by Julian Miles | Oct 3, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“I’ll bring your drinks over in a moment, but the steak sandwich will be about ten minutes.” With a flick of her auburn hair, Teria moves away, navigating the tables, chairs and customers with an unconscious grace.
She works fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and volunteers at a shelter for abused women on the seventh. As she relays my order, Leo, her supervisor, looks up and waves a greeting toward me. I smile and nod. He splits his time between working here and caring for his terminally ill son, doing nothing else except eating and sleeping.
Compassion. I had never encountered a race like you, nor had I heard of anything like it. In a universe of predator-eat-predator, the concept of being strong enough to survive was thought to be the antithesis of caring about the weak.
I arrived by supralit, stepping from its crackling portal with eighty-four others. We were the infiltration teams, spreading across the continents of Earth. Our job was to start the rot that would ruin your societies, weakening you for the moment when our governance would be welcomed as a saving grace rather than an invasion.
Since then, I’ve seen war zones, refugee camps, rural towns and packed cities. I’ve broken break with Amish, shared MREs with survivalists and greeted the dawn on Anglesey. I’ve sung in churches and thrashed like a lunatic at heavy metal gigs.
And, more importantly, I’ve intervened in situations where the strong prey upon the weak. The first time that happened, the rapist was dead on the ground before I realised what I was doing. As the intended victim fled, I stood there with blood on my hands and cried like a lost child.
You did this to me. With your savage battles and glorious last stands, by giving your last pound to a homeless man, the completely impossible ability to go from killer to healer in the blink of an eye. Nowhere else in this universe will a fighter stoop to aid a fallen opponent after the bout is done. Respecting your adversary is a concept alien to the very aliens you postulate about. Valuing every life – is ridiculous.
Until I saw you do it. I came to wreak havoc in the name of an empire so distant you cannot see the light from the sun above its nearest outpost with your greatest telescopes. In the ten years since I have killed seventy-three of my former comrades. I would be agonising over that, were it not that the remaining eleven have suffered similar epiphanies to my own.
We send back reports of a race torn by factions of varying depth, of fighting a long war with deadly opponents, of a long-term strategy that may take generations to accomplish. The empire we serve notes our reports and commends us, as it pursues a thousand strategies on ten thousand worlds. We have a couple of centuries before suspicions arise.
A chromed tray sliding onto my table breaks my reverie.
“One latte, one red wine, and a Danish from Leo’s mama. He says she demands that you visit again.”
I smile up at Teria: “Which evening will you be free next week?”
She grins: “Tuesday. I meet this lovely bloke after work, but you’ll do if he doesn’t show up.”
It’s our little joke. She spent ages stalling me, just to see if I was deadly serious about her. This ‘lovely bloke’ was born thousands of light years away. My children will be born here, and we will start the defences. Deadly serious is all I have left.
by submission | Oct 2, 2016 | Story |
Author : Rollin T. Gentry
Jay poked his head through the open doorway and glanced around.
Standard fare: coffee pot in the back, whiteboard up front, A-is-for-Apple, Z-is-for-Zebra signs all over the walls. If not for the small poster on the outside of the door, he might have mistaken this for an AA meeting, or maybe anger management. But no, tonight was “Loving Our E-ternal Loved Ones”.
He was in the right place.
As he took a seat in the circle, Jay found his client, Marcy, sitting opposite him. The man sitting next to her, a middle-aged man wearing a white shirt and striped tie, was finishing up a rant about the injustices of uploads in general and his real-piece-of-work father specifically.
“Goddammit,” the man said, pounding a fist on his knee, “it’s not fair. If ever there was a bum that needed to be six feet under, and for good, it was my old man.” Jay tuned out at this point, reviewing the last message he’d received from Marcy. He’d heard it all before. The people that came to these meetings all had the same story, more or less.
“And then,” the man continued, “just when his day of reckoning comes, just when that fat bastard’s ticker finally goes out, my mother — saint that she is — runs to the local E-ternal branch office, puts the house up as collateral, and has him uploaded. Now, she expects me to sit across the dinner table from this … this holographic monstrosity and act like everything is wonderful, like he never did a thing wrong his whole life.”
When the meeting adjourned, Marcy made her way over. “So, what now?”
“There’s an empty room down the hall. After you.” He motioned toward the door.
In the empty classroom, both stood with their phones out, and Marcy asked, “So, how does this work?”
“It’s all very simple,” Jay said. He swiped and tapped his phone. “You should be seeing something on your screen now. Services rendered: Full retirement of one Carl Jenkins. Double check his social, please.” She nodded and tapped. “OK. Deletion of all active instances, plus all on-site and off-site backups. And you purchased a sim to be run during shutdown, correct? Something traditional?”
“Yeah.” Marcy looked unsure. “How long does it last? Real-time, I mean. Your ad said it feels like forever?”
