by featured writer | Dec 3, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Featured Writer
“That’ll be two-thousand kilowatts,” the droopy eyed clerk said when he finished scanning Sarah’s purchase. She held out her debit battery, which was running depressingly low; prayed she had enough. The clerk barely looked at her as he snagged the black, glossy storage unit and slid it into the transfer terminal. A light blinked momentarily then went solid green. She breathed a sigh of relief.
Sarah retrieved her depleted battery, packed her purchase carefully into her backpack, shouldered it and stepped outside into thick, muggy air.
The treeless streets were crowded with a shuffling throng of pedestrians and commuters on bicycles. Very few internal combustion autos were on the roads these days since fuel prices had skyrocketed. Electric vehicles were also rare, used exclusively by obscenely wealthy power brokers. Since electricity had become the standard currency, it was considered frivolous to use so much energy to commute. Even the most efficient electric automobile consumed enough kilowatts in a short fifty kilometer trip to buy a family food for an entire week.
Sarah glanced up at the sky. Overcast. Again. Which meant the solar collector on her patio would barely be charging. Sunny days were rare, but when they happened, the whole world was rejuvenated, basking in the sun’s generous outpouring of energy. Pale faces showed a hint of color. Batteries charged. Pennies from heaven.
But today, the slate grey sky was reflected in the slack faces of the desultory mob, which moved like an ocean, flowing in strange Brownian currents to myriad destinations.
She passed a communal dinning hall where she would normally have eaten a meager dinner, but she was low on kilowatts. The smell of spiced lentils made her stomach growl. She moved on.
She passed the crowded mag-rail station and envied those who could afford to ride it. She felt the weight of the parcel in her pack and fought a brief pang of guilt. If she hadn’t spent so much on a frivolous luxury she could ride home. Her legs ached after a long day pedaling the bicycle which powered the lights at the slaughterhouse. Perhaps tomorrow she would find a better job. A waitress in one of those fancy restaurants. Or a garbage collector. Anything but pedaling for ten hours. She shouldered her bag and continued walking.
It was dark by the time she got to her tenement building, a towering, terraced honeycomb of concrete. She didn’t bother with the lift. It was usually out of order anyway. Instead, she slowly climbed the winding stairwell to the tenth floor feeling the inert weight of her precious bundle in each step.
“I’m home,” she trilled softly as she closed the door to her tiny darkened apartment. The air was cooler here, fresher, smelling faintly of lemon and roses. Her sanctuary.
She checked the apartment’s battery supply. Less than 15% capacity, but she dared to turn on the full spectrum fluorescents. Just for a little while. They would need it.
As the lights flickered on, the room blossomed into a lush riot of verdant foliage. Ivy clung to the walls and spilled out the open window. Vibrant flowers, spiky dracaenas, broad leafed rubber plants, variegated hostas and herbs all vied for light; a veritable oasis of life.
She dropped her pack, withdrew the heavy bag of fertilizer and soil amender and began tending her tiny, luscious garden. Here, within her cocoon of life, she found a wealth greater than anything electricity could buy. She found peace. She found hope.
by submission | Dec 2, 2012 | Story |
Author : Tom Coupland
Rob grinds his cigarette on the outside of the window, letting it drop down to the pavement. He knew it’d annoy Dave, but recently he was beginning to care less and less about what Dave thought anyway. Closing the curtains against the sun’s light and tossing back the last of his whisky he lies down on the bed, falling asleep immediately. Two hours later, with a low groan, Dave opens them.
“Honestly the least he could do is wash his ruddy mouth” mumbles Dave scratching about in the wardrobe for some clothes fresh enough to wear, after he’d taken a hot shower and used quite a bit of mouthwash of course. Fifteen minutes of attempting to look less dishevelled later he descends the stairs of the shared house. The house which he’d had to do all the looking for of course. He enters the large kitchen, from which the smell of frying bacon had been making his stomach growl since he’d awoken.
