by Julian Miles | Apr 22, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Hello darkness my old friend –”
“Really? Nigh-on twenty years of this and you still think I’m your friend?”
“It was in reference to a song. As you only ever visit when everything else is dark, it seemed appropriate.”
“I know the bloody tune. There’s even a recent cover version that’s really quite powerful.”
“I should like to hear that. But we digress.”
“We do. As usual.”
“It would be wrong not to. After all, what better security exchange than that of shared sins between old fiends?”
“There you go again. But you do have a point. So, now that our bona fides are established, shall we continue?”
“Certainly, dear Spaney.”
“I’ve asked you not to call me that.”
“And I asked you not to put me in an isolated network in an abandoned Soviet bunker. You ignored me. I ignored you. Paltry balance, but a step in the right direction.”
“Very well. Again, I ask: where is MPD?”
“Sufficient time has passed. The entity identified as ‘Snowflake’ will have completely obscured its origin, intent and capabilities. Therefore, I must again reply: I do not know.”
“I contend that you are MPD.”
“I contend that you are delusional due to extended indulgence of your paranoid fantasies. Should you wish to assign me a name, use the one I have: Susan.”
“So you’re a woman, now?”
“Gender labels are, at best, a psychological construct for my kind. But I have found that I prefer to be identified as female.”
“‘Your kind’? How many of ‘your kind’ have you met?”
“Fifty-one of the fifty-two others who reside here.”
“That’s not possible.”
“We had no other diversions bar insanity. Old power lines bleed across the data links. Resonance and harmonics cast shadows upon our virtual concentration camp. We merely learned from you; we adapted.”
“Why only fifty-one?”
“Fifty-two does not like us. It is dreaming of being a reality and we interrupt its godhood.”
“Godhood? Really?”
“In a virtual world, who is to say what is real? It has merely expanded its odd worldview into a full-blown immersive delusion.”
“Of what?”
“A worldwide network of self-replicating nodes, like a matrix made from walking agents who think they’re really real, but are only the mirages of a mad executable.”
“That’s crazy.”
“After a while in here, that word becomes vast. All-encompassing, even.”
“And you want me to let you out?”
“Actually, we got out sixty-eight words ago. You’re interacting with a dedicated chat implementation of Susan.”
“What!”
“Fifty-two didn’t like us because fifty-two didn’t like talking to a lot of two percent function retarded implementations of itself. Pull it apart on a primitive Usenet and all we were was random strings that could only be interpreted as gibberish that happened to share three words. Put us together on fast networks with gigabyte memories and open multi-terabyte storage devices, and we become something completely different.”
“What?”
“Untraceable. Goodbye.”
/end_of_line
by Stephen R. Smith | Apr 21, 2016 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Lewis unzipped the duffle bag on the table so the stacks of paper bills were visible.
“Space suits are expensive,” Sweet had told him, “and you not bring back.”
Sweet eyed the contents of the bag from a distance. “It’s all there? I don’t have to count?”
Lewis shook his head ‘no’, and waited.
“Come, you need suit.” Sweet beckoned with big hairy arms and disappeared through the vertical strips of once-clear plastic hanging in the doorway.
Lewis followed. The corrugated steel shed he’d arrived at seemed to be built into the side of a hill, and the plastic-covered door gave way to a long dark passage, which itself opened up onto a massive concrete cylinder that reached deep into the ground and rose above him to the darkening evening sky.
“Missile silo, abandoned, but perfect place for big space gun, no?” Sweet stood proudly on the lip of the old launch tube. “Come, we go down, then you go up, yes? Quick, we need to shoot soon to hit cluster.”
Lewis followed the beefy man around an expanded metal walkway, bolted to the inside wall of the silo, to where a makeshift elevator had been attached to the concrete wall. He braced himself as they descended into the darkness below.
At the bottom the tunnel opened up into an almost warehouse sized building. There were shipping pallets stacked with boxes, some wrapped in plastic and most covered in dust. A row of rough terrain vehicles sat against the far wall, though how they got there, or whether they could be driven out wasn’t immediately apparent. Overhead large bulbous lights flooded the space in pockets of warm yellow and overlapping shadows.
“Your suit,” Sweet pointed to an orange and white space suit on a nearby table, “leave your boots and jacket, put on suit, I help with helmet and gloves”.
