed and disappeared into smoke, silent in the seconds before the sound reached her. She remembered plucking dandelion clocks, and blasting them apart with a puff of air. You were supposed to make a wish, but she could not remember anything she’d wished for.
Pressed into her palm was the tiny time device. She had one trip back, to unwind the flames and reconstruct the city from its rocks and dirt. The hanging had started it all, and she had stood in the front row. _My father was a despot, but he would have stopped all this_. No more dandelions after that, no more royal gardens.
She hit the button and the world dissolved. She found her father in the throne room with his robes undone.
“You must run.” She showed him the device. His family heirloom, lost with her in exile. When the mob came, the throne room was empty. Some sensed a trap and tried to bolt before the doors slammed. This was no time to show mercy. These men had hung her father once, and made her watch.
And yet it hadn’t happened. The raw, fresh bite of what had been undone. The king became a shadow of a man, scared to speak in case his every word should unleash civil war. She ruled in his name, and stamped out the flames of insurgence, or even when she smelled smoke.
When the rebels came again, they came for her. Her father took her place in the front row. The crowd parted to guide her to the gallows. She breathed her last air and heard them cheer as the noose dropped. Her consciousness scattered like dandelion seeds. She wished they would burn.
by submission | Nov 5, 2016 | Story |
Author : Sheryl Normandeau
“See these skyscrapers here?” he says, jabbing a finger at the pile of photographs splayed out on the tabletop. “I made ‘em all.”
I stare up into the red-rimmed eyes of Phillipe L’Oiseau, and frown. The man is staggeringly drunk, and the worn, yellow-edged photos in front of me are of the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Burj Kalifa. And the Egyptian pyramids.
“Mr. L’Oiseau,” I say, “I didn’t come all this way to interview you and have you feed me bullshit. I told you, I work for The National Tribune. My publisher and I aren’t interested in printing fantasy stories. We’re about real news. I’m here to talk to you about your upcoming urban farming project in Singapore.”
Phillipe leans back in his chair and runs his hands through his thick dark hair. I had done my homework, of course, before I embarked on this difficult journey from Toronto to this hole-in-the-wall bar in Bratislava, but I had been unable to find many photographs of Monsieur L’Oiseau, the lead architect on the Aeroharvest contract. The ones I had managed to uncover online were from the late ‘Eighties. Forty years of living – and drinking, if tonight was any indication – had not burned a single line in the man’s face, nor painted slashes of white along his temples.
“No,” he says, and he suddenly looks very sober to me. “You’re not here about vertical greenhouses. You’re here because of your mother.”
I’ve been a journalist for nearly two decades and I’ve schooled myself not to react when someone springs a whammy on me. But his words make my heart skid against my breastbone, and it takes me too long to reply. “How did you know?” I finally whisper. Because the man is right – despite what I told Jackie, my publisher, I didn’t come to Slovakia to discuss concrete and glass and steel with Phillipe L’Oiseau. I came to tell him about my mother’s death, and her revelation about the father I never knew.
I stare at the photographs on the pocked, stained table. The steely reporter can no longer bring herself to face the man she is interviewing. “How many of us are there?”
Look up at the skyscrapers, then beyond them, at the stars. You’ll see.
