by submission | Jun 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Josie Gowler
The fever breaks at five in the morning, suddenly. It’s like the air right after a thunderstorm. I sit up. Much too quickly. The greyish room swims for a few moments and I clutch the sides of the bed. Feet on the floor. The cold creeping up through my soles helps. I have this sensation of deja vu. The sheets are soft under my hands. There’s a nice view of a garden from the window; the sun is just starting to rise on a decent-looking day. God only knows where I am, though.
A stocky bloke in a white coat, mask and goggles comes in. He’s got a round and kindly face but he’s holding a clipboard so it must be serious. “How are you feeling?” he asks.
I can’t decide exactly what I feel like, maybe a mixture of newborn kitten and blast furnace interior. I want to tell him that, but something else is bugging me. “Were you watching me?” I ask.
“Samantha,” he says, ignoring my question. “Louise. Angela.”
I shrug. None of the names mean a thing to me. Scratching at my arm, I glance down and notice an injection hole. “What did you…” I begin.
The world spins again and the next thing is my (or Samantha’s or whoever’s) head is down the toilet. I grimace at the sour taste in my mouth, but at least my brain’s starting to clear now.
I don’t have the energy to make it back to the bedroom.
# # # # #
Midday. Damn. I clamber to my feet. I’m freezing. Fancy dozing off on the bathroom floor. Like I’ve got bugger all else to do. I swig down a glass of water and return to the bedroom. I slide into the chair next to the desk. The front page of the notepad in front of me shows a date – three days ago according to my watch – and a formula.
‘Three days. Confusion/amnesia. Whiff of paranoia’, I write. I know I just need to get some initial thoughts down at this stage before the feeling fades. I’ll refine the text later and merge it with the doc’s views. Then will come toxicology reports, proposals for a wider sample group and lastly the pre-manufacture field testing. The generals want to know what their merchandise is like. I like to think it’s part of their shoot-to-wound policy, but I suspect they just want to skip the regulatory hassle of justifying testing it on someone other than its creator. Three days seems about right to overrun an enemy stronghold. I might have hit on my next first-rater in the maximum inconvenience bio-weapons field.
I’m ravenous. Time to get that coward of a doctor back in to do the blood arrays and run the quarantine tests so I can hit the canteen. I want to catch up with my fellow lab rats: I could do with a gossip. And see whether anyone’s had a disaster this time. Well, it’s not like we’re underpaid for this crap. I smile as I push the call button. There’s probably some poor sod out there on a pittance, being injected with the last virus I made so the enemy’s virologists can test cures. It’s my job to make sure they stay one step behind of my blockbuster drugs.
So that’s it, then. Until next time.
by submission | Jun 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : K. Pittman
In the crypt, the door about to close, she dances. Her bodysuit lined with cpipe and circuits, feet bare on plascrete, steps unpracticed but confident.
She dances, gazing briefly at the helmet on the low shelf beside the windowless crèche, beside the suit’s lined tabi, beside a neatly folded stack of gray utility garments, beside her ring, beside her wife’s ring.
She hadn’t danced at their wedding. There wasn’t time or space there in that floating, golden moment in the bursar’s office. A signature, a brief, lingering kiss, a tap of the chit on the flat screen. An aircab. Lifetimes ago, before broken past.
She hadn’t danced as a child.
Mama was sick, Papa was old, and they had no friends. There were no others, no predecessors, no cousins, no siblings. “You were a gift to us,” her parents would say, at their brief meals between endless rotating shifts, lying past pain and stress and trouble, past thin walls vibrating pointless hate and sick ambition. “You were the best thing that ever happened.” She didn’t dance, but her childhood was relatively untroubled.
She kept to herself, and while a happy child, didn’t dance.
School had no dancing. The other kids danced, though; in their rooms, cam-to-cam and face-to-face, secret dance parties peeped in snips on devs over mealbreak in School’s evening shadowed breezeways, like some old movie everted.
There was no explicit rule against it, but there was no public dancing. There were uniforms and drills, tests and training, mealbreaks, lounge cycles, and a loosely enforced caste system, and compulsory viewing of mendacious school news, full of what she’d later call “mathematically attractive” student anchors unquestioningly and unwittingly lying about nothing and everything, about out- and in-school. The em-ays were about the same, in her nascent estimation, as the snitches, and cowards, and idiots, and quiet creeping killers, which were all the other kids. Not her scene.