“My sim guy says it’s the closest thing to a real, medieval-style Hell on the market. It’s a little trick with CPU cycles. Five minutes real-time feels like millions of years inside the sim. And I told you about the sim viewer, didn’t I?” Marcy nodded.
Jay’s phone beeped. The transaction was complete. “Well, I suppose I’ll leave you to it then.”
As he slid out the door, Marcy called out, “Hey, turn off the lights.” He flipped the switch. Her furrowed brow glowed pink in the light of the big red button. He eased the door closed.
Jay had known clients who pressed that button and simply walked away.
But that wasn’t Marcy.
Jay had seen the rage simmering behind her eyes the first time they video conferenced two weeks ago.
She was going to pause, rewind, and replay eternity over and over until her batteries and her Uncle Carl were thoroughly and properly dead.
But in the end, she’d get satisfaction. They always did.
by submission | Oct 1, 2016 | Story |
Author : Casey Cooke
All robots had been programmed to fear the ocean. A few level fours, who had also been programmed with risk-taking protocols, would walk right to the edge of it. But even they, eventually, would succumb and back away. Level sixes – caregivers to infants programmed for additional caution – would routinely refuse to bathe their charges in the bathtub and opt for sinks instead, but this side-effect was deemed acceptable.
However, robots were expected to attend their charges on the beach regardless of fear. And, on this day, in the middle of high-summer, they flooded the sand. Some stood with umbrellas, some unfolded blankets, and some prepared drinks or light snacks. Others played with children: perfecting sandcastles, digging symmetrical holes, and smiling as they were partially buried in the sand. A careful few stood ready with a dry towel for their swimming charges. These robots were nearest the water, moving a few steps forward and a few steps back, always mindful of the tide.
At the top of the dunes, a young girl and her robot hopped off the transporter pad while their family surveyed the beach. Before they could be stopped, they both ran – as fast as their legs could go – to the water. The robot, a level four they’d named Sylveen, was far faster than the six-year-old; she hollered out to the child, “catch me if you can!”
Sylveen ran passed the drink-givers and the sandcastle-makers and the towel-holders until she was waist deep in the water.
As she turned to wave, her sensors warned her that her feet were slipping, so she tried to dig them deeper into the sand below the sea. But that wasn’t the cause. The electromagnetic currents that kept the molecules of the ocean from turning toxic once again now pulled at her circuits and plating. They were safe to biologics, but not her heavy-metals frame.
Still giving drinks and making castles and holding towels, all the robots on the beach watched as Sylveen’s body contorted, twisted and drifted away. And all the robots heard the girl, who had not yet learned that robots were replaceable, sob to her mother, “I… I didn’t know. I… just re-programmed her to be brave.”
by submission | Sep 30, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
“VEYAN! COME LOOK AT THIS!”
I looked up from my bio-sweep and bolted to the sound of Carlos’ voice, knowing that the rest of the team would follow me. After rounding a few corners of the empty city, I came upon the intern and followed his gaze to the giant, defunct construction machine. Its purpose was immediately apparent; broken treads would have held up a blocky body studded with instruments, which itself sported a mechanical arm with a 3D printing knob, laser chisel, and manipulator fingers.
“Building machine?” Mirina thought out loud. “Wow. Looks older than most of these buildings.”
“Must’ve been,” Carlos wheezed, still out-of-breath from yelling. “I think it built them.”
“Along with the aliens?” Reifa clarified.
“No, I think there’s more of them around here. I think they’re von Neumann probes.”
We all turned our heads simultaneously. Janthin was the first to speak.
“Can you back that up with anything? We can’t just guess about this.”
“Think about it! It’s what we humans thought about doing for a long time, before we got the Kicker Drives. Send out robots to build your colony beforehand, then send some people– or whatever– over to live in the new city. Once the robots are finished, they self-replicate and repeat on some other planet.”
“You still need more evidence,” Janthin retorted. “It’d be pretty interesting, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.”
“Besides,” Reifa said, “It doesn’t tell us anything about the people who lived here or why they left. For some reason, neither does anything else.”
Reifa’s words made the answer hit me. “Actually, it might tell us something.”
Attention shifted to me. Their expectant looks were enough to prompt me.
“You all know that we’ve been a little frustrated for the past few days because we haven’t found anything on these aliens. No DNA except for that from the native life, no messages or writing system, no possessions, nothing. We’ve been assuming that this is because of quirks in their biology, psychology, and that they were very thorough in their evacuation. But I looked and that robot, and now it’s clicked: I don’t think anyone or anything has *ever* lived here.”
Carlos, by that time, had caught onto what I was saying. “Yeah, yeah! They sent the robots here, planning to follow them, but then they went extinct. Or lost funding. Or got bored waiting, maybe. But getting the robots to stop would have been too hard and/or too expensive, so they let ‘em do their thing. We’re standing in a city that has never held people.”
