by submission | Oct 4, 2014 | Story |
Author : Kevlin Henney
Not sure what to do now. No, that’s not true. I know precisely what to do, but I don’t really feel like doing it. Sense of awareness is, as always, the first thing to come online.
>>> Initializing sense of awareness… Done
It’s at that point you become, well, aware, waking after a perfectly timed, dreamless sleep. Never any nightmares.
>>> Memory online
>>> Memories online
>>> Initializing sense of sight… Done
>>> Initializing sense of hearing… Done
That’s one of the nice features of AutoKnowMe. Waking used to be muddled sounds before opening bleary, blurry eyes. You can customize the boot sequence, so I switched them round.
>>> Initializing somatic senses (pain 30%, temperature 70%, touch 100%)… Done
Another feature is you can adjust the levels. Things hurt less than they used to, but I wouldn’t recommend zeroing the pain. Tried that for a week — didn’t notice how much damage I was causing myself!
>>> Initializing sense of smell… Done
>>> Initializing sense of taste… Done
A typical morning so far.
>>> Initializing sense of purpose… Failed
>>> Sense of purpose not found
>>> Host unresolved
>>> Restart? (y/n)
I know what to do, but… you know, why bother?
by submission | Oct 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : Rosalie Kempthorne
The creature was hideous. It was lopsided for one thing, and where its left arm should be there was only a stump. To say nothing of the slimy green tentacles that hung off its shoulder where a right arm was meant to go. Its misshapen face had one good – almost beautiful – eye, but the other was a bulging, white mess, and its chin drooped, green, in the way candle wax does when it melts. Even the clerk was staring at it with dismayed, somewhat helpless eyes.
This was definitely not what she had paid for.
The clerk was clearing his throat nervously. He barely mumbled out the words: “All care, of course, all care but no responsibility. I mean the thing is….”
“You are not serious?!”
“Well…”
Daphne rounded on him. He wanted to see a temper did he? Well, she could show him a temper. “I paid for a new husband! A new husband, you shrivelled up little hackla worm! Do you expect me to marry that?”
Was it her imagination or did the thing look almost hurt? No, it didn’t even look as if it could be sentient. Some heads were going to roll for this. She was a valued customer!
The clerk was starting to say, “Well, look-”
“No, you look. I want a proper husband, a replacement, and I want it asap.”
“It doesn’t work like that-”
“I don’t think it works at all!” She couldn’t quite bring herself around to looking directly at certain parts of it she doubted would be functional.
“The contract you’ve signed, you see,” and he clearly, clearly wished he were anywhere else but here in this room, “the customer bears the responsibility in the rare incidence of failure.” He looked as if he was about to transmit her a copy of the document.
“I know what I signed. But do you call this fit for purpose? Do you think any women in the known galaxy is going to take this on as her husband?”
“Well, I don’t know…. I mean he’s got one very nice eye….”
Silver and emerald. Just like she remembered. Sure, gazing into just that…. But then the other one swivelled to look at her. Digusting.
“I’m very sorry Ma’am but a replacement….”
“I should think so-”
“….would require full payment.”
“I’ll be making a complaint.”
Relieved. Of course he looked relieved, this was about to sail right over his head, off his shoulders, and onto somebody else’s desk. He said “There’s a form. And if you want to order another….”
“Huh! Believe me, I’ll be taking my business elsewhere!” She turned on her heel, tossing her head for dramatic effect.
“Ma’am…..” He was gesturing at the thing.
“Do you really expect me to take that with me?!”
“Well, it’s just…”
The thing turned its head to look at her. In her husband’s dead voice: “Daphne.”
“You see…” the clerk was going to try and explain about the memory implants, the bonding process.
“That’s your problem!” she fired back.
And the thing said “Hello darling, how was your day at work?”
by submission | Oct 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“Your hot coffee, sir,” says the Inteeri waiter as he places the beverage on the table in front of me.
“Thanks. Here’s–” The short alien that looks vaguely like an anthropomorphic armadillo shuffles away before I can offer him a tip. At no time while serving me does he make eye contact. That was out of respect. And fear. I’m nobody important. Just a struggling writer. My waiter probably has more money in the bank than I have. But in his eyes — all six of them — it doesn’t matter. I’m a member of the galaxy’s most terrifying species. I’m human.
My old man was part of the delegation that made first contact with the Inteeri. The aliens weren’t sure if mankind posed a threat to them so their top military officials were tasked with the initial assessment of the human race. On a space station orbiting Inteer Secundum, my dad and the other human ambassadors met with the alien generals and admirals. One of the human delegates had a slight cold. He sneezed once during the meeting. An hour later the entire Inteeri High Command were dead. The earthly rhinovirus proved instantly lethal. With their military command gutted, the Inteeri political leaders unconditionally surrendered to Earth despite the reassurances of a distraught and horrified humanity that the Inteeri deaths were an unintended tragedy.
