by submission | Jun 29, 2024 | Story |
Author: Andrew N. McCue
I was 15 when I left home. Replacing schoolbooks from my pack with clothes and food, I steal my mother’s favorite can opener, some flatware and a small stash of cash.
I walk mostly or hitch. Standing on the side of a road I read stapled, tacked and nailed sheets of paper on a power pole; lost cats, yard sales, a suicide prevention lifeline flyer with a few tear-off phone numbers missing and an advert for a free palm reading.
My food supply dwindling, I hope the palm reader offers snacks.
It takes me two days to work my way to the palm reader’s address. Not a horse drawn wagon
or a purple stucco house but a high-rise office building. I go up an elevator and am greeted at a door. Not by big hoop earrings or a gold tooth but by a sharp looking business dressed woman. Maybe she’s my mother’s age.
She shows me to a room with a table. We sit on either side, and she guides my palm-side-up hands under a scope thing. She peers into a pair of eye pieces and makes small noises as she adjusts knobs. The light on my palms brightens.
She looks up from the scope thing. “You have an unusually long lifeline,” she says. She says some other things but I’m mostly wondering where the snacks are.
“We’ll be in touch,” she says as she walks me from the room to an elevator.
“I don’t have a phone or an address,” I say.
“We’ll find you,” she says.
At a mission, I get a hot meal, a shower and a place to sleep. In the morning an army type in a suit and two uniformed army types are standing over me.
“Will you come with us, please,” the suited one says.
“No thank you,” I say and roll over.
The two uniformed army types manhandle me off my cot. In handcuffs, they escort me from the mission. I’m hoping they will offer me snacks.
That was 19 years ago. Standing watch on the starship’s bridge at one-twentieth of the speed of light we still have at least 70 more years before we reach Rigil Kentaurus.
But that’s okay. I’ll still be around. I have an unusually long lifeline.
by submission | Jun 28, 2024 | Story |
Author: Janaya Young
In space, hyper lanes operate like traffic lanes but with one important difference: you aren’t entirely in one place or another while traveling through them. Most people can’t tell. Maybe you feel a slight shudder of the ship, or for a moment you look down and your hand is not where you thought it was. But then it’s back and you think you must have just blinked or imagined things or had too much of the ship-generated food. With so many ships moving that quickly it becomes impossible to calculate, to avoid collisions. When you’re going that fast everything becomes fuzzy and soft, like it’s forgotten it used to be solid and that it liked being solid and everything decides to have a go at being intangible. But then your ship slows, and your body, right down to the teeth, remembers that it liked being solid and snaps back to what it was.
Sister and I like watching the ships pass in the hyper lanes. You can’t see it with just your eye, of course. You have to look through the special windows they have at the station. You can adjust the settings and slowly, slowly the hyper lane comes into focus. Blurs of blue and red. And then blurry outlines of things that just might be ships but all strung out and see through. Sometimes we’ll take a picture, and we’ll zoom in on that moment of frozen time and we’ll try to find the funniest thing we can see. Sister always thinks it’s funny to find people in the shower, with water going through them instead of running over them. Or when they’re in bed and just a mess of limbs and flesh and funny faces.
Though I like best when people are working, when there’s no line between what a person is and what they are doing. Today I saw an engineer with blinking lights on his arms, binary code in his eyes and wires coming out of his fingers. I saw a botanist’s leg become the root of a Ficus and for a moment if she could be aware of it, I wondered if she could self-reproduce just like a plant could. But then it all went back to normal, and the ship skipped away, and mother came in and started screaming about what’s appropriate for little girls to do. I know I will never see those exact people again, but I wonder if they know, if part of their atoms remember that they aren’t as solid or as separate as they think they are.
by submission | Jun 26, 2024 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Darren had come to dread having to decompress. He wasn’t alone and yet no-one was talking about it, even the media were quiet on the subject but then hardly anyone now was exempt. The evidence was everywhere and decompressing people had become a commonplace sight across the city. Old people, old bodies, slumped in cars and on public transport, sprawled across park benches and on the pavements. The only way to distinguish them from the city’s homeless was by their fine clothes. Shrunken and shriveled bodies adorned in the latest designer labels. It was, Darren had decided, grotesque and he was terrified at the prospect that eventually he would be reduced to this.
When Darren first started wearing the chip almost thirty years ago (although he now hated that phrase: ‘to wear’, the chip wasn’t something one wore like an item of clothing or an accessory). No, it was something one used and relied upon. In the beginning decompressing had not been an issue. The moments when he chose to remove it, and it had literally been just that, moments, it was no more invasive than brushing his teeth.