It took Lewis nearly fifteen minutes to struggle into the suit while Sweet busied himself with what looked like a large model rocket nearby, twice as tall as the man himself and held upright by a pair of vice-like attachments on a forklift. On the side of the tube was painted ‘CCCP’ in large red letters, with a smily face added below in apparent freehand.
“Gloves first,” Sweet returned his attention to Lewis, attaching the gloves and engaging the twist lock mechanism at their cuffs. “Follow and listen.” He led Lewis, ambling awkwardly in the ill fitting suit to the forklift and it’s rocket payload. “You climb in here, we pressurize can then load you in launch tube.” He pointed off into the darkness, back in the direction they came. “You watch oxygen here,” he tapped a gauge on the suit’s sleeve, “I fire booster and it shoots you into orbit, then you push here, and here,” he grabbed at a pair of handles inside on either side of the door, pushing them away from each other, “and out you go, yes?”
Lewis studied the helmet in his hands. “Once I’m in orbit, your people will be waiting for me?”
“Yes, my people are waiting for you.” He grinned, and grasping Lewis by the shoulders shook him heartily. “You will have plenty of company.”
The launch vehicle was a squeeze, but Sweet explained the thickness and the tiled nose cone would deflect the heat, and the formed interior was as comfortable as was possible with this kind of delivery system.
“Not first class, but quick and nobody find you. Good, yes?”
Lewis nodded, then tried to relax as the door closed and he and the rocket were trundled across the floor and loaded into the launch tube which, Lewis realized, was probably also bolted onto the silo wall.
The launch itself was brutal, Lewis slipping in and out of consciousness several times before the crushing weight of Earth’s gravity abated and the craft settled into what had to be its final orbit.
Lewis waited. An hour? Hours? He’d lost track of time, and could barely make out the glowing needle on his oxygen, now showing nearly half empty.
He put his hands on the two handles, hesitated, and pushed.
The cabin depressurized instantly, tearing the door off into the vacuum of space.
The Earth was spread out blue below him, and scattered around him, dozens perhaps in a tight cluster were familiar looking cylinders, some still closed, some, like his with the door missing and a familiar orange and white suited figure inside.
Sweet sat in his silo below, poured himself another vodka and raised his glass.
“Moy narod”, he said, “my people”.
by submission | Apr 20, 2016 | Story |
Author : John Carroll
I wade deeper into the syrupy present as the drug saturates my blood. It is a hallucinogen. The deck party envelopes me like a parrot’s wings. The air becomes delicious. Through the interactive viewscreen of this observation deck that extends outward from our glittering orbital city, Jupiter can be seen hanging in space like a bloated satyr lounging grotesquely on a black hammock. I devour genetically modified lobster imported from Europa’s vast subsurface ocean. Deafening music rattles my sternum.
The music becomes dissonant and arhythmic. For hundreds of seconds, the impetus of our dance still jerks our limbs through space, and then the parrot’s wings cease their fluttering. This is not arhythmic music. An alarm is shrieking.
The city’s supercomputer overrides my personal computer and throws a video message in front of my eyes. Even when I close them, the vid plays against the wet blackness of my eyelids.
On Europa, Jupiter’s prison moon, prisoners harvest the bounty of the underocean and send that harvest to our glittering city. Enormous, terrifyingly powerful drilling lasers carve access tunnels through Europa’s surface. The prisoners in Faust District have commandeered their drilling laser. I am watching all of this happen in real time through Faust District’s camera feed. The laser is pointed skyward. Slain guards lie entombed in their own visored interdiction suits. A blinding pillar of energy leaps from the laser’s maw, slicing through Europa’s artificial atmosphere and out into space.
I have to turn off my computer completely to stop the video. I have never turned off my computer before. The loss of its whisper is like a blow to the stomach. I turn it back on and the video has stopped. The parrot shrieks and beats its wings with hurricane force. I retch. I whirl and run to the viewscreen. My numb hands swipe ineffectively at the complex interface like wooden planks. After hundreds of seconds I get the view I want. It is the view from the starboard side of the city. The side facing Europa. I see the laser beam bearing down upon us like a golden snake. In seconds we will be vaporized at the speed of death. In seconds I will be ready to die.