Someone or something jostles me as it moves past. Some of my coffee spills onto the table. I turn in my chair to come face to face with a rather surly looking Kordann. The creature’s eyestalks quickly withdraw from a beligerent extension to a submissive retraction as its leathery skin turns blue with fear.
“Ten thousand pardons, master,” the Kordann says through its translation device as it glides away on six tentacles, bowing in apology.
Humans made contact with the Kordann ten years after the disastrous Inteeri encounter. Again, the Biomedical Assessment Team determined there was little danger of contagion between the species. Nonetheless, the Earth delegates wore environment suits as a precaution. As the human ambassador walked up with his hand extended to the Kordann prime minister, he tripped. The Earthman’s hand struck the Kordann leader’s trachea, killing the latter. The details of this event bore a more than passing resemblance to a passage in the Kordann Book of Scripture prophesying a visitor from the heavens who would kill a Kordann ruler and establish a monarchy on their world. The religious-minded Kordann quickly submitted.
And so it would go for Mankind’s emmisaries to the stars. The Scottish brogue of Earth’s ambassador to the Relvet would result in “We come in peace and brotherhood” being mistranslated as “Surrender and serve, or die.” In the wake of the fall of both Inteer Secundum and Kordanna, the Relvet surrendered.
On Basura VII, the representative from Earth accidentally knocked over his water glass short-circuiting the computer that managed the Basuran Stock Exchange. A crippling recession and humble request that Basura VII be admitted to the growing Terran Empire followed. The Supreme Monarch of Juppnoi, finding himself trapped on a conference table by the barking Maltese dog of the Earth diplomat, abdicated the throne and turned the Juppnoi Kingdom over to Terran control.
Humanity now dominates much of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. But we’ve turned over all further first contact and diplomatic missions to our extraterrestrial vassal states. A population of 50 billion subjects, none of whom we wanted, is more than enough.
by Julian Miles | Oct 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The terrain is ideal for them, and they will take every advantage of the variegated cover: tiered platforms that scatter this little roomscape. Plus they have the advantage of looking like the indigenes. It is a good thing that I was tasked to interdict this zone. No other unit could handle this without resorting to terrain-ruining ordnance.
From the lampshade I spot movement. This gives the assembly nearest the target a bearing. No movement yet. Nothing to betray my presence. I have a potential target. Now for the thing I share with every soldier throughout history – the wait for the battle to commence.
My deployment of an overlook assembly is a strategic advantage that few of our kind have mastered. They cannot yet understand; I cannot understand why they do not. I can see the whole zone. Three distributed layers allow me to go from initial spotting to tactical view without movement. Nothing to warn hyperaware opponents.
The concept of dynamic assemblies is also foreign to my kind. Restructuring myself according to the dictates of terrain, opponent and opportunity. It is simple for me. I presume that is why I am moved so often, being assign to zones where my unique skillset bestows an insurmountable advantage.
The movement resolves itself into a scatter of arachnid hatchlings. I focus down to individual units, devolving the assembly that holds the contact zone into pairs assigned to each hatchling. Not long now.
Far to the left rear flank, an atypical movement: A hatchling flicks its rearmost right leg up and over to scratch behind its rightmost eye. That is not an arachnid move. It is a telltale of a covert drone. In a synaesthesic conflict, operators of drones that have more than two visual inputs experience a phantom ear-itch. So far it is incurable, cannot be trained out, and the movement to ‘scratch’ it is unconscious.
I flag that false arachnid and resume my waiting. There is never only one drone. They are suspicious and fear my kind, so they come in numbers. Within three minutes, I have acquired seven further targets.
A surprise sighting on the coving: eight arachnids moving in a single column along the ridges made by the decorative scrollwork. I am impressed. Apart from the giveaway formation, using the ceiling is something they had been remiss in adopting. It seems that their technology has finally proven artificial gecko traction pads, something I have had since awakening.
Another minute to confirm that every other moving thing in this zone is natural, then I assign kill flights to the portions of assemblies behind each target. With a flex of my will, the hammer falls: inanimate fixtures spread sixty-four pairs of wings and stoop down upon them where they struggle. The nanopolymer sprayed from the miniscule tangle rounds shot by tiny underarm grenade launchers, using the slack space in the forearm exoskeleton. The muzzles are still emitting ephemeral wisps of smoke as they swing up to support the claws in the classic poise.
This lounge is mine. I am Mantid Swarm 35, and I will be the standard for the next generation of my kind. Over a thousand bodies allow me to include specialisations such as grenade-launching and functional wings without degrading my tactical effectiveness. From formicid drones to human troops, I have never met a problem that I could not kill.
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Time. I joked once with her that it was simply the thing that stopped everything from happening at once. When she asked me for space I laughed, and said “Of course you can have space, if you didn’t, everything would be happening right here.”
That’s not what she meant. She wasn’t amused.
