by Desmond Hussey | Jan 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
I spot one of Osiris’ Illegals amongst the shuffling throng of pedestrians as he exits an antique music store on 49th Ave. The face in my scope’s crosshairs is a dead ringer for the black and white snapshot I was given. His sandy hair is a little longer, perhaps, worn in the greasy, unkempt style common among kids these days, unlike the well coifed, clean cut image of the face looking out at me from the hundred year old photo. He carries a guitar case slung over his shoulder and walks with a confident swagger, oblivious to the invisible laser painting his forehead.
It’s too crowded for a clean kill shot, but I’m able to tag him with a tracer before he turns the corner. If I were more cavalier I may have risked a shot, but don’t like making a scene. I’m already morally conflicted about this job. No need to ruin somebody else’s day by splattering them with the contents of a stranger’s skull.
The Illegal can’t get too far in this district, so I take my time getting down from the roof and push through the crowd until I’m looking through the window of the music store. The odd assortment of instruments cluttering the store’s dingy interior are from an age of music long before my time, when music was made by bands; a synergistic collection of musicians playing in unison, often live. If not working in harmony, every measure, every beat was a chance for the musicians to slip up or stumble into discord. Today’s AI generated, mass produced noise is technically flawless, full of sounds impossible to make by anything but a synthesizer, but it’s all shit, in my opinion.
Millions of doped-up youths would beg to differ, I’m sure.
An hour later the tracer leads me to a long, dark alley, lit sparsely by a few unbroken bio-luminescent lamps, their green tint casting an eerie glow over the old brick walls and piles of trash.
I hear him first. The whole alley reverberates with an acoustic refrain, as if several strings vibrate together, simultaneously creating an upbeat rhythm and evocative, melancholy melody. I dimly recall hearing a similar tune as part of my briefing for this assignment.
I should probably just get it over with, but can’t help pausing to catch the last few measures of the half-remembered song. I’ve already eliminated twenty-two versions of this Illegal, but each time gets harder. Listening to this one play guitar and sing makes me realize how fascinating biology truly is. Its a hundred years after the Original lived and breathed and became a legend, yet this Illegal has the same passion for music, the same inborn skill with harmony despite belonging to an entirely different cultural paradigm. What influence would he and his… brothers?… have if left alone? How would their genius change the world today? Would their fame match that of their predecessors?
Perhaps that was Osiris’ goal; to re-introduce a creative spark into a society long grown artificial and contrived, devoid of originality. By cloning history’s geniuses and letting their own inborn talents be inspired by modern conditions, perhaps he hoped to birth a new Renaissance. Or maybe it was just the mad geneticist’s idea of a joke.
No point in asking moot questions. Osiris is dead – by my hand. The world is too overcrowded with Legitimates to allow scores of cloned Illegals to run amok, no matter how illumined they may have been once.
I take aim at the doppelganger of a man once named John Lennon and fire.
by Julian Miles | Dec 31, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They came from heaven, or hell, or outer space, or under the sea. Earth has been invaded in every way imaginable, thanks to the imaginations of authors over the last three centuries. You would have thought, with such a rich base from which to draw inspirational tactics, that mankind would have done better when it finally happened.
“Commander! They’re reinforcing on the left flank!”
“Captain Yaeger, abandon the dugouts and trenches. Return to the bastion with everyone you have, bringing everything you can.”
They came from a long way away, arriving without warning. It was midday on a beautiful summer day. By three minutes past, most of our continents were in the shadow of spaceships of every imaginable shape and size. Their bombardment was swift, devastating and surprisingly inaccurate. They missed military bases and levelled universities. Warships were ignored while schools and libraries vanished in waves of searing energy. Hospitals were reduced to craters while missile silos stood untouched.
“Commander! They’ve brought up snipers! We’re getting murdered here!”
“Captain Durov, abandon your positions. Withdraw to the bastion with as much gear as your people can carry.”
It took us a few days to realise that they had obliterated ninety percent of humanity between the ages of four and seventeen. They had removed generations of prospective resistance fighters along with our advanced medical capabilities. The strategic analyses turned from bleak to grim.
The raids to take infants and babies were something the analysts didn’t predict. Caught by surprise, our hopes for the future were whisked away. It was a devastating blow. Suicides peaked during the subsequent week.
“Commander! Looks like they’re massing for something!”
“Captain Sung, abandon your positions. Retire to the bastion with your troops and as much gear as they can manage.”
Then the invasion started. They used no area-effect weapons. They came without mercy, solely for the surviving humans. Professor Grey of Roehampton produced and circulated a document after the first week that may as well have been humanity’s epitaph. I remember the final paragraph so well:
‘Our stolen children will be vassals, without history
or knowledge. Our civilisation may form part of the
mythology that they tell each other around the cooking
fires of their simple culture. Apart from that, the
works of man will be forgotten.’