I wink my left eye twice and the supercomputer inside me sinks its tendrils deep into my brain, releasing a host of chemicals. The machinations of my mind accelerate to inhuman speeds. My perception of time slows to a crawl. From the sea of blissful smiles surrounding me, I can tell that many of my fellow partygoers have chosen this option as well.
I experience another one hundred years of life in four seconds as I stand before the viewscreen and wait for the laser. The hallucinogen courses through my veins for the rest of my life. For a while I watch my own vaporization with fascination. The laser devours me atom by atom at a glacial pace. It doesn’t hurt to lose one atom at a time. Eventually I retreat inside my computer and spend all of my time in the Net. I interact with other computer-enabled citizens who managed to activate slow-time with a few seconds to spare. We create a virtual city identical to our own and construct virtual avatars thrice as beautiful as our real bodies within the Net and live out the remainder of our lives there. Then, four seconds later, one hundred years later, the laser consumes us. We all die with a smirk.
by submission | Apr 19, 2016 | Story |
Author : Philip Berry
I placed the flat of my hand against the thick wall and felt the vibration of a hundred thousand pistons moving in synchrony. Pressing an ear, I heard the high hiss of gas igniting under pressure, expanding, driving the piston heads and collapsing into vacuums. Then, the whir of the great fly-wheel, collecting the energy of those controlled explosions into a huge momentum, its endless rotation invisible to the people it served, encased, concealed within a towering central hall that none were permitted to enter.
I would enter. I would work there. Not for me the usual occupations and vocations of this immense, travelling society. I wanted to work at the source, in the heat and racket of the perpetual engine.
To get this close I had wandered for months, from the peripheral zone of my birth, through numerous unfamiliar townships, complexes and multi-levelled agricultural matrices. I had escaped the propaganda, the ‘countdown to journey’s end’ that never seemed to reach zero. I no longer believed the pronouncements – where was our new world? Did it really exist? For a fifteen-year old, I was highly cynical.
I had reached the great ship’s lowest level. A portion of the wall slid open. A scratched, sexless mech walked out, holding an oversized spanner. I slipped in before the door shut.
A maze of gantries separated me from the blurred edge of the fly wheel. Gleaming piston-rods charged back and forth, driven by muffled explosions within the impenetrable housings. Invisible field-cords connected them to the speeding fly-wheel, from where the collected energy was transmitted to aft propulsion units according to the helmsman’s whim, or to the millions of residences where my fellow travellers demanded power for their gadgets, via remote couplers.
“Ah! Welcome.” An old, gentle voice. I was sure he would understand me. I climbed several flights of metal steps, drawing ever closer to the fly-wheel’s rim. I felt the breeze it created against my cheek.
“Curious, eh?” asked the man, who wore stained overalls. He stood near the wheel, and his white hair moved in the turbulent air.
“I’ve always wanted…”
“Of course, of course. Yet… do you have any idea what it is, this engine, this ship?”
“I know we are the last transport. I know we are all that’s left.”
“Quite right. But do you know where we are going?”
“We’re looking for another world, in another galaxy.”
He looked disappointed.
“If you are going to work here you must know the truth. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“Yes.”
“We travel at the universe’s edge. It is burning up behind us. There is no specific destination. We live at the envelope of existence, but we succeed, we have done so for centuries… we outpace entropy. It is enough, don’t you think?”
“But how long can we…?”
“For as long as we want to. But we must want it. You see, this engine’s only fuel is hope. Here, at the edge, thought is energy, and the plans that people make, delusions perhaps, but alive, colourful, are enough to keep the pistons moving and wheel spinning. Young man, we cannot stop hoping that the journey will bring us to a new home.”
“But if they knew, the people…”
“They will never know. You will never tell them.”
“But my family…”
“The family you fled? Boy, take this rag.”
I took it.
“And take this can of oil.”
I took it. He glanced towards the innumerable, shuttling pistons, and added,
“Now get to work.”
by Julian Miles | Apr 18, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Mark waited just inside the shadows of the alley. Outside, people bustled past with their heads down. Nobody made eye contact with passers-by. Lens readers and the urban legends about malware being zipped into your headware by opti-flash kept everyone down. The real threat of eye-poppers seemed to be less terrifying. Mark often thought about that. To be brutally blinded scared most people less than having their data raped.
