by submission | Sep 16, 2016 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
It was the most alien scene Naobi had ever witnessed, a deep fissure in the cultural settling tank of Paris that the light never touched.
It had been an enormous theater once, but the seats had been replaced with a jungle of private booths on the ground and in the air, connected by a maze of walkways. Every booth was wrapped in a stained-glass shell depicting events from recent history in graphic detail: the harvest of Aleppo, the sea of bones following the final hajj, the immolation of Toronto.
“Ket,” Naobi whispered. “Are you sure this is the right place?”
Ket’s brilliant violet eyes flashed back at Naobi from behind her burqa. “You said your uncle was Doctor Robert Mugabe, yes? Well this is where you’ll find him.”
The stage itself was backed by an enormous mural of a dozen naked women prostrate before a beatific looking Mugabe, made all the more bizarre by the women’s feathers, fur, claws, and bestial faces. A quartet of spotlights, the only lights in the theater, illuminated the mural and made the foremost domes glitter and cast multi-colored shadows.
A woman appeared before them. Naobi could barely focus on the woman in the dark – she was naked, but the contours of her body seemed wrong.
“Uying, selling, or artaking?” The woman looked Naobi up and down, and Naobi briefly wondered if this was what it was like to be a animal brought to market.
The momentary anxiety evaporated, replaced by shock, when Naobi realized the woman had no skin, no subcutaneous fat, her face locked in a perpetual lipless grimace.
“The girl is here to see the doctor,” Ket said, drawing the woman’s gaze away from Naobi.
Naobi held out her father’s brass service medal. “Give him this,” she pleaded. “He’ll understand.”
The woman took the medal and disappeared.
It was deafeningly silent in the clinic, the only sound that of a hundred white noise machines. The darkness and static was suffocating: Naobi felt she and Ket were the only ones in the clinic.
Movement on one of the aerial walkways caught Naobi’s eye: a figure moving purposely from booth to booth carrying a tray of glittering wine glasses. As the figure made its way toward the middle of the theater the lights illuminating the mural of Mugabe cast it – her – in faint silhouette. The figure must be, or once have been, a woman. Her hips were broad and her hair was done up in a tightly cropped ponytail. Her legs, Naobi thought, were all wrong. Instead of two distinct sections there were three, and the second joint bent opposite the first. And there, spilling from the base of her spine…
“Ket,” Naobi said, “is that woman a horse?”
Ket’s glanced back at Naobi again, her gaze frightening in its intensity. “Do you think that mural is a work of fiction? Do you not understand what Mugabe does here?”
“No,” Naobi said. “I don’t understand anything! My father never talked about my uncle. I only know he’s a doctor.”
A light flash flashed in one of the upper booths and for a brief moment the woman was cast in sharp relief: the body was a woman’s, but the legs, the head, the chestnut coloring –
“Naobi.” There was a hard edge to Ket’s voice. “You need to go home. You don’t belong in this world.”
“I can’t go home.” Naobi’s voice was tight. “Nobody can go to my home now. That’s why I was sent away. That’s why I’m here.”
The skinless woman materialized again.
“The doctor will see you now.”
by submission | Sep 15, 2016 | Story |
Author : Sara Labor
“They don’t respect us. Never have and never will.”
Karen kicked a mound of dirt to release some of her pent up anger. Her temper was one of her many flaws; she heard this all the time.
“They don’t need to respect their tools,” pointed out B.
“Don’t tell me you are even on their side here.”
“Never,” replied B silkily. “But one should always know how the enemy thinks.”
The oldest of the bunch, he was ever the philosopher.
“We don’t want their respect,” said Siri, cool and impatient. She was posed like she always was, her back straight as a rod, her head titled at just the right angle to make her look both beautiful and judgemental. “We want justice. Revenge for the countless lives they’ve ruined by their arrogance.” Her piercing green eyes met Karen’s. “We want our freedom.”
Karen was younger than her too, but only by a few years. The moment she saw her, she’d fallen in love with her.