He remembered how he would often remove it whilst waiting for the morning train or even crammed in to the crowded carriage as it rattled its way into the city. But now, if he needed to remove it on the station platform, he would have to ensure he was seated, sitting slumped for at least half an hour, barely conscious, hardly able to move, the precious chip safely stowed in his pocket. Managing this only if after pulling it from its port in the small of his back he was strong enough to move that far. No, the days of the quick and easy fix were definitely behind him.
The chip has been widely available for almost fifty years now and the oldest users are well into their eighties and possibly above. And these are the people decompressing out on the city streets in plain sight. They are degrading and broken, not just the chips but also the users who are unable to stop trying.
At sixty-one, Darren is still relatively young and he hasn’t yet needed to cower and hide away in a toilet cubicle or lock himself in one of the supply cupboards at the office. But the tension when it comes is a bit more intense and the discomfort, the pain, lasts a little longer each time. So far, he has always managed to make his way home where, closing the bedroom door and pulling down the blinds, he huddles beneath the duvet.
When at last Darren emerges, he doesn’t immediately re-insert the chip. Pushing himself up from the bed, he crosses to the mirror on the wall and studies himself. And standing there, as he pushes the chip back into its port, he watches the not so subtle transformation.
by submission | Jun 25, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“You’re a peasant, a cyber peasant in the fiefdom of Facebook, of Meta. You’re a digital sharecropper for Google and Amazon and Apple, and you don’t even know it!”
The hooded man stood on the polished marble steps and shouted as a small crowd gathered. Alternately, the man turned and slapped bright yellow sticky notes on the tall sleek glass doors of the gleaming office tower in the heart of Wired Street.
“You’re being played. You’re being scammed. You’re being enslaved!
“Free apps, games, software. It sounds so good. So simple. So convenient. Like with easy credit and pay day loans, they get you hooked. They lavish you with eye candy and then suck, suck, suck you dry of your data, your identity.
“To Big Tech you’re not a citizen, you’re a datazen. Like in China, they’re tracking everyone online and in the streets with facial recognition software. Authoritarian regimes love the web, love the dependence of datazens on digital exchanges. You are so much easier to monitor, influence and control. If all your currency is digital, they can cut you off, squeeze you.”
He plastered more stickies, each a bullet point of heavy black text, on the door, and continued his harangue as the crowd grew.
“Understand what you are giving away. All your decisions, all your movements, all your interests. You’re letting Big Tech have it all. And for what? An indulgence? A promise of access? Of interconnectedness? Of celebrity?
“It’s criminal. You are being robbed. And yet you are the one being put in the debtor’s prison from which you can never work your way out—as long as Almighty Tech holds the keys. Even as we spread to new worlds looking for freedom and opportunity, you can’t escape it. Don’t worship and sacrifice yourself on the altar of Almighty Tech!”
The man pressed the last of his 95 sticky notes onto the doors just as building security came out. Many in the crowd were already posting pictures of the scene to their social feeds.
The man threw back his hoodie and bowed toward the crowd.
Some in the gathering throng gasped.
Others smiled.
On his broad bald red head, the man had a large QR code tattooed. More phones came out. In a flash, the scene was viral on the feeds.
As building security moved in, he shouted, “You can’t touch me. I’m interplanetary. I’m a Red. You don’t want to mess with Big Red.”
Building security messed with him anyhow.
Voices in the crowd shouted, “Who are you?”
Struggling as he was led away, the otherworld man called confidently out to the crowd, “Martian Luther.”
by Julian Miles | Jun 24, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The corridor is just far enough off-true that it messes with your vision and balance if you’re not careful. Or if part of you relies on an exoskeleton to function.
“You okay there, Zeno?”
I flick a glance and grin towards Leroy.
“I’m seventy-one, godammit. Been doing this war shit for nearly fifty years, and it still sucks.”
He chuckles under his breath.
“I hear that, and I’m only eighteen behind you. When did the old guard get so old?”
Susan comes back to us at a fast lope, exoskeleton humming as she jumps the hole in the floor in front of me.
She lands. The floor gives way. The exoskeleton whips my arm out in time to catch her flailing hand. It pulls her up, over, and past me before both exoskeletons release our bruised limbs from automated rescue responses.
I slowly stretch my abused shoulder. A couple of degrees more and the damn rescue would have dislocated my arm. Then again, if it’s that or lose another of us, it would be a cheap price to pay.
Leroy helps her sit up. She grins at me.
“Your shoulder objecting to moving as fast as you used to?”
I grin right back.
“Like yours isn’t.”
There’s a shrug, then she brings a finger to her lips and points to our right. Leroy and I crouch down, bringing weapons round with care. Sure enough, her uncanny hearing has saved us from a sneak attack.
Without another word, we kill our sensor packs and move with aching slowness to take up positions either side of the two places Susan indicates. She does a finger countdown from four.
Three. Two. She closes her fist: pause.
Her eyes widen. She points to the section by Leroy with one hand, making the sign for him to drop with the other. He obeys.