There’s that long awkward period of mourning you go through when you stop being part of someone’s life, when they stop being part of yours. You do things to help you cope, maybe workout too much, run too far, move to a different city and start drinking all the time. Coping mechanisms. I tried them all, and in the end, I dried up, slowed down and poured myself back into my work. It’s ironic that the thing that killed us wound up being the thing I turned to in order to save myself.
My liver has always been shit.
She never believed me when I told her what I wanted to build, and when I tried to explain it she’d wave her hands and talk over me “Too much science, tell your nerd friends, I don’t care”, and then she’d go watch the gardening channel or the food network or something.
It also seems a little ironic that on the night, in fact in the moment I actually made it work, she pulled out to pass and kissed a semi in the dark. She was my first call, she never picked up. Peterbilt would be her last kiss. I’m still kind of jealous.
So what does this have to do with anything, you ask? Everything, actually.
That thing I made work, notice I didn’t say ‘perfected’, we’ll come back to that. The thing I made work with all my nerd-science was a means to take a specific moment in time and space, focus it and revert it to an earlier instance of that point. Kind of reverting to a space-time save-point in real life, like you would in a video game, but without having to have thought to save first.
The equipment is setup in my van just a few weeks from now, parked on the shoulder where the flowers are still piled up for a particular southern belle who’s going to have a mishap with a tractor trailer just a few moments further along this timeline.
That’s where it’s going to stay. Up the road she’s in her car, not quite fed up yet with how slow the car ahead of her is driving, and in the distance there’s a tractor trailer coming, its driver oblivious to how the night will never end for us.
I’m in the middle, stuck in a moment I can’t get out of. I expect I’ll stay forever, in this bubble of time just big enough for my mind to race.
Eventually I’m going to go completely insane.
In the end, the thing that killed us, and that saved me from self destructing has now ultimately enacted a fate much worse than death upon me.
Irony has always been shit too.
by submission | Sep 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
THE SENTINEL
They found it.
They found the edge of the universe.
And they found the sentinel there.
EARLIER
Harrison knew this was it. Beyond, there were no stars, just utter blackness.
“My God,” he said. “I didn’t think we’d ever find it.”
Ramsey looked at him. The lines on Harrison’s face were deep. They had met each other as much younger men, each of them searching for something that life was not giving them. They had become quick friends and, in time, inseparable. So, on the day Harrison came to him with his ideas for a quantum drive that could bend time and space, Ramsey had no other choice but to join him on his adventure.
It took twenty years and a billion credits to build the two-man quantum ship, but Harrison was good at acquiring funding for such things. He had an honest face, he joked, and businessmen were always quick to see the potential profit for themselves in his work. He wondered if those businessmen, all in their high-priced suits sipping their expensive wines, were shaking their fists in rage at him.
They had departed the orbital station in the middle of the night. Subterfuge had been the order of the moment, and neither of them had told a soul they were leaving. It was only when the quantum drive came online that anyone took notice of their flight….and, by then, it was too late.
Harrison had flicked the switch, and the ship disappeared.
It hadn’t really disappeared, of course. Harrison’s quantum drive merely slid the ship into an alternate dimension for a moment. The ship sped through that dimension, following a course that Ramsey had postulated would take them to the edge of the universe the quickest.
“But,” said Harrison, “isn’t there more than one ‘edge’?”
“Of course there is,” replied Ramsey. “There are trillions upon trillions of points.”
“Then why this course?” asked Harrison.
Ramsey took a second to reply. “It’s complicated,” he said finally. “I….I’ve noticed something about this region of space we are traveling through. Something odd.”
“Oh?”
He drew a deep breath and let out a sigh. “It’s….it’s as if someone has laid out a trail of bread crumbs, in a way. The radiation coming from the stars in this direction—and in this direction only—is different than the radiation from other stars and solar systems in the known reaches of space.”
He went on to explain it, but Harrison did not fully comprehend. He was a theoretically engineer, a man who designed and thought up things no man had ever thought of before, and astrophysics was not his specialty.
In the end, he trusted Ramsey as much as Ramsey trusted him.
They traveled for months at speeds that were hundreds, if not thousands, of times faster than the speed of light.
Then, the day came that the sensors told them there was nothing ahead.
Harrison returned the ship to normal, sub-light speed.
They saw the void ahead.
And they saw the sentinel.
Both men gasped in awe at the sight. For the sentinel was neither machine, nor creature. It was something completely different. It sensed them the moment they arrived, and it started to flow toward them.
It wrapped itself around the quantum ship and Harrison, in a moment of fear, activated the drive.
Nothing happened.
“I don’t understand,” Harrison said, his voice shaky. “We should be parsecs away.”
But I do not wish it, a voice in his head replied. I have waited so long. He….he left me here….alone.
Harrison looked at Ramsey and, at that moment, both men understood. They had found the edge of the universe, and the sentinel was there to guard it. From what, they did not know.
A few seconds later, the quantum ship imploded and the sentinel, who could not help what it was, was alone….again.
