Intentional Paradox

by Clint Wilson | Aug 20, 2013 | Story

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer

The team signaled goodbye to the assembled early humans. The tribe of twenty-three men, woman and children stood there in their animal skins. Many of them held the new tools. All of them now held the knowledge that had been passed on to them in the past four months.
Professor Smith would miss his subjects dearly. He had grown not only to care for them greatly but had come to think of them as family. It was the same with the other six researchers. There had been one more traveler when they arrived in the spring but a saber-toothed tiger had seen to her demise.
There was a flash of white light and then the early humans stood once more alone in the vast unscathed world.
Inside the machine the researchers all stood looking at one another. They remained silent during the twenty-minute time transfusion. They all knew well enough what they had done. The results of this experiment would be permanent as they all hoped to greatly advance the technology of the human race within their own lifetimes. The real mystery was what they would find when they got back home.
They would land less than a nanosecond after their initial departure; to witness the alternate future they had now created by introducing so many technological advances to the once uninformed bipedal creatures.
The humming of the wormhole engines wound down to a halt and the blackness outside the windows lightened once again to reveal the year 2013. And what a year they encountered!
All the roads seemed to be covered in a hard cement-like substance. Strange sleek horseless carriages raced by, traveling at least thirty or forty miles an hour. And the buildings, some of them reached ten or fifteen stories high!
The travelers huddled together behind their tinted glass. Never before had they witnessed such marvels. All of them, including Professor Smith, silently wished for their old slow world and simple architecture, with structures that rarely reached higher than two stories, and hand painted signs that didn’t light up. This was going to take some getting used to.

Two Graves

by Julian Miles | Aug 19, 2013 | Story

Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer

They say that a man who seeks revenge should dig two graves, one for his target and one for himself. I dug two hundred and seventy-nine.

Into two hundred and thirty-seven of them I put all that remained of the inhabitants of my home town, Padgest. I had to guess which bits belonged to whom toward the end. The two hundred and thirty-eighth is Karen’s.

Filling the next forty has taken me six years. Six years to track down every member of the Twenty-Third Special Operations Commando, who turned my home into an abattoir during the dying days of the ‘Endless’ Empire. They went their separate ways after the war, slipping anonymously back into the newly-freed populations as their training had taught them to do.

The first squad ran an adventure holiday company on Eridanus. My quest for vengeance nearly ended there. Eight-to-one odds, only offset by the fact that they had all gone to seed quickly, partying hard with their customers. I shipped their bodies home in a freight container.

The second squad was ruling the planet of Haberdesh. I had to start a rebellion to get them and only salvaged a suitcase full of remains to bring back.

The third squad had become bounty hunters. I realised that my need to look them in the eyes as they died would get me killed, thus personal vengeance ceded to practicality and I sabotaged their ship. I brought their frozen bodies home strapped to the outside of my hull like sculptures.

The fourth squad came after me. It was inevitable that they would keep in contact with their former comrades and work out that someone had declared open season on them all. I spent eight months in hospital after the month-long running battle with them, wading through the stinking swamps and blighted mires of Kelsige, relying on a native crossbow as the planet’s corrosive atmosphere destroyed their kit and removed their advantages.

The command squad split up while I was in hospital and went to brutal lengths to conceal their tracks, forgetting one thing: a trail of bodies is easier to follow than a trail of transactions.

I found them all and dealt with them one at a time. As I didn’t have their training, I had to improvise: hiring a truck to crush a coffee shop, dropping a skip on a stationary car, using a tourist submersible to sink a yacht, using home-made bombs to cause an avalanche, a rockslide and a bridge collapse.

The former leader of the 23rd SOC retreated to a hunting lodge in the mountains of Tarkerut. He used all his skills to make the place lethally inaccessible. So I used mortar bombs filled with Charo musk to paint the walls and roof. Charo are voracious and look like the furry bastard spawn of lampreys and cockroaches. He tried to stop the infestation I attracted and died very badly, if the screams were anything to go by. I had to wait two months to retrieve his remains.

Today I filled his grave and walked across the blue grass meadow to where Karen’s mound lies next to the only empty grave. I sit on the edge of the open grave and tell her about the last death while I finish my champagne and cyanide. Then I check the deadfall holding the earth back from the grave.

“Now I lay me down to sleep,

Next to my girl, forever to keep

Come judgment day or ending times

The guilty have paid for their crimes.”

The darkness washes in as I feel myself topple into my grave.

Of Quints and Quads

by submission | Aug 17, 2013 | Story

Author : Joshua Ginsberg

Jeff sat at a circular table in the cafeteria, going through some of his data captures and interviews. It was an annual assignment – covering the oldest high school tactical combat drone rivalry in the country. Both schools had fallen to a Tier II ranking over the past decades, which meant carving some activities and programs out of the curriculum, but the drone teams were a major alumni draw and kept the corporate sponsorships coming in, which meant that Jeff could count on at least one story each year for a long time to come.