She kept to herself, got decent marks, never thought about dancing.
The crypt door is closed now.
Streaks of gray fall across her eyes as she rocks and sways to a music alit from within her, her head, her body – patches of colligated melodies and rhythms swell and she starts as it, she grows as it – shuffles shakes shimmies shudders springs left prances right sways gently into turgid mental winds viscous in unseen swirling colors pulled aloft by time, shapes pushed into forces.
Soon a bell, the sound of a bell, will fill the crypt, followed by bitter cold and sleeping stink, and what she’s been told is a dreamless hibernation until the ship, the carriage of her crypt among millions of others, assumes a safe parking orbit over the terminus of a new world, under the disk and staring eye of a new system sun. Her wife waits for her in a hablab, watching the birth of a Spindle while stealthy probes map the planets and circling dust. The sound of a bell, and she’ll don the tabi, attach the helmet to the suit’s cowl, climb into the creche lined with quilts of acceleration gel, and sleep the sleep of sleeping sleep.
Many long tomorrows from now, she’ll dance with her brilliant love under concatenations of alien constellations, and those tomorrows are tomorrow, but that’s tomorrow.
Tonight ends soon, after a bright tone, and tonight she dances for the first time, seconds against the bell.
by submission | Jun 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Tom Moro
We are the light of life
We are the seeds of salvation
We are the light of life
We are the gateways of creation
We are the light of life
Gene slammed his head against the wall, tears streaming down his small, flushed face. Fear had been pouring through his body for so long that he was crashing into adrenaline exhaustion, shaking, fevered, barely able to move. But he was so close. They wouldn’t win, not now.
The chanting was intensifying as the asteroid neared its destination. In the sightless black, desperately feeling along the wall, the boy was permeated by the deep, dead voices. We are the light of life… The sound had been going on for weeks, so long that his lips unconsciously mouthed the words, his brain too tired to resist. He could not remember sleeping. He could barely remember anything but these endless, dark rooms.
The priests had taken his family to the temple. He could remember that, the confusion of his little sister, his mother’s straight back. They had stayed in the temple, marked as priestesses (whores/slaves) to pay for his father’s sins. The sons though (brothers he had brothers) were taken to the depths, to the rocket chambers. A man with holy hollowed eye sockets had made them kneel and showed them the rockets and told them what an honor this was for the planet, for their family.
They were walking miracles. They would go up into the sky and travel in a great blessed mountain. The mountain would be full of life, seeds and bacteria and humans (blood sacrifice), and it would fall on to a dead world. They would die, crushed and burned, and it would awaken that world for the Great Mother. They were heroes. They would go to Heaven and have ice cream and vids and sex. Miraculous.
They put the heroes in ships and then in repurposed asteroids, and locked them in and played the chanting. We are the seeds of salvation… Gene had sat against a wall for days and peed on himself. There was no food. The boys in the asteroid muttered to each other and lurched around, but slowly, the heroes all grew still. They all began to chant.
Gene liked to read. And the priests might have stuck him in the dark and filled him with chanting, but he still understood things like terraforming and conquest and theocracy and tyranny. Better yet, Gene was a mechanic’s son who liked to read. And they could take away sleep and sight and family, but they couldn’t take away that Gene damn well knew how to stop an engine.
It took him two weeks of crawling and fumbling to understand the vents, to begin to picture how the great engines shoved them through the stars. It took him three more days to find a crippled boy who had a metal walking stick. Another day waiting for that boy to die. And then four to break and break and break everything he could reach.
Two more vents. Two more vents and the engines would automatically shut down to avoid a useless, still-in-space explosion. They would be stranded in orbit until someone fetched them. They would all die, mindlessly chanting, starving. But they wouldn’t die burning on a dead world, sacrificed to spark life in the service of the Great Mother. They would be a failure.
Gene pushed himself up. Two more vents.
by submission | Jun 9, 2012 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
General Mortensen glanced again at the timer on the wall, ticking down the minutes until the door at the other end of this glorified closet would open. Twenty programs he oversaw for DARPA, and this was the only one that really felt weird. The door behind him led to the outside world, the door in front of him to a tiny control room overlooking a small habitat which simulated a space capsule headed for Mars. Separating the two was this airlock and a few billion dollars worth of computers and sensors. Everyone thought it was just a NASA simulator, only a handful knew it was also something else.
