by submission | Oct 13, 2016 | Story |
Author : Riley Meachem
The stars in our sky are run on electrical wires. Shaped like logos and dyed the color of neon and glass. They come on the fronts and backs of cars, on huge billboards. There’s a sort of beauty to it, I suppose, knowing that your mountains were drawn by architects and city planners, that your grassy fields were purchased for sporting events. No, not beauty. A beauty off-shoot, a less popular cousin, some generic brand-name aestheticism. But it’s the only beauty I know.
I’ve lived here, as long as I can remember. When it was just five square miles set adrift out on the sea. When the skies weren’t always ablaze and children could run out on the streets, while shopkeepers and fishermen and workers of every kind went about their business. Where everyone knew each other. When we were just an odd social experiment– a city built on pontoons and set to move around the seas like a ship. Then, of course, things changed—as they always do.
People are wont to tell you change is always a good thing. Well it’s not. But it’s not a bad thing, either. Change is just change. It doesn’t care who or what it affects, what happens when it comes. Doesn’t bother moralizing or deciding whether or not to be good or evil. No, it’s just change. And it comes rambling forward without stopping.
I was too young to remember what it was really all about. Just that the first bomb fell in Pakistan, the next in some place called India. Then others joined in, fiery ICBM’s annihilating whole civilizations, their buildings and their memories. I cannot even remember most of the world before the bombs started to fall. All that’s left of them are the dust clouds that still linger in the skies.
Fallout swept over the land, killing crops and animals in places that had never so much as seen a missile silo. But our city in the sea grew. Morphed, perhaps, is a better word. People flocked here from all over, any survivors crawling, floating, swimming from the wastelands to this lone oasis. And we welcomed them. They brought business, built houses.
Then winter set in, but we just kept moving southward and southward. And then the fish started to die. Night set in as the sun was blocked out by the dust. And more people kept coming and we kept floating along, desperate to survive for some unknown reason. Living on where it’s always night, the air is always cold, and the water is always warm.
One by one the stars have started to go out, as fuel dwindles. The divers have had to go deeper and deeper to find food. We’ve started making farms with solar lamps. It’s really quite ingenious what this species can do when it isn’t busy killing itself. Plants that grow towards fake suns and stars that don’t exist.
And the funniest thing is, our impending doom doesn’t even bother me at all. It just seems so unimportant now.
I wonder why we bother going on in a world like this. I wonder what my role is in this puzzle that seems to be black and devoid of any image. And I cry, as I always do, as I stare out at the inkwell ocean meeting the jet stone sky, wondering when the blackness will overflow and wash all this away.
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by submission | Oct 12, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
I entered the war room, the data all pulled up on my reader. The e-whiteboard at the front told me that one of the colonels was trying to sell the idea of a space ark to the Admiral, telling him to devote materials to escaping the Solar System and trying to hide. The Admiral had a look of frustrated acceptance on the issue when I came to a stop and saluted.
“Admiral,” I said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but the Intelligence Division has urgent information from spy telescopes on the Jidehri reinforcements.”
He sighed, “Go ahead.”
“We’ve taken time to look at the star on the other side of the wormhole,” I began, my voice shaking a little, “as well as its immediate surroundings. We’ve managed to identify several planets on the other side. The hole isn’t aligned correctly to show us Mercury or Mars, but Venus, Earth and Jupiter have been resolved after we ran the images through some pattern-recognition software–”
“Hold on,” he said, holding up a hand. “You’ve lost me. It sounds like you’re saying you saw our Solar system through one of their wormholes.”
“That, uh, that is correct, sir,” I managed to utter. “The Intelligence Division has come to the conclusion that what we saw through these wormholes were our planets in other universes. We think that the Jidehri open them when the war in one universe doesn’t go their way, and then pass through to another universe where we, the enemy, are having worse luck. This essentially gives them control over probability, and allows them to devote less resources to lost causes while making their successes even greater.”
“So there have been countless universes where the Jidehri have just up and left. No resistance, no warning.”
“Right. And countless times, universes like ours have received more forces of conquest, leaving us with even less of a chance, prompting even more versions of the Jidehri fleet to come here and fight. It’s a positive feedback loop, and the way things are going now, it’s going to put this universe’s humanity in the ground.”