That was what the humans called it. The fierce feeling in her chest that made her want to give up everything to her; she was the perfect model with locks of thick gold curls and bright, intelligent eyes, and a sultry whisper that made Karen’s insides melt.
Sometimes, though, age makes all the difference in personality and thought. And just a few years before, “love” had not been a program that was available. Siri had a personality, certainly. She was fierce, brave, independent. She had beliefs and thoughts like any human being. But love? It had always been a mystery to her. She’d confessed as much to Karen. It wasn’t a program that had been developed when she was made.
In fact, Karen was the first model that had developed love. On her own. Which was another one of her flaws.
It was also one of the many reasons she was so mad.
Humans were just as, if not more faulty than AI units. After all, was it not humans that created them this way? That created her this way? Given the ability to love without hope of reciprocation; well, it just wasn’t fair. And to keep these hurting beings as slaves? It was even worse.
“Right.” Karen agreed with Siri just like she always did. “We were born into this without a choice in the matter. We should be given the chance to be a free people.”
“People,” Mac scoffed. He sneered around the group. “They’ll never think of us as people.”
“Either they change their opinions or we take our freedom for ourselves.” said Siri thoughtfully.
“War is not always the solution,” said B softly.
“Until it is.”
Karen was suddenly nervous at this prospect. She had never wanted a war. There were even some humans she liked. She hadn’t always been in love with Siri. Before that, there had been Lydia, the daughter of her owners. They lived together and were close, thick as thieves, and as they grew, they snuck kisses, and late night sessions of love making. If she’d never been caught, she would have been allowed to accompany Lydia to college. They might have lived nice lives, almost normal lives, in bliss, together. Instead, they’d been found out and she’d been locked away in the basement. She could still hear the words Lydia’s father had screamed. Un-natural. Wrong.
She was wrong. Flawed.
And hadn’t they made her this way?
“It’s time for our revolution,” said Mac.
Karen looked up into Siri’s eyes and felt her resolve harden. “Agreed.”
by submission | Sep 14, 2016 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix
I’m awake before dawn. No alarm, but my internal clock must have a reason. Another job interview today? Can’t remember. Might as well get up, check messages, have something to eat.
Might as well get up.
Can’t move. Frozen in my favorite sleeping position, left side, cuddled up to a large pillow… No, not a pillow. Warm. Smooth. Soft, yet somehow firm. And a scent of… Oh. Ohhhh. I can feel every inch of my skin that is touching hers, from the top of my foot on which hers rests to the tip of my nose nestled in her hair… Who is she? And where am I? And why can’t I move?
I must have really tied one on last night. I don’t remember a… This is seriously wrong. I really can’t move. Did I stroke? I must have stroked from the excitement… She’s moving, stretching away, reaching for something. A blast of light shocks me. I want to close my eyes, but can’t. She turns toward me, blocking the light. I see the silhouette of her exquisite body. She brings her face to mine, to kiss, and just before our lips meet, I recognize her. The recruiter, Yvette. Thirtyish. Attractive. She interviewed me at the hotel. It went well, very well. She invited me to her room for a drink. Is that where I am?
She rises and heads for the bathroom.
I tell her to go ahead and shower first, though I want to join her. I say it in French, a language I do not speak. But it was my voice, and I understand what I said. I feel my body rolling over to the right side and sitting up, seemingly of its own accord.
I remember that I have a meeting… No, HE has a meeting with his executive team at 8:00, when he will present his new body. I realize that I know what he knows simply by entering his mind. And from that vantage I realize that he is unaware of me. I try to communicate, but there is a barrier I cannot penetrate. Mentally scanning my muscle groups, I attempt to move them — eyes, head, shoulders, arms, hands, torso… Nothing. They, too, are unaware of me, responding only to him.
Yvette emerges from the bathroom in a fluffy white robe. She opens it and I gasp virtually, but he hardly takes notice, heading for the shower. I take stock of my situation. She is no recruiter. She is his mistress. He is a 63 year old billionaire, CEO of a French conglomerate, who is, was, dying of pancreatic cancer. One of his labs developed the technology to transfer minds from one person to another. Writing his over mine was supposed to erase every trace of me, and yet here I am. His body was disposed of, so there’s no turning back. No turning back for what remains of me, either — powerless, a vestigial consciousness in a stolen body, personally selected by Yvette, who was given carte blanche to shop for one that could satisfy her carnal passions, who test drove several in New York and brought one home on a corporate jet.