The countdown reached zero. Mortensen stepped into the control booth and the sweaty handshake of the idealistic young scientist who had conceived of the project.
“Doctor Robeson, good to see you again.”
“General, welcome back, sorry about the wait but we must characterize every atom for this to work!”
“Yes, I know. So why don’t you just show me what you wanted to show me, so I can go somewhere more hospitable?”
“Of course, General. As you know, this facility has been upgraded to allow us to track the location over time of each and every atom within the boundary. The computers are then supposed to use that information, the basic laws of physics, and a ton of processing power to extrapolate backwards and determine the location of every atom within since the boundary was established.”
“Yes, and it hasn’t been working. Heisenberg and all that.”
“Very good, General, but the problem was mostly just time – we may be dealing with imperfect data, but with enough time and a closed system we can get incredibly accurate!”
“So it’s working now?”
“Yes!!”
Robeson bent over the controls, brought up video on two displays.
“The one on the left is truth – habitat footage from two months ago. The one on the right is the extrapolation. They line up within measurable limits – every word, every twitch exactly as predicted!”
Mortensen stared at the displays, gathering his thoughts. Did the man not realize what he had discovered?
“General, just think – someday we could extrapolate the entire history of the human race. Every big question answered!! This will be the biggest innovation in science EVER!!”
“I see. It really is perfect? I need you to be absolutely sure, willing to bet your life on it.”
“Perfect General, perfect.”
“Can it predict forward? Predict what will happen in this booth in, say, five minutes?”
“It should be able to – I haven’t tried, spoilers and all that, but I can run it for you I suppose!”
The scientist bent over his controls, entered the time differential, and sat back while the computers processed the result. A scant minute later, a video started on the simulation screen. He leaned forward, trying to make sense of what he saw, before turning, panicked, to the General.
Who was now holding a pistol.
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you? Your simulation was just physics and chemistry, and it is perfect. Every twitch, every word, you said. Can’t you see what that means? No soul, no free will. We are here in this room not by choice, but because the laws of physics said we must be. Do you know what will happen if we let that knowledge out of this room? What people will do when they know that nothing they do is their choice or responsibility? Your computer knows. Look!”
Robeson turned back to the screen, in time to see the simulation go suddenly black. A second later, so did everything else.
by submission | Jun 8, 2012 | Story |
Author : Dan Whitley
Magnets’ shot rang true and hammered the Fed tank right in the mantlet. Once the smoke cleared, we could see she’d clocked the damn thing so hard that its front-left hover-tread had failed, digging itself into the dirt under the weight. Pellet-shaped electromagnets and coolant fluid evacuated from the dead left gun barrel. But the right barrel remained intact, standing tall in defiance of our revolution and our freedom, where it would remain until, eons from now, the corrosion of time came to reclaim it.
“Hey, Walsh,” Bauer asked behind me, “How big is a Fed thumper’s crew?”
“Three or four; sometimes the driver and the commander wear the same hat, if you catch my drift.”
“So who’s cleaning this one out?” Deacon asked.
“Well, you did the last one, I think. And Magnets is exempt, naturally. You wanna make use of that grenade you never got to throw, Farmer?”
“To be honest,” Bauer said, “not especially. But I will if you say so.”
“I think we should just leave it,” Kirikov chirped up. “Nothing survives that type of punishment.”
A muffled pounding sound rang behind us in mockery. Two raps on the hatch, followed by a sound like a sack of honest-to-goodness potatoes falling in a heap. Our squad froze. No one wanted to do what had to come next.
I drudged over to the tank husk as its other hover-treads shut off. The whole machine swayed like a boat on calm seas as the failed tread, still drawing power, did its best to continue to function. I leaned on the turret and steadied myself, yanking the hatch open and throwing my rifle and my face over the edge.
Mercy betrayed my aging, too old for war anymore. I stared hard over the rifle sights, right into the wincing, boyish face of a Fed tanker and a large-bore pistol. The handgun, I wagered in those long moments, must’ve been a hand-me-down, an heirloom from a relative that served, as it looked too big to fire flechettes like most Fed weaponry. I looked past the pistol’s angry mouth back to the Fed.
“Look, if you’re gonna shoot me, then fucking shoot me.” The Fed’s voice: hoarse, pained, blunt – and female. “Otherwise, pull me out of this heap.”