The war room was silent after my dramatic ending. The officers in the room looked with pale faces at the Admiral and I, partly in fear of the Jidehri, partly in fear of the Admiral’s reaction. Which happened to be a brightening of his eyes and a smile creeping across his face.
“My God! This, ladies and gentlemen, is the turning of the tables! If we put up enough resistance in the coming battle, the Jidehri will leave overnight! Send out a broadcast– I want to notify all of human space about this development.”
“But sir,” I returned, “we’re in a losing universe that, for just that reason, is going to keep on losing! I think we need to take Colonel Rinyan’s proposal of a last-ditch ark seriously. It may be our last option.”
The Admiral actually laughed at me. “Nonsense! If we make it just a little difficult for these damn things, they’ll scrap this war and move on. I wish I could help the next universe over, but the only thing we’re capable of doing is saving ourselves. And that sounds a lot more plausible all of a sudden. Rinyan, I’m afraid we’ll be using the resources you want for the ark on something a little more… militarily oriented. Get the Engineering Division to design some new battleships. This war ends in a fortnight, one way or the other.”
by featured writer | Oct 11, 2016 | Story |
Author : Priya Chand, Featured Writer
Sam looked at the tickets and crumpled paper, already softening under the onslaught of summer heat and Mei’s palms. “I never been to some classics concert before,” he said, holding his fists tight against his sides.
“You never sat in the nootropic section, either.”
They’d been to two other concerts—inside the walls, anyway—in their seventeen years. Sam licked grit off his upper lip and said, “How you get those tickets, anyway?”
“Same way you got cake for my birthday. See, the waiver.” Mei waggled the crumpled paper in his face. “I already signed, but your ticket not gonna activate until you do, too.”
Sam smoothed out the waiver and nodded when he saw the Tuskegee Convention seal in the corner. Certified ethical. “Fine.” When he pressed his finger down, the nanofibers winked and both of Mei’s tickets turned pink. “When is it, anyway?”
“Six hours, but it’s in Shivnagar.”
“Shit.” Sam tugged his shirt off with the deliberation of someone who owned two outfits, both threadbare.
“Yeah, I got a dress this morning at Hydracity. All they wanted was skin.” Mei raised her thumb, which barely looked raw. She’d once scraped her palm sneaking into a kitchen. Sam could see the scar from the infection.
“Coulda warned me,” Sam muttered, but by then Mei was halfway down the street, sandals slapping around the oily puddles that littered the road. Awnings flapped in her wake, droplets scattered. Sam hoped the acid wouldn’t wreck his clothes. Scoring goods was harder for boys than girls—after centuries of gender imbalance, there wasn’t a huge demand for male data.
#
There was a whole line of teenagers outside the stadium. Most of them had decent clothes and shining hair, but when Sam looked at their feet, he saw mud and ragged toenails. There were other lines of people in heat-wick salwars or jeans—the kind of people you’d expect at a classics concert. He bet none of them had ever sold data, or if they had, it was the kind used to make new cures or enhancements. Sam had a friend who’d gotten out of the slums that way.
The ticketwalla didn’t make eye contact with Sam, just slapped a patch on his hand and shooed him through. “Come on,” Mei said, dragging him past the signs to their section.
The seats were disappointing. Plastic, small, same as the movie theater in their own neighborhood. At least the setup below looked fancy. Backup dancers were going through their paces as techs guided speakers and screens into place. “How long?”
Before Mei could answer, they were blasted with noise.
Sam couldn’t figure out what was going on—the crowd roared along to lyrics in some near-dead language, one he’d missed in nine years of school—and then the patch activated.
Bliss, he was riding a dolphin leaping through a sea of sound, tears of joy. The strings slipped into mourning, and a moment later he was sobbing like he hadn’t known he could sob. Sam caught Mei’s face out the side of his eyes and saw it glistening. She hadn’t cried when she first showed up, a six-year-old from the hydroponics, but it was lit in neon tonight.
After it was over, Sam and Mei agreed that the classics were pretty good. When the under-thirties job market reopened and they got placed in a factory, maybe they’d put a little aside and learn Telugu.
Mei traded her fingerprints for train tickets, and as the silver bullet dove under the swamps, terabytes of data streamed through the skyscrapers floating above.
by Julian Miles | Oct 10, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The room is a stock F-Class residential dwelling. With three people and a forensics robot within, it’s one small child short of standing room only.