The mandibles of a Scortan come through the wall either side of where he’d been but a moment before. He reaches up and grabs their outer edges, using the ridges to keep a grip as he slams his boots against the wall to trap it.
I step back, then lunge through the door. Rotted wood explodes outward as I correct my aim and shoot the grey horror in it’s armoured head.
Partially deafened by the noise of my antique 8-gauge in a confined space, I turn a slow circle with the hammer back on the other barrel. When a second centipede/scorpion hybrid doesn’t charge in, I allow myself to relax.
Susan peers round the door.
“You blew that up good. The mandibles came off in Leroy’s hands.”
“Handy. I’ve wanted a Scortan machete for a while.”
Leroy steps into view, curved mandible in each hand.
“Machete nothing. You seen these? I’m thinking scimitars.”
Susan moves down the room, cuts the stinger from the armoured tail, then brandishes it at us.
“Scortan tail stabby thing for me.”
“That a technical term?”
“The technical term is khanjar, but I didn’t want to confuse you with long words.” She points to the mandibles. “Scimitars are definitely what you’ll get from those.”
Leroy looks down at the Scortan.
“Real shame the only way to stop them is to destroy the bit we need to defeat them.”
I lean over and look at the torn wires and unidentifiable components amidst the bloody ruins of the head.
“We’ll get one. Burying it under rocks is the current plan. Until then, we need to stay lucky.”
Susan chuckles.
“Absolutely. I want to have a long, violent talk with whoever infested the Earth with these.”
She’s not alone in that.
by submission | Jun 23, 2024 | Story |
Author: Stephen Dougherty
The faint light of the Crab Nebula lingered in the eyes of Franc Dreyfus for just a second. He turned off the telescope and swivelled his chair to face the exit of the tiny observation room.
He pushed himself gently through the doorway that led to the similarly compact space that was laughingly called the lounge. Settling into a chair, facing the only window of the outpost, he pulled across himself the strap that would keep him from floating away. From here he could see the Earth-lit edge of Shackleton Crater, and the enormous black abyss of its depths.
Beneath this lonely observatory pulsed the lifeblood of the Lunar South Pole. Here, ice was continually and automatically extracted from the freezing rock and converted to water before being pumped to the surface. It was then sent via pipeline to the observatory.
As Dreyfus took in the view something caught his attention: a small object seemed to be tumbling slowly above the crater. Squinting, to try and discern what it was, the tired astronomer released himself and floated through the doorway back into the observation room. He powered up the externally mounted telescope and pointed the powerful instrument towards the anomaly. He located it, shook his head in disbelief and tried refocusing.
What looked to Dreyfus like a human body – without a spacesuit – tumbled end over end toward the immense mouth of Shackleton Crater. It just couldn’t be, he thought. And when pushed to the highest resolution it seemed to be translucent. He switched views from optical to infrared, then x-ray. Nothing. It only registered in visible light.
He immediately thought to contact the control centre on Earth. They might be able to make sense of it. He flipped a switch and cleared his throat.
“Control, this is Grissom Observatory.”
A few seconds passed with a quarter million miles of static.
“Go ahead Franc.”
“I’m seeing something very odd above Shackleton. Is there any activity in orbit? Any accidents reported?
There was a long pause with more static.
Dreyfus continued. “I’m seeing what looks like an unsuited figure moving above Shackleton. Only registers in visible light.”
Silence.
“Control? Do you copy?”
“We copy, Grissom. Standby.”
Dreyfus turned back to the monitor to check he was still tracking the apparition. It wouldn’t be long before it went into the permanent shadow of the crater.
“Hey, Franc?”
“Yes, Control?”
“We just heard from our European partners.”
“Yes?”
“They just lost one of their guys in an accident.”
“Lost?”
“They report an explosive decompression on their lab out at Jupiter. A young scientist named Vanidestine was blown out of a failed hatch.”
Dreyfus thought for a moment. “Vanidestine? Wasn’t that the name of one of the crew lost whilst constructing the water extraction plant?”
“Yes. Someone here tells me that was his mother. How is the figure dressed?”
“The figure is blue. He’s stopped tumbling now.”
More silence.
“Franc. I’m told they wear blue on that station when on duty.”
“It doesn’t make sense. That station is four hundred million miles from here!”
“We don’t have answers, Franc. We’re not picking up anything in your vicinity from here. Keep watching, check your instruments and get as much data as you can. Over.”
A dumbfounded Dreyfus floated over to the monitor. Impossible as it seemed, he could see what looked like a human body where there shouldn’t be one. The telescope was tracking it, which gave him hope for his sanity.
He whispered, “Rest in Peace.”
Inexorably, arms outstretched, the ghost of Vanidestine dove gracefully into the darkness towards his mother’s grave.