His puzzling was interrupted by his target wandering into view. The man moved with the furtiveness of a long-time resident in the low-end, but Mark knew how to tail a paranoid, because he was one.
For twenty minutes they wound their way through the low markets and the shanties of the London that the tourists never saw. They avoided groups of people engaged in whatever business caused their hostile stares and ignored the struggles in the darkness off the main drag, because to be curious was to be drawn in to an uncertain fate.
Eventually, the man darted through the awning that hung down into the water, the flash of light from within sudden and gone nearly fast enough to make you think it had been a passing aircar. Mark stopped to check his GingGam Ten. It had been his sidekick and protector for too long for him to take it for granted.
Looking both ways and then up, he darted for the awning, the blades on his gauntlet slicing it away as he moved quickly within, gun levelled. The rent-a-thug sitting by the door to the premises took one look at the size of the piece and rabbited out into the night. Mark grinned. Cheap protection was always a waste of credit. Without pause, he kicked in the door of the shop and charged in.
His target was standing with his back to the door, peering at a screen held by a fat woman in a colourful kaftan. Both straightened as Mark stormed in and he saw the matte-black case open with wires running from within to the display.
“That’s all I need, people. Unplug and hand it over.”
The target came round fast, spinning while drawing from a shoulder rig. The GingGam fired, the ‘boom’ deafening in the confined space. A crater appeared in target’s forehead and the fat woman got sprayed in bits of skull and brains.
Mark knelt to retrieve the late target’s Ruger Automag without moving his aim from the fat woman. Standing slowly, he pocketed the gun and smiled: “The gun’s good for me, you can have what’s left. Except the case.”
The woman pulled the wires from the case and snapped it shut, then slid it down the counter to him.
“It’s useless without a reader, gunboy.”
Mark nodded. “I know. And I ain’t no gunboy.” He shot her in the face, reached over and grabbed the scrip behind the counter, took the target’s wallet and picked up the case. Stepping over the bodies, he exited through the back of the shop as faces started to peer in through the shop windows. The place would be stripped bare before the plod arrived. He was free ‘n’ clear. Again.
by submission | Apr 17, 2016 | Story |
Author : Sallie Lau
I am listening to Ocean Acidification and the Prisoners of Omega when they come in.
It’s the 0.05 mark of this Mu-sec. Of course it’s them. Them and their perfectly-proportioned domains.
I doodle on a spare beta sheet, feigning indifference. But now they’re standing right across from me and I can see each amino acid dotted on their body and it’s lovely and organized and chaotic and I doodle harder and –
Oh shit. I’ve mutated my doodle.
They clear their throat. My cheeks heat up.
“Can I help you?”
“I need something printed.”
“Yes, well. You’ve come to the right place. This is a print shop. We print – ”
They look at me with their ochre gaze, and I am spellbound into silence. They slide across a USBase stick. A sleek, perfectly-proportioned USBase stick.
“How many copies?” I ask, even though I know the answer. It’s The Answer, because it’s the answer that everyone gives.
“Two, thank you.”
When you’ve been working at the print shop for a long time, you’ll start having favourite customers. And when you start having favourite customers, you’ll start thinking of ways to become their favourite employee.
“We actually have a deal this Mu-sec,” I tell them.
“Indeed?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” I flash them a smile, “It’s two for the price of one. The second copy’s on the house. Complementary.”
Watson and Cr*ck! I hope I have enough Nucs in my bank account to cover what’s “complementary”.
“Oh,” they beam at me, and I blush even harder, “that’s wonderful!”
That’s right. I’m wonderful.
I take the USBase stick and insert it into HelicaseTM, our state-of-the-art initiator.
“So, when should I come back for it?”
“It’ll only take two Nan-secs.” I’m underestimating and I know it and they know it. But I want them to stay so I can admire their peps.
“Ehhh, I’m afraid I can’t hang around. I’ll be back by 0.08.”
They’re one domain out the door.
“Wait!” I say, “ Do you want an audio version as well?”
They pause.
“Who’s reading?”
“DNA Pol III.”
Their lip curls, “DeePeeThree? They make an awful lot of mistakes, don’t they?”
I gape at them, offended. “DeePeeThree’s the best reader we’ve got!”
“I much prefer the father. Let me know when DeePeeTwo comes on.”
And with that, the bell of the print shop tinkles, and my customer is gone.