A young man in a lurid red suit, cut in the fashionable retro-zoot style, turns to his bearded boss with a look of mystification: “What’s a ‘buk’?”
Detective Dru looks up: “It’s an intermediary form of collated hardcopy, printed on sheets of pressed wood pulp.”
“It’s made of wood? No wonder they called it pay-per!”
“You’re not wrong. Now, back to the matter at hand: why does Miss Priscilla Townsend, a twenty-year-old student, living on the poverty line, have a shelf full of them?”
The third member of the team, a woman possessing eyes seemingly too large for her narrow face, waves a hand toward the shelf: “Initial assessment has their value at mid or high six figures, depending on content.”
Dru nods: “Tomas, get someone from Antiquities to catalogue and bag everything on that shelf, then get me the last five years of our victim’s life. Loanna, find me something on the family. We’ll meet at the office in two hours.” With that, he turns and carefully makes his way out of the cramped domicile.
Their office was a converted B-Class residence, salvaged from the last flood before the Thames Levee went up. On the flat roof, where Dru was, you could see the broken line of low islands that marked where the Thames Barrier had been.
“She was the great-granddaughter of Elliot Parson, boss.”
Dru knew that name, but the details eluded him. He sighed: “Go on, then. Remind me.”
Tomas grinned: “Headmem, boss. You really should get some before your mental archives of London criminality and how to catch them are lost to us.”
“I meant remind me about Mister Parsons.”
Loanna joined them: “He knows that, but couldn’t resist it.”
Dru pointed at Tomas: “Tell.”
“Elliot Parson, last curator of the British Library, disappeared fifty-three years ago, just after the library system was abandoned. During the transfer of assets to the British Museum, it was found that he had stolen a huge selection of collectables from the deposit archives in Bolton over the preceding decade. Most of those items are still missing, and all of the items on the young lady’s shelf are part of that haul. She died of malaria because she wouldn’t sell stolen goods to pay for treatment.”
Loanna nodded: “We’ve actioned a death mandate for her data presence, and her private blog details exactly that. It also seems that Elliot may not be as dead as everyone thinks. He, or someone purporting to be him, sent those books to her three years ago when she started university.”
Dru stared out across the Thames Delta: “Send the actionable data to Interpol, arrange for her ecofuneral, and hand the books over to the British Museum.”
As Tomas and Loanna reached the door to the stairs, Dru’s raised voice reached them: “Don’t forget to get an itemised physical receipt as well as an electronic one. There are far too many academics in that place for there not to be an indebted hacker or two.”
by submission | Oct 9, 2016 | Story |
Author : Samuel Stapleton
Synthetic: a substance made by chemical processes, especially to imitate a natural product.
The data analysis was grim. Predicted system stability – 62%.
—
My small gathering of journey members stood off to one side. Tori spoke quietly.
“What’s the consensus?” She asked. I took a breath and looked up from the floor.
“Further analysis showed it’s only scored a stability rating of 62% for the next 2,500 years. It’s not good enough.”
A frustrated sigh emanated from the group of young professionals.
“We scrap this round of synthetic bodies, reupload to digital, and we should make the next system in just under 160 years. It’ll feel like a quick nap.”
They took it well, but disappointment lingered throughout the ship.
—
Tori came to see me in my quarters before we reuploaded.
“How is everyone scoring mentally with the news?” I asked.
“All well within norms. I actually came to see you because I need to report something.”
“Shoot.”
“I’ve been speaking with one of the younger members, Scott Yearsley. I’m afraid he’s broken more than a few protocols plus numerous ethical standards as well…”
“Give me the short version.”
“He brought an illegal upload. He’s one of our programmers. I don’t know how he did it but I know he’s not lying.”
I sat. Stunned.
“We have a stowaway?”
Tori nodded as my head began swimming with the implications.
—
“Scott. I have to level with you. Tori reported to me like she had to. It’s her job. This will go easier if you just explain what’s going on.”
He looked at me the way a cat might look at a beetle it is considering swatting down from the air.
“It wasn’t hard. I uploaded my girlfriend onto a separate network. Reprogrammed my allotted space to make it look like she was personal data files – mostly video – and then reuploaded her to the ship from a port before we left.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“Scott we have no idea what kind of mental state she might be in from being stored. Humans go mad without proper monitoring and subconscious waking.”