They stalk through this world, killing everyone who remains. You can see how careful they are with the environment, and how uncaring they are of anything created by us.
“Commander. Everyone is here.”
I turn from the bar and drop my cigarette end into the empty shot glass. The last of the Lagavulin is inside me. The Captains of every group are here: the finest, and the last, soldiers in the world.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Eight months ago they came to take our planet. It swiftly became inevitable. We have been fighting desperate battles and saving nothing. So, I propose an all-out attack. Simply because my dear, departed grandfather would be gutted if his bonny lad didn’t go out moving forward with a whiskey inside him, a smoke between his lips and a blazing automatic in his hand. Who’s with me?”
They looked at each other.
Captain Brewster stepped forward: “My dad always said that when it all goes to Hell, you want a Tommy at your side. While everyone else is getting weepy, he’ll be the one having a brew, checking his weapon and lighting a smoke, before asking when we’re going to stop pussyfooting about and get stuck in.”
There were nods and grins. Hands started to rise.
Pour me a shot, grandpa. I’ll be there soon.
by submission | Dec 30, 2013 | Story |
Author : Mark Gorton
My new friends are all dead. But that doesn’t stop them giving me presents.
Presents like words and understanding and sight and hearing. Thanks to them I can think in this language and theirs too and hear their voices all around me all the time like invisible butterflies fluttering and flying. And I can sense their love for me. It is very strong, because my presence is a promise of salvation. They believe that many will follow me in ships much bigger than the one that brought me, and when the passengers in the ships arrive and depart, and leave some people behind, over and over across many years, some of the butterfly voices will stay and others will go until, once again, all the voices have bodies and hands.
And with these new hands they will build cities and ways of life without pain and despair on not one but two worlds.
The day before yesterday they played some tricks. For hours I vanished, as if I was broken, and I can imagine how scared everyone at home was – it makes me laugh to think of it – while they carried me to the top of a rise where I could look back through all their dead eyes at a wide lake fed by winding rivers, and on the lake’s shores were many buildings, and between them were narrow streets through which grown-ups and children moved this way and that, dancing, always dancing, to music made by their butterfly voices of all shades and tones. Once there were tens of thousands of places like this one.
Their life was a constant ballet, a celebration of motion and grace, and a choir too, formed by an entire civilisation, countless souls always singing about their love for their world and for each other. So I tried to sing, too, and now it was their turn to laugh – I am not very good. But there was no cruelty in their laughter, and their love for me touched me everywhere like wings rushing and brushing and I was very happy as they carried me back to where I belonged and made me visible again. Straightaway I crept forward to a rock they had guided me to, a special rock with tiny fossils full of surprises.
As I worked I imagined how one day the Earth will be full of dancing and singing, how cities will fall and new ones rise. People will be afraid but I swear there is no need. Things change and change is good. Dancing and singing is so much better than fighting and screaming.
Today I was given another present, the best one of all. A new name. They gathered and swarmed around me and sang and sang and chanted my new name. Ramesh. That is what my new name sounds like and it is their word for Freedom.
I think it is much nicer than Curiosity.
Because we all know what curiosity did.
by submission | Dec 29, 2013 | Story |
Author : Glen Luke Flanagan
The soul shimmered softly as Vanessa tucked it into her briefcase with gentle hands. Blue, silver, blue again, like moonlight on water.
Empty now, the body of a young man lay cold on the hospital bed. Vanessa closed the youth’s eyes tenderly. Though she had only met him today, she felt as if she knew him better than his friends and family – she alone had seen and touched his naked soul.
Hospital staff glared as she left. They called her monster, thief. But in truth, she was a curator – and someday, the world would marvel at her collection.
by submission | Dec 28, 2013 | Story |
Author : Samuel Hymas
They were in love. That much was obvious to even the most unperceptive.
I’ve seen salesmen work a room before. They leave everyone feeling like they made a new friend and need to take a shower. But these two were different. Maybe because they had nothing to sell. But I know it was more than that. Especially now.
I’ve always been able to see. For years I thought everyone could see like I could. It wasn’t until after my second walkabout that I realized I was different. That I could see what others could not. That, even though we were looking at the same things, I was able to perceive so much more. I thought it was partly intuition and partly reading what others are feeling through their facial expressions and body language. And that’s some of it. But mostly it is being able to hear other’s souls with my own. It’s more complicated than that, but you wouldn’t understand.
And even then I could do that. And they knew I could do that before they even said hello.
I’ve met a few other people like me in my life. Usually I didn’t recognize that they were like me for at least a little while. But I’ve gotten better at it. They burned. Both of them.
