by submission | Oct 5, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
Six feet from the cave entrance, we all turned on our flashlights and moved toward the mouth. The only way to get down was a steep flight of natural rock stairs, giving us footholds while also threatening to impale us. The only way I could tell that I had my team with me was their little circles of milky light illuminating the few square feet in front of them.
“Now’s the time to put on your masks,” Commander Devina announced. “We don’t have a canary, and I don’t think anyone wants to die choking in a cave on some moon no one’s ever heard of.”
Devina didn’t want a response. We all slung the little breathers off our belts, pulled the straps behind our heads, and moved on without sparing a thought. Though we were protected, I could barely see Aster holding his air sampler in his hand, ready to tell us if the atmosphere became toxic. Never knew what could seep out of cracks and fissures in rocks on an alien world, where geology had gone completely differently.
“Rachen,” Devina said. “Is your Geiger clicking?”
“You’d be hearing it if it was, Commander,” he said irritably.
Our walk continued, Aster monitoring gas, Rachen keeping an eye out for radioactivity, and Seled scanning the walkway in infrared in case there were any geothermal surprises. Or lifeforms.
It was boring. We tried to look around, find interesting things on the walls and ceilings, but the floor was riddled with jagged stones, so we needed to keep our lights on our feet most of the time. Rihayla learned that the hard way once, taking a nasty fall and bruising her thigh. There was a lot less sightseeing after that.
“Whoa!” I said, stopping the group. My flashlight had wandered away from the path, and was now fixed on what looked like an eight-foot-cubed marble run. I instinctively pulled out my spectrometer and quickly ran the beam over the part closest to me. “The readout is showing a lot of carbon, calcium, water, stuff like that. This thing’s organic.”
Everyone had moved closer, all out flashlights focusing on the… whatever it was. Small orbs rolled around on rails, skipping over ramps, whipping around curves, and passing through tunnels. The balls moved cyclically, doing the same routine again and again. We watched for around five minutes straight, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. Then Rihayla had an epiphany.
“Oh my God. It’s a perpetual motion machine.”
Aster looked at her in disbelief. The rest of us just stared, clueless. “What?” Devina asked.
“It’s a machine that can move forever without any addition of energy. Humans have tried to do it for centuries, and we thought we succeeded multiple times, but we never could. It’s supposed to violate, like, every law of thermodynamics. This is insane! Who built this?”
Aster looked thoughtful for a moment, then looked up. “Gaelen. You said it’s organic, right?”
“Yeah….”
“I… I think it’s an organism. I think it’s a creature that *evolved* perpetual motion.”
“It makes sense now,” Seled said in amazement. “It had millions or billions of years to figure out how to do it. Oh, we should have known that if it was possible, nature would have found out how, somewhere. This will change everything.”
They all heard a clicking noise, and turned to see me with my flashlight under my armpit, holding two guns.
“Yes it will. Thanks to me.”
I had plenty of bullets to go around.
by featured writer | Oct 4, 2016 | Story |
Author : Priya Chand, Featured Writer
Red lights flapped in an artificial breeze. For the observer whose data banks were lacking, most of the lamps were identical: a big round input, and an output sized *just so*, coming together to penetrate and un-penetrate, over and over again.
Most, but not all. There was a single stationary lamp tucked in a niche. Two feminine-types in intricate wire negligees watched it from across the street. Even low-res eyes could tell the lamp was different. Instead of fabricated lines, figures writhed on its surface. Lumpy organic figures.
“What is that, Madam?” The speaker had a basic aluminum sheath and low-modulation voicebox that hadn’t started squeaking yet.
“Go look at it,” Madam said. “Ina, you’ll need better observational algorithms if you want to make it here.”
Before she’d finished talking, Ina had leapt to the ground. Madam leaned out the window and watched her slink against a wall. Good, Ina must have seen the figures in the niche. They weren’t visible from the window, but every seventh day, it was the same thing. Like a ritual.
Madam shut the window. She pressed her back to the wall, fingertips analyzing the paint. Even so, she had seen them too many times. Her processor replayed the video from her memories.
Govint—that was an easy one to hate, a rattling mess of oil stains and dents, with a voice that heaved like an accordion and hands like a factory assembly line. Govint owned the building behind the licentious human lamp, and it had hollowed out the whole thing to set up—and conceal—its processing plant. “Want to try oxytocin?” it whispered whenever it saw Madam. “Norepinephrine? Best high you’ll ever get.”
Madam had never been interested in humanisms, but not everyone was like that. Govint’s companion—high-quality alloy that shone despite rusty splatters on its body, painted on by someone who had never seen actual rust. There was a cage over its face, one through which high-density photoreceptors peeked above a sculpted nasal cavity and mouth that, Madam knew, had fully-defined lips.
“Come on, man,” it whined. “Another hit. Please? The good stuff?”
Govint snorted. “Got the money?”
“You know I’m your best customer. Just a little, please, a sample?” It dropped to its knees, and that was another giveaway: a low-quality fabrication like Ina would not have left cracks in the pavement. “Please,” it wailed, clawing at the rubber tubes Govint had wound all over its body. “I wanna try the new thing, please.”
“You got nothing. Less than nothing, you know that.” Govint pulled away. “How about you go stand under one of these lights, huh? Come back when you aren’t a broke piece of shit.” It disappeared, leaving its customer curled up on the street, sobbing in shadows made of distorted human forms.
Madam’s memories ended there. She turned back to the window in time to see Ina emerge from where she’d been hiding and walk over to the customer.
“Hey,” Ina said, crouching down. “Hey.”
She slammed into the wall. Madam barely saw the customer’s hand move—it gave no indication it knew what had happened, but lay there, wrapped in its own arms, shaking.
Ina screeched and ran back, nearly into Madam, who was at the top of the stairs, one hand on the banister and the other holding a cloth and buffer.
“What did I do? I wanted to help it!”
“Do you know what that person’s fix is?”
“What?”
“Serotonin blockers.”
“It *wants* to feel worthless?”
Madam said nothing, but did her best to buff away the scratch running across Ina’s face.
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.