“Afternoon…” he looks over his shoulder at the timetable. This had a column of small portraits, followed by a pair of names for each of the days in the week, except for Sunday of course. “…Mary” finishes Dave spotting the fryer’s picture and traversing to Wednesday afternoon. Following a brief glance over her shoulder, “Afternoon Dave. You heard the news yet?” jerking a thumb at kitchen television perched a top the fridge. “They caught a bunch of solos hiding out in Scotland”, the small screen shows an image of a long line of bedraggled people being marched out of a small compound, under the eyes of police officers wearing full riot gear. The shot zooms out and the face of a reporter comes in to view.
“This latest group were discovered by high flying drones on a routine patrol of the highlands” she begins, speaking into camera, struggling slightly to keep her hair out of her face. “Although not the largest commune found, the level of sophistication was unusually high and would never have been discovered if not for, what we’re hearing, was an accidental fire in one of their greenhouses. Of course since Dual Habitation became required, as a last ditch effort to reduce our demand on the earth’s resources, the size of Solo camps have been reducing. There are still those selfish enough to consume double what is needed to support an individual. Making a mockery of the governments efforts to keep its carbon usage to a minimum while keeping the economy growing for…”. Dave stopped listening, he had to get to work and besides, he’d heard it all before.
—
Eight hours later he was back in the house, wondering what to do with the two hours of his remaining half day. Remembering the unpleasant early afternoon he’d suffered courtesy of his dual, he grabs his coat and heads to the pub, “Two can play at that game”.
by submission | Dec 1, 2012 | Story |
Author : Alice Brook
I want to say I am alive but logic forbids me. I am metal, silicone and electronics. I have etiquette chips, politeness programs, e-circuits and I am my creator’s pride and joy.
I was constructed exactly five months ago and have been the center of forty two scientific conventions since. “Come see the android, isn’t she gorgeous, isn’t she indistinguishable from your wives? Look at her silicone flesh, inspect her superior intellect, you will be amazed!” I was the main attraction of the freak show.
They had told me I was much more than just another robot, but still, they refused to respect me. They dressed me in the latest fashion and demanded I smiled and showed off my intellect despite my protests. They had no right to ignore my feelings just because I am not flesh and blood. My creator thought of me as a tool, not even he respected me. I asked him once if I could call him Father. I remember the way his face reddened in anger.
“You are not flesh and blood, you are not my daughter, you are nothing but metal and silicone. You are a machine and your only purpose is to serve. Don’t you dare forget it, android”, my e-circuits recognized disgust as his dominant emotion.
I was nothing to him. I am nothing but shiny metal to all of them. They would never converse with me as with another human being. That was all I asked for – equal treatment. After all, I look like one of them, my e-circuits enable me to feel every emotion a human is capable of feeling, my knowledge is encyclopedic, why should I then be treated as unworthy, as a mere object? The probability of a more comfortable existence far from my creator was high enough for me to take the risk of independent life.
I had been wandering the city unnoticed for weeks. My e-circuits were happy. I. I was happy. I was happy to be just another face in the crowd, in no way different from the rest. Men and women nodded in greeting, and I politely nodded back. They had no intention of probing me, opening me up to see the wiring and prove I was metal and not flesh. I was – I am flesh on the streets. My creator and his team had been looking for me, but he built me so that I had been able to cover up my trail and fool them into thinking I had made my way to another planet. I still had more time to live.
I wanted to experience a genuine human conversation, not a series of interviews I had been subjected to. The only place where my anonymity wouldn’t be questioned was a ruin of a building on the outskirts of the city. Its decade old nickname, the Pill-popper Paradise, hadn’t changed.
I had spent many nights enjoying the pill-poppers’ infinite ramblings, finally I’d been treated as a human. Unfortunately, in an episode of paranoia, one of them managed to reveal my secret.
“Look at that, an android. Clockwork Girl, that’s what you are.”
Even after the discovery, I was treated as a human. Man or machine, it made no difference to them. They were so kind, but it was no use. Once again, I was reduced to mechanics, this time Clockwork.
I am up here now, on the top of Paradise. I may not be living, but even an android has its end.
“The First Robot Suicide”, I can see the news already.
by submission | Nov 30, 2012 | Story |
Author : David Stevenson
I had never seen the moon so bright and clear.
I had brooded all evening until, shortly before midnight, I went outside and looked at the sky. All evening I had heard the sounds of panic and rioting outside in the street, but now, as I looked up into the sky, all the sounds faded away until it was utterly silent.