I stared another long moment, swore under my breath, slung my rifle, and reached into the tank.
“Walsh, what in the everloving fuck are you doing!” Deacon seethed at me.
I glared back over the edge of the hatch. “Are you gonna give me a fucking hand or are you gonna stand there like a goddamn ape?” I had the Fed by the arm and gave her the yank she needed to help herself from the wreckage. She had kindly holstered the pistol and promptly attached that hand to her ribcage. She sat on the failed tread, now still.
“Cracked ribs?”
“Feels like it,” the Fed replied.
I dug some painkillers out of my pack. She ate them dry and said, “So how do I… I wanna defect; how does that work?”
We all shrugged. “You just do, I guess,” Kirikov said.
“What’s your name?”
“You guys first,” the Fed insisted.
“Chatterbox” Adam Walsh. Edgar “Eggs” Deacon. Margaret “Magnets” Kirikov. “Farmer” Jimmy Bauer.
“Hannah Thompson,” she said. She straightened her cap. “Captain.”
And that was that. One of us.
by Patricia Stewart | Jun 7, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Jennifer surveyed the interior of the sleek two-person starcruiser. “Nice ship, Larry. What did you say you paid for it?”
“One point five on Giarcslist. That’s 50% under market.”
“Wow,” she replied as she added an emphasizing whistle. “What’s the catch?”
“There’s no catch. I’m just an excellent negotiator.”
Larry could feel her laser eyes of doubt boring through his mendacious grin. “Oh, okay,” he relented. “It’s an Arcturian ship. Strictly voice command.”
“But it accepts standard galactic too, right?”
“Well, not at the moment. But when we get it back to Sol, I can get a translator module installed.”
“We’re more than seven thousand light years from home,” Jennifer pointer out. “Are you planning to hire an Arcturian pilot? Because if you are, you can let me off right now. Those reptiles smell awful.”
“Relax, sweetheart,” Larry replied as he pulled an object from his flightsuit’s vest pocket. “It came with a ‘Larousse Arcturian-English Pocket Dictionary’.”
“What’s that? Is that a book? Are you kidding me? A paper book? That’s it; I’m taking a cab home. You tell that salesman to redock this instant.”
“Really, Jennifer, you need to take a sed. Besides, he’s already docked with another customer. Look, just sit down in the co-pilot’s seat. I’ll just warm up with a few simple commands. How hard can it be? That’s my girl. Now, just buckle up, and enjoy the view.”
Jennifer reluctantly engaged her harness, but folded her arms in a stern ‘I’ll do it, but I won’t like it’ posture.
“Look at that,” said Larry pointing out beyond the cockpit’s panoramic forward port. “The Messier 4 Globular Cluster. Four hundred thousand stars. Beautiful, isn’t it. A quick tour, and then straight home. You’ll see; it’ll be fun.” Larry quickly leafed through the dictionary and found the warp commands. The book had seen better days, he conceded, but he couldn’t let Jennifer see him struggling. He slid his index finger down the badly stained page searching for the correct phrase. “Ah, here it is,” he guessed, “warp one. Okay, here we go.”
Swallowing hard, he gave the three word command, “Whöle. Êeesh. Ick¢.” The tiny ship lurched forward at maximum warp, straight ahead into the globular cluster. Larry, who had been standing, was thrown aftward, into the canted bulkhead. Cursing himself for forgetting to activate the inertial dampeners, he clawed himself forward into the pilot’s seat. Jennifer was screaming hysterically. Stars streaked past them like a meteor storm on steroids. In the distance, Larry spotted a stationary dot of light that was getting brighter by the second. Realizing that he only had seconds to avert the collision, he ripped into the dictionary looking for the ‘All Stop” command. Finding it quicker that he could have dreamed, he frantically yelled, “Kähs-Oope¢.”
Larry slammed head first into the viewport, as the ship came to an abrupt stop a mere one hundred thousand kilometers in front of a boiling red giant. “Dammit,” he moaned as he checked his forehead tentatively for blood. Then, turning his attention toward Jennifer, he asked, “Are you alright, Honey?”
In shock, Jennifer stared at the behemoth orb hovering directly in front of the ship. Solar prominences large enough to engulf several dozen Jupiters, danced around the periphery in ultra slow motion. In awe, she exclaimed “Holy shit,” and the tiny ship lurched forward at maximum warp.