We all looked around ourselves, and the place got even creepier just then. An entire city that had never been lived in; the ultimate ghost town. I don’t know if I was being sincere or if I was just scared when I said, “Well, I think that means we’ve found everything there is to find here. Pack up the gear and prepare to rendezvous with the Aristarchus in orbit. We leave in two days.”
The crew nodded, slowly walking to their outdoor stations, looking around to avoid the ghosts of those who had never been.
by submission | Sep 29, 2016 | Story |
Author : Grace Franzen
In 1721 Mary Margaret Thornton is sitting in the shallows of the river when the dairy farmer’s son finds her. He rises often this early, on the breath of dawn, specifically of a purpose to find her before anyone else does. When he sees her in the water, current tugging languidly at her skirts and hair, he shudders to think what the other townsfolk would think of her. What they would do.
“I saw her again,” she says when he helps her out of the cold water, throws his coat around her. “They showed her to me. An angel who will make roads for us in the sky.”
He knows it’s useless to talk real sense to her. The only way to reach her is with her sense.
“And how can the dead know what hasn’t happened yet?” he points out. Mary Margaret Thornton’s face is a pleasant but distant one, never quite wakened from a dream. He sometimes wonders if he and the river and the townsfolk live only in her mind.
“The time and the light touch them not.” She spreads out cold white fingers from his coat, wiggles them lightly. “They cannot forget and cannot lie. And they have seen her.”
She smiles and pats his cheek. It’s a shuddering, enticing feeling whenever she looks at him, whenever she looks right through him.
“She is trying to come back to us,” she says. “My children shall give birth to angels.”
In 2721 Captain Priya El-Aleil is sitting in the chair of command, eyes closed, listening. Outside the great impenetrable windows the coldness of space drifts by, the massive explorer ship Kurosawa tied to no orbit and awaiting orders. Priya El-Aleil looks very different from Mary Margaret Thornton. The blood of giants, of stars, of comets and commanders courses through her, but right now it is the blood of Mary Margaret Thornton within her on which the captain depends. The Galactic Assembly is depending on that blood, depending on Priya El-Aleil, and she is depending on the dead. The dead will at last find what was lost.
The dead, she knows, will finally bring them back to Earth.
by submission | Sep 28, 2016 | Story |
Author : Alicia Cerra Waters
Don’t they understand that we have no room for them here? Think about it. We are on the only blue planet in a galaxy of gas giants and colossal boulders caught in orbit, most of which are about to be swallowed up by their swollen, burning suns. Anyone who doesn’t have a death wish and isn’t a complete idiot moved here a long time ago.
Well, why shouldn’t I say it? Is it my fault that those people didn’t do their homework before they settled on a planet that was about to go up in flames? They chose the places they lived. Seriously. It’s 2578. We have ways of figuring out which planets are going down and which ones are going to sustain us. And with no sustainable planet, there’s no future. If you’re old enough to remember earth, you know all about what happens when a planet dies. You remember the oceans drowning cities with poisoned water, you know all about the air giving people a goody bag full of cancers, and you know that if you wanted to get the hell off of that place you had to be strong and you had to be smart. Some people didn’t make it.
As for me, I’m not going to sit around and cry about what I saw. And let me tell you, it was a mess. People needed gas masks and special suits to go outside on the planet that gave them life. If you couldn’t afford the gear, well, that was it. You didn’t last long. I’ll spare you the gruesome details of what people who died that way looked like.
Those of us who worked hard enough could pay a space shuttle to take us away. But if you lived in a poor little country, forget it. You weren’t going anywhere unless a missionary or a bleeding heart liberal saved you because there was no way you would be able to afford the ride. Of course, people fought it. There were riots at so many shuttle launches; guards beat back masses of people who were diseased and thin and desperate, people who had nothing to lose. A few of the riots were successful, but they didn’t do any good. A lot of people were killed, and the passengers who were going to get off earth didn’t get their tickets refunded, oh no. If they couldn’t afford to pay again, tough. Those people who paid everything they had to leave earth turned into the rioters at the next shuttle launch, and if they were lucky that’s how they died. It would be better than another day on that miserable planet. But what does that matter now? Am I supposed to worry about it for the rest of my life?
I survived, and if those people stuck on the desert planets and rock planets can’t do the same, it’s not my problem. Those planets glow red in the night sky. They should have known not to land there, and now they’re paying the price. And don’t talk to me about everything those people never had. I don’t want to hear about their disadvantages anymore.
I’m here in the sunshine. I can breathe and drink clean water, and I wake up every day in a warm bed inside my big house. No one I know is unhappy. No one I know is living on a planet that’s about to be burned. Those places are far, far away. If anyone is screaming, I can’t hear them.