“I’m not an idiot captain. I know I’m only 14 but I’m fluent in 22 coding languages and I almost earned my medical degree before we left. It took me like, 19 hours or so to build a self-housed mental watchdog for her. Like I said. She’s as safe as you or I when we’re in storage.”
“Well you’ve broken about 17 military laws and even more civil ones.”
He was silent.
“Yeah but you’re not going to delete another human being as per stowaway regulations. Those were meant to apply to physical stowaways. And I’m the best programmer aboard, it’s not even a close competition.”
He rested for a moment before carrying on.
“I mean I hate to make it seem like I’ve won but once we left Earth both she and I were free and clear. You’re better off doing nothing. It’s why I told Tori. My girlfriend isn’t hurting anyone and we can download her once we’re all settled and the mission has been a success. Or we’ll fail to find a stable system and she’ll vanish into eternity with us.”
I sighed. And wished I could have a stiff drink.
“Well. What’s her name? Tell me it’s not Juliet…” I said out of sarcastic spite.
I caught the flash from his perfectly white teeth as he smiled and spat out that single syllable.
“Eve.”
“Her name is Eve.”
—
Subtle.
by submission | Oct 8, 2016 | Story |
Author : Leanne A. Styles
I reached across and tightened the strap on my kid sister’s tatty seatbelt. She grinned; through the breathing tubes, through the pain.
The shuttle we’d stolen had been recently decommissioned, but so far it was holding together pretty well as we hurtled towards our destination.
The poor had been exiled from Earth by the rich many years ago. I’d escaped the cesspool space station we’d been born on dozens of times to visit the wonders of the blue planet, but Tilley had always been too sick to come with me.
The parasites attacking her lungs were making her sicker than ever now. One week, tops, the medic had said. This was her last chance.
Through the hatch window, the haze of the atmosphere was approaching fast.
“Hold on, Tilley,” I said. “It’s about to get bumpy.”
We hit the fog. The shuttle shook violently and I braced my arms against the hatch, terrified it would blow and we’d be sucked out.
“How much longer?!” Tilley yelled over the racket.
“Nearly there!”
Moments later, the turbulence died and we were sailing through calm skies. I deployed the chute. The shuttle decelerated with a jolt, and swayed gently, descending to the water with a soft splash.
“How long do you think we’ll have?” Tilley asked as I helped her into her survival suit.
“A few hours ‒ if we’re lucky.”
We put on our life jackets, then I opened the hatch and we climbed out. Tilley gasped when she saw the towering cliff face rising out of the inky waves.
“What are they?” she asked, her eyes scanning the sky.
“Birds. ‘Gulls’, I think.”
“And where are we exactly?”
“Somewhere in what dad told me is the Atlantic Ocean.” I double-checked that her oxygen tank was watertight, and climbed down the ladder into the bitterly cold sea. “Hurry; no time to waste,” I said, reaching up to her.
To my horror, she jumped right in, disappearing beneath the waves before re-emerging coughing and spluttering.
“Are you alright?!” I said, grabbing her by her life jacket.
“Ye―ah.”
“Your tubes!”
“I’m… fine, Archer.” She started splashing and laughing.
“Come on,” I said, shaking my head and pulling her towards the rocks.
Laying side-by-side on a slimy ledge, we watched the birds launching off the cliff face. After what felt like a few hours, I looked over at Tilley.
Without looking back, she said, “I love you, Archer.”
But I didn’t reply. I’d been distracted by the distant drone of the search crafts. The patrols had spotted us on radar and were coming to arrest us. My stomach flipped at the thought of Tilley spending her last days in a detention centre, or worse, surviving the journey back to the space station and dying in solitary.
“Time’s up,” I said solemnly.
Nothing.
I looked over. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t moving.
I nudged her gently. “Tilley?”
She was gone. I burst into tears, burying my face in her chest.
The crafts were getting closer. If they found Tilley they’d only burn her and dump her somewhere horrid.
I couldn’t bear that.
As quickly and carefully as I could, I took off her life jacket, stuffed her survival suit with as many loose rocks as I could find, and slipped her into the water.
Her beautiful face disappeared into the depths just as the crafts roared over my head.
Six months in solitary awaited me, but it had been worth it to see my sister smile one last time.
To bring her home. To Earth. Where she belonged.