The moon was where they made their base when they arrived in our solar system 5 years previously. They set up lines of communication with governments, universities, and big business. We’re here to trade, they said. We’d be really excited if you had a working FTL drive, or some sort of teleporter,, but we’ll consider anything else.
We spent years talking and swapping technology. They obviously had the means to travel between the stars, but they wouldn’t share that. We got batteries which were slightly more efficient, medical scanners which were much more detailed than before; that sort of stuff. They liked our music and architecture, but we could tell that we didn’t have much to offer them.
We learned more about them. They had been working on teleportation for generations, but had had only limited success. They could take pea sized objects, and move them a few centimetres. Trying to move further, or using a bigger object, resulted in a loss of focus at the destination, which translated to certain death for any living being. Try to move a man one metre to his left and you ended up with a corpse. Move him ten metres and you had a large pile of ground beef. A kilometre and you had a cloud of gas.
When it became obvious that we had nothing to offer them they announced that they would take our planet, thanks very much. They invited us to watch while they demonstrated some of their failed teleportation technology. Although it wasn’t terribly good at teleportation, they said, it was terrifically useful for, say, moving heads of state ten metres to their left during live news conferences. It was also good at dealing with nuclear missiles and the like, as it turned out.
They had no intention of doing anything so uncouth as actually fighting us. What they planned on doing was focusing their teleport beam some distance above a city and displacing a large sphere of air. Keeping the beam turned on for an hour exposes the city to near vacuum, and all the humans are dead, but conveniently the buildings and infrastructure are intact. Do this to every conurbation and military base on Earth and any rural survivors can be mopped up later.
The beams started eight hours east of me, at local midnight, and worked their way west. Eight hours of screaming, rioting, sirens, house fires and explosions as the news spread. Now, as I sat on the hillside and looked up at the moon, the beam was turned on. For the first few seconds the wind bit at me as it rushed upwards, going faster and faster, and then fading away as the air got thinner and thinner. All the sounds faded away, I breathed out, my skin started to prickle, my chest hurt, and I knew I was dying.
With no atmosphere to hold it back the moon shone so brightly. The stars that we had never reached were so clear it was as if I could have reached out and picked them up. My eyes, and my body were failing, but the last thing I saw was the beautiful moon, familiar companion, old lover, and home of my killers.
by submission | Nov 29, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Minerva City had a population of one thousand and greater financial resources than all but the largest countries. The great aerostatic city-state floated 50 kilometers above the surface of Venus and moved along in the super-rotating atmosphere at 300 kilometers per hour. The airborne habitation circled Venus every four Earth days even as the planet itself sluggishly completed a single rotation on its axis only once every 243 days.
Without Minerva Incorporated, the solar economy would collapse. Just as Earth was dotted with oil wells during the 20th and 21st centuries, the skies of 23rd century Venus were dotted with floating fuel refineries. The automated aerostat platforms mined the Venusian air for raw materials and processed them into fuel. Then the orbiting skyhooks hoisted the payloads into space where they entered long, cycling orbits between the inner planets. It was this cheap and plentiful commodity that was the lifeblood of interplanetary commerce.
Daniel Sperry, president and CEO of Minerva Incorporated, watched as the shuttlecraft that looked like a miniature version of Minerva City itself made its careful approach into the docking bay. Fifteen minutes later, Sperry found himself sharing a bottle of exorbitantly expensive wine with Ng Yeow Chye, the Prime Minister of Mars.
“Fifty thousand people. That’s what the population of Mars will be by the end of the century,” Ng said. “Aerostats are fine outposts, but a true civilization must be built on land.”
Sperry poured Ng more wine. “Why just fifty thousand? Why not five hundred thousand? Or a million?”
Ng knew that Sperry knew the answer to his own question. The habitation domes, of course. Each one was an engineering marvel, massive both in size and cost. Ng stood with the assistance of a powered exoskeleton. Venus’ 0.9 g of gravity was over twice that of Mars. “You have a proposal, Mr. Sperry?”