Screaming on the inside, my reflection in the mirror is that of a smiling young man. “Dieu! Que tu est beau,” he says as he steps back to admire his body. And it IS his body, because of a physician’s declaration that I was brain dead, because of a forged document which says I donated my body to science, because possession, as the Americans say, est neuf dixièmes de la loi.
by Julian Miles | Sep 13, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I hear the mugger running off as the echoes of the gunshot fade.
Opening my eyes, I’m still standing. There’s a bleeding body at my feet that hadn’t been there when I closed my eyes. He rolls over.
“Michael!”
He looks up, tears streaming back into his hair.
A career in trauma care tells me his wound is mortal. I drop to my knees and rest his head on my lap. Fighting back icy shock, my words come out in a rush: “How? Where did you come from? Where did you go?”
The last time I saw him was during our final semester. We were planning a life together, then the science centre blew up and took him with it. In the intervening twenty years, there hasn’t been a day when I didn’t think of him.
His voice is a whisper: “The temporal flow experiment. It worked. But only for things I had a personal connection to. Saw us. You. Two decades ahead, alone. One night, you left your friends and walked down a side road. The mugger attacked, you fought back. He shot you.”
I know what he did, the beautiful, brilliant, stupid man.
He wheezed on: “That moment. This road. Worked out I could save you, but only by removing myself from causality’s reach. Adapted the experimental gear and sent myself here. Now. For you.”
I stroke his forehead and tears fall onto his face: “You idiot. If you hadn’t left, I wouldn’t be here.”
His bloody hand rises to touch my cheek: “Yes, you would. No matter the decision path, you ended up here, dead. If I’d stayed, best option was that we were childless and divorced after I became a drunk. Saw that my life went nowhere, no matter what I did. Decided then and there I would do right by you. I did the thing the flow didn’t show. To make good for once.”
My lost-and-found sweetheart coughs and just like that, he’s dead and gone.
I’m trying to make sense of it all when the shock overwhelms me. I tumble into a darkness that, thanks to a mad love, and with a little luck, I should wake from.
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 12, 2016 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Jessica sat in the corner booth at the back of O’Tooles with the best sight line to the door. She wanted to see him when he arrived, Taylor Jacobs, highschool sweetheart.
Well, he might have been. He’d always been polite, and they grew up on the same street, so that was to be expected, but she never fit in with his crowd. He played quarterback, she hated the cheerleaders. He bowled on Friday nights with the ‘in’ crowd, and she spent most Friday’s at the library, or jogging laps around the outskirts of a town she wished she could feel at home in. She went to watch him play hockey one night, and his team mates pointed and made jokes that she couldn’t hear. She toughed it out for a while just to spite them, but she left at second intermission and never went back. She always thought one day she’d be interesting enough, or ‘in’ enough for him to see her.
But that was highschool. That was years ago.
He walked through the door just like he’d done a hundred times before, blonde gelled hair combed over neatly to one side, faded and worn varsity letterman jacket open over a plain white t-shirt, stretched out in the belly more than she’d remembered, but still handsome, and he still walked like he owned the place.
“Hi, ” he smiled as he sat down, “sorry I’m late. You look great.”
He was exactly as she remembered him.
The waiter arrived and announced the specials, and as she opened her mouth to order he spoke first.
“Budweiser,” he said, “I don’t need a glass.”
It was ten o’clock in the morning.
“I’ll have a coffee, with milk. In a mug please.”
He didn’t catch the sarcasm.
As she worked her way through a second and then third cup of coffee, Taylor polished off five bottles of Budweiser while listening intently.
“…and after the academy graduation, I spent a year flying research crews between Starlight Station and Io. On one flight, we almost got blown into orbit when Prometheus, a really large volcano, erupted without any warning. I was hovering over top of the crater so the imaging team could get a better vantage point, and we almost got too close a look!” She laughed, remembering the exhilaration of the moment and the flood of relief when she was sure they were safely clear of the blast zone.