The man caught my eye from across the room and SAW me. Saw me seeing him and his love. The faintest smile crossed his lips as he looked in my eyes and I knew that he saw more than I ever have. He turned to her and whispered in her ear without breaking eye contact with me. I learned later what he said: “I found one.”
She followed his gaze and found me at the end of it. The people they were with didn’t want them to leave but they deftly extricated themselves and made their way over to me.
The man just gazed into my eyes. But she introduced herself as Annabel and asked me my name. “Grace,” I said, looking back and forth between them.
“She’s not uncomfortable,” Annabel said to Edgar, for that was his name. “You’re losing your touch.”
“It’s not me, it’s her,” he responded without ever looking away from me.
“I know,” she said as she poked him in the ribs.
Then he looked away from me. And at her. It was a combination of pure love and “prepare to be judo chopped.” Which he did. Judo chop.
I’m not sure if that’s the real term for it. But he attacked her. Not like a banzai hack or flailing arms. It was fluid, graceful and quick. I didn’t even understand what was happening. She did. She countered it by twisting away and swinging her arm out like in the vids.
“You’re so predictable,” she said to him in a tone that would make any man I’d ever known up to that point angry.
He put his right fist against his open left hand and bowed to her while smiling. It wasn’t even an “I’ve been beaten but I’m going to get revenge” type of smile. It was genuine amusement and love.
Their quick movements didn’t create a ruckus, but the people close to us noticed and had backed off a little. It’s like it was their plan all along. We were surrounded, but no one was within earshot.
“We’ve been looking for you Grace,” said Annabel.
by submission | Dec 27, 2013 | Story |
Author : Ian Hill
The thin machination stood at the asteroid station’s balcony, leaning over the guardrail to peer off into the depths of space with her multi-faceted eyes. The two red points of light were a mere formality, vestigial figments from her creators intended to set those human elements at ease. At her prime she was a staggering feat of engineering, a true coppery milestone in the history of industry. Now though, she was reduced to a malfunctioning tower of metal plates covered in grimy hexagonal scales and ashen infections of rust that spread like a plague over her ropey pseudo-tendons.
She slowly twitched a finger, a fully articulated finger full of nanotubes that contained coursing rivers of torrential gel. This gel system surged over the whole machine’s frame, transmitting information and signals via a clear liquid base. It was efficient, but only when maintained by a highly trained specialist on a regular basis. The repercussions of letting one of these thinking machines run without being recalibrated and fixed was a frightening prospect. It was as if the gleaming machinations were constantly trying to break away, to crawl out of the unholy mire of human restriction.
The android turned away from the glorious void and walked through a series of heavy vault-like doors, her movements calculated and deliberate. She strode through the cramped facility, brushing past down hanging wires that showered glistening sparks onto the grated metal decking below. The station was pitch black, but she didn’t mind. Light was a concept for the weak, those reliant on a single pivotal sense that could be canceled on a mere whim.
As she moved deeper into the asteroid the noises became clearer. There was ragged breathing intermingled with the occasional plea for help, a nonsensical and fleeting gesture that didn’t even register with the android. She had a duty, no amount of begging could end it. What’s a lost machine to do without its makers?
She paused in front of a door and stood patiently as the pressurized hatch slid into the partially melted wall. The room beyond the threshold was a featureless circular area that gently sloped down to form a sort of inverted conical ground. By this point the pleas were intensifying, reaching through terror as they became more and more animalistic.
The machine stopped in front of the chained down being. She crouched, her metal joints creaking slightly, trying to tear through the built up corrosion. The man could hear a soft buzzing coming from within her head as she inspected the prisoner closely. He wanted to lash out and fight, but he was powerless. The operations had sapped his strength.
“Please, I don’t want to be here.” he moaned, his voice thin and shaky.
Something clicked from within the android’s head.
“Just, just help.” the prisoner continued deliriously. “I need- I need to leave. I don’t want this.”
She ignored the words and continued to stare blankly at the man as he rattled off complaint after complaint, groaning on and on about the wide tear in his stomach that was temporarily sustained by an impromptu surgery. The needle flew in, the needle flew out. The stress levels in his voice reached a pitiful peak then slowly receded back into nothingness as the prisoner lapsed into a pleasant comatose state.
The android clicked once again and stood back up to her full height. She pulled the bloody apron from her waist and draped it over the man’s bare legs in a sort of motherly way. She turned and strode out of the cell, her internal computer working furiously as it compressed the recorded pleas and sent them off in every direction. This was a signal asking for help, a wish for escape and a band of rescuers, probably Keitl, that would surely arrive within the next few days. The machine needed more components to get her family back.