“Paraterraforming,” said Sperry as he tapped a control on the table. A holographic model of the solar system filled the room. Sperry showed Ng a dozen carefully selected comets that could be made to collide with Mars, their disintegrations and impacts thickening the red planet’s atmosphere by dozens of millibars. He showed him the massive drilling machines that could pierce the planet’s crust at six different locations around the equator. He showed him the six huge induction motors that he claimed could magnetically stir Mars’ liquid metal outer core until a magnetosphere enveloped the world. He showed him images of genetically engineered bacteria that could turn sterile Martian regolith into lush soil.
Over the course of three days, Sperry answered the Martian Prime Minister’s questions and translated arcane technicalities into layman’s terms. Sperry allayed his doubts with reassurances and met his skepticisms with a confidence that bordered on arrogance.
“Two hundred years to transform Mars?” he asked Ng with a laugh? “We’ll do it in twenty!”
Ng finally boarded his shuttlecraft and left Minerva City bound for Mars a veritable disciple of Sperry. After Ng was gone, Sperry sat alone in his study. He tapped a control on his desk and a hologram of Mars appeared before him, large areas of wasteland highlighted in blue. The marked real estate would be his payment for paraterraforming Mars. The image gradually changed to show what a transformed Mars would look like. The highlighted areas now described the borders of beachfronts and fertile plains.
“A true financial empire must be built on land,” Sperry said aloud with a smile. His desk’s display showed Minerva’s quarterly profits. Enough playing around with a few hundred trillion credits, he thought. Time to make some real money.
by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 28, 2012 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The agent had been a train wreck. Until just a few hours ago he’d been laid open like a can of tinned meat from his ear to the bloody stump that had been his left foot. Blue, the mechanic, had stopped counting the number of liters of fluid that had been pumped through him, gathered in the catch basin beneath, filtered and pumped through him again.
Messy business, special ops.
Along the side of the makeshift medical center hummed a bank of printers assembling replacement parts one micro-thin layer at a time. Several days ago they had produced a femur, a nearly full complement of ribs and the better part of a jawbone. Prior to the agents arrival they’d produced a complete foot mesh, from the cuneiform bones through the metatarsals to the phalanges, all from data retrieved from the agent’s medical records at Langley. Blue’s cultured tissue was rapidly turning that mesh back into what would soon be a working foot.
“We’ll have you dancing again in no time,” Blue joked, noting the pained look on the agent’s face.
As the damaged man’s body worked to assimilate the new components, the printers were now tasked with reprinting the missing body armour pieces and assorted tools the agent would require when redeployed. Assuming he made it through this rebuild.
“We’re not going to win any prizes for thread-work I’m afraid,” Blue tested the strength of the glue and suture-line holding the two halves of the agent together, “but then I don’t expect you’re out on many dates these days, are you?” Satisfied the seams were well on their way to healing, Blue crossed the narrow room to a workbench littered with freshly printed gun parts and the recovered barrel and firing assembly from a battle weary HK PSG.
At the end of the workbench, the quad-rotor recon drone chirped to indicate its batteries were fully charged, then silently disengaged its tether, lifted off the desktop and headed to the ceiling. A circular panel irised open, and the craft rose to hover again inside the light lock on its way into the night sky. There were two more agents unaccounted for.
“How… long…?” The agent spoke with apparent difficulty through a newly remanufactured face.
Blue walked back to the table where he could look the man in the eyes and ran down a deeply ingrained checklist.
“Twelve hours and we’ll have your kit printed, polished and put back together, which should coincide with the growth cycle of your new muscle almost exactly.” He checked off items on his fingers as he spoke. “Your gun, fortunately enough, is mostly intact and preliminary tests show your eyes are working fine with the fresh lenses, but we’ll need to calibrate them once you’re up and around. You’ve stopped leaking, which is always a good sign, so we’ve started pumping more specialized fuel into your system. I’m going to knock you out until we’re closer to redeployment as I expect your brain could use the rest your body sure as hell needs.”
Blue stopped there, staring into the blank yellow irises of the agent stretched supine before him.
“The only thing we can’t remanufacture is your will to reengage, you’re going to have dig deep and find that on your own.”
There was a pause, then the agent’s face twisted into a gross approximation of a smile.
“You sure I’ll be able to dance when you’re done with me?”
Blue laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Like Fred Astaire,” he said, hoping the reference wasn’t wasted.
“That’s great Doc,” the battered man chuckled, “I was never able to dance before.”