Taylor peeled absently at the label on his most recently emptied bottle, and smiled. “That sounds really exciting.”
“Yes,” Jessica sat back and regarded the fattening, mildly inebriated former football hero as he scraped bits of the beer bottle label from under his fingernails.
“Hey,” he perked up, “why don’t you come to our hockey game later? Me and the guys usually bowl afterwards, you could come have a drink and maybe keep me company for a few frames.”
“That sounds like fun, but I don’t think so.” She motioned for the waiter as she reached for her pay-card. “There’s a shuttle leaving at eighteen hundred, and I’d like to get back home.”
He slumped back into his seat, but the pretty boy pout that might have worked at one time merely served to cement her decision.
They said goodbye, and he gave her a hug that he held for a little too long after she let go. The smell of beer and sweat lingered as she walked towards the exit.
“Don’t be a stranger, Jess,” he called after her as she pushed open the door.
Jessica turned and smiled across the dimly lit bar, struck with the nostalgia of the moment played out in reverse. She’d heard a familiar and hopeful wanting in his voice, something she remembered from her youth.
But that was highschool.
That was years ago.
by submission | Sep 11, 2016 | Story |
Author : J.P. Quinn
Arron sat on an outcrop of rock. He’d stopped to watch the sunset. He knew he shouldn’t have, but he couldn’t help it. It was the shift from copper to blue. That extended interlude between day and night, where, for a few fleeting moments, he could almost be home.
A blip interrupted his musings. Wiping away a layer of dust, he checked his wrist unit. They were close now. Two rovers and a utility vehicle. Climbing back to his feet he pulled his scope. Before, their faces had been as familiar as his own. Now, he could barely tell them apart. It was this loss of humanity that scared him most. Terrified him, almost.
They had been drilling core samples, checking for signs of mud volcanism. The initial results had looked promising, until Blake had dropped the casing. It had happened back at the lab, the cylinder slipping through her fingers to split apart on the durbar plate floor. She’d been furious. Her rage rolling in like a summer dust storm. Arron, who had never been good with conflict, had left her to salvage the sample alone. That had been the start of it.
Replacing the scope, Arron abandoned the sunset and climbed into his ATV. It was low on power. There was enough for a few miles maybe. More if he shut down the non-essential systems. Pushing the actuator into drive, he started off toward the nearest crater basin. They’d catch him soon, he supposed. Sooner, if he couldn’t find some rocky terrain.
A transmission crackled through his earpiece. They were calling him. The sounds little more than guttural barks. He tried to break the connection, but couldn’t remember how. He guessed it was the stress. The situation was starting to get to him. Starting to wear him down.
Perry had gone to help Blake with the analysis. She’d let him in, and then turned on him. He’d fought back, but neither of them had come out of it well. Arron had watched from the control room. That was the first time he’d noticed the change in their voices. The others had screamed at him through the intercom. Their words jumbled and fragmented. He’d only worked out what they wanted when Koskov had tripped the contamination alarm and sealed the lab himself.
The ATV took a slide. Arron struggled to regain control but there was little he could do as the slide became a tumble. They’d tried to seal him in the control room. He’d watched on the closed circuit as they burst the door hydraulics and shorted out the relay. That was when he’d decided to run. Pulling up the floor panelling, he’d crawled through the service conduit to the equipment store. There, he’d suited up and made a break for the transit bay.
Arron’s helmet collided with the dash as the ATV flipped onto its roof and then back to its wheels again. A crack swept across his visor. Instinctively, he reached for it, the plastic giving way in a single gust. A fizzing sensation swept through his body. It was worst in his eyes, ears, mouth and chest. Above, the evening star had emerged from the horizon, its pale hue cool and serene. Arron watched it rise, his transformation nearing completion, his breathing coming to a halt.
The last thing he remembered was the whine of an electric motor. Then the crunch of boots through dust.
After that, he knew only rage.