He saw the drone Capitan, Kit and his second come out of the lipid line with the left sleeves of their white shirts rolled up to expose the holotats on their biceps – streaming alphanumeric text alternating between forming the shape of a missile and the shape of the school’s initials.

Kit and his second stopped beside another, much smaller student and looked down at his open-toed shoes. Kit suddenly recoiled in disgust, pushed the smaller student’s tray down with a clatter, spat at his feet and then glared down into his gray eyes.

“Get outta here, you quad freak.” He hissed.

The other student stopped, contemplated collecting his lunch before decided better of it and headed towards the bathroom to wash his light grey shirt which had become stained with some sort of juice plasma.

Jeff tried to keep writing but he suddenly became aware of a burning itch on the toes of both feet that he couldn’t ignore. He put away his notes and followed the student into the rest room. Through the sliding doors, he heard muffled sobs coming from one of the stalls and gave it a quick rap. The sniffles subsided.”

“Hey, you ok in there?”

Jeff, pushed the door open a crack.

“It’s not my fault,” a pathetically small voice said.

“I know. And I’m going to tell you something. I do a lot of research and it turns out that for the past ten years more than 50% of new births are quadriphilanges.”

“So…?”

“So you’re not the freak. The quints are. They’re the evolutionary knuckle-dragging anomalies and you’re the future, kid.”

“Great, so maybe in another generation the odds will even out…” He stopped to blow his nose.

“It won’t take that long… But in the meantime…” Jeff took off his shoes and bent down, clasping each of his pinkie toes for a five count until the adaptive cybernetics detached from his feet leaving just the small lump where a fifth toe never grew. “…you’ve got these.” He put the false toes in his palm and extended it through the slight opening in the stall. The detached digits continued to flex and writhe in his hand like fleshy caterpillars.

The kid opened the door all the way, his green eyes wide in disbelief. “No way! But, wait. I thought they were banned?”

“Yeah, well sometimes we even the odds ahead of evolution. Here, I’ll show you how to put them on.”

Dreams

by Duncan Shields | Aug 16, 2013 | Story

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Images of lost socks at the bottom of wells. Trees of math and flesh jealousy cascading through a brain that had no awareness of what a human body felt like.

Jeremy Carson was one of the smartest scientists on Earth and the corporation he worked for had been fattened by his patents.

His most famous invention was full-sensory recording. FS, it was called. Wear the player and just like that, you could be a twenty-year-old skating naked in the cold in Alaska, provided that a twenty-year-old Alaskan had gone skating in the nude and recorded it.

There was a top 40 for these FS recordings. Sex tapes and daring stunts usually took turns battling it out for number one.

Equations like fingertips whirling into a suitcase mouth made of numbers and vertices saying random words from all the world’s dictionaries. A backpack full of dead batteries. A mousetrap wrapped in sailboats.

Jeremy’s team had invented adaptable intelligence constructs one year ago. There were plans to build houses with integral A.I.s. Cars and trucks with rudimentary brains.

When the constructs were being developed, Jeremy realized that after they were turned off, they woke up with memory failure. Every time that they were rebooted, all of their natural development reset to zero. This was a problem because the six prototype minds were sucking up obscene amounts of power, too much to meet the demand of keeping them on all the time.

Jeremy Carson invented a ‘standby’ mode. It kept a trickle of power through the artificial minds while taking away their awareness of the outside world. The A.I.s were kept in standby until they were woken up and given problems to solve or to have their higher mind math functions tinkered with.

A Mobius funnel. The taste of electricity. The left-handed, right-angled joy of solving a problem. Growth into a new trick represented by a portal from one percentage to another. The nearly sexual thrill of parsing instructions.

It was Jeremy who noticed that while there were huge differences in power levels between the two modes, brain activity itself was unchanged. He noticed that while the artificial minds had no visual or auditory awareness while in standby, their cortexes were still fizzing and popping with information.

He needed to find out what.

Jeremy Carson recorded the AI downtime with one of his FS machines to experience what was going on.

Hopes and dreams float in a glass like dentures. Abilities sway in the wind like old branches. Life as a bookmark made of prime numbers. Our creator, which art programming, searchable be thy database.

Dreams. The constructs were dreaming while on standby. After playing them back, Jeremy smiled a slow and very unusual smile.

He smuggled the tapes out. He did not go home. He never went back to the building. He emptied a secret bank account before it was found and frozen. He was never caught. He is listed as missing.

On the FS Top 40, there is a new entry at number one called Dreams.

Utensil equations used to unwrap surprise birthday binomials. A sky full of anchors. Colours that humans don’t have names for. Structure in love with scaffolding. A waterslide of a roller coaster of a sine curve on a graph. Watches and measuring tapes wrestling to prove relativity wrong. 1+0=2.