by Julian Miles | Jan 16, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Telemada Centre is pretty on a New Year evening. The displays in the shop fronts are outshone by the Christmas lights. I watched on live AV as Veleria Diesel turned them on. Seemed right that her fight for the rights of the poor was finally getting recognised.
The transparent escalators are the tourist feature: Dubbed ‘Stairway to Heaven’, they ascend nine storeys from the entrance plaza up to the restaurant tier. People who want to do anything as ordinary as shopping can use the lifts.
I am on it now. The sensation is eerie, provided by some retasked military stealth technology. Ahead of me Haddad is oblivious to his nemesis standing quietly watching the view from three metres behind him. There’s no hurry. He’s going to a very exclusive restaurant with his latest nanodoll. A little harsh as the young lady is actually an undercover Narcotics agent, but the role she has did necessitate selection by her proximity to looking like a porn star.
He’s on the phone to his legal team, who are informing him that his appeal has been rejected and he has twenty-four hours to present himself at any law-enforcement office for last will and demise.
He finishes the call and laughs out loud, commenting loudly to his bodyguards that if they think he’s going to step up for death, they are mistaken. Then he orders them to prepare his airliner and transfer his remaining funds to Grenada. He will leave for the airport after lunch. The exercise of unthinking arrogance is almost artistic in its nonchalance.
We arrive at the top tier and he wanders into the restaurant. I walk over to the bar and order absinthe over sake with a twist of speed, a cocktail colloquially referred to as ‘Emerald Seppuku’. Haddad notices that. He nods to me, the respect of a hard-living man acknowledging conspicuous excess in another. My n-tech reduces the drink to the danger level of water, but he doesn’t know and that’s the idea.
Everybody has n-tech of varying types from the age of six months. The health of the world has improved beyond measure with every medical procedure reduced to micro surgery with a few million surgeons already on board. Just lie down, let the master surgeon guide your n-tech and you’re fixed. Your ID is onboard as well, so the amputational horrors of implanted chip theft are a thing of the past.
A better society. As n-tech can only interface from under three metres, the big-brother worry is removed as well. Utopians are already hailing the new age. Not quite. Dangerous and greedy people still take advantage of society. In a landmark and completely secret agreement, my agency appeared.
Haddad is seated and I have an Emerald Seppuku delivered to him. He sips it appreciatively and gestures me over. I walk over and combine flattery with macho humour. I walk away with his card. I am sitting at the bar when he rises and heads for the toilets as the nephritic doubler instruction resolves. Minutes later the bodyguards get frantic and I am just leaving when the paramedics arrive. Too late: Nbola is always fatal. For some reason all of the n-tech in a person just goes berserk, becoming several million tiny blades. A paralysed, agonising ninety seconds as you are pureed from the inside out.
Nbola is very rare and a cure is being sought. It is also fictional. The more enlightened the society, the more insidious and decisive the means of protecting it need to be. I am a Surgeon-General. Never need me to operate on you.
by submission | Jan 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Kevin Ware
It was only because of the eighty years that the first probe had been studied that the true meaning of the next was clear. The teams of muttering specialists who had travelled to Alberta to examine the wreckage in exhaustive detail had wrung every last shred of information from the charred and flattened hulk.
It was a simple probe. It was not the last of its kind. It had travelled a long way, but only by our standards. It was from outside the solar system, but only a bit. The best expert thought was that some kind of ship had lobbed this one (and presumably others) into the inner solar system to see if any of the planets there had something of interest to take. Technology, life, artifacts?
Listening post after listening post confirmed the path of the compact and unnaturally reflective object doing a gravity-assisted momentum dump around Jupiter. A few million calculations carefully run by a small woman hunched over a cup of cooling coffee quickly determined what several telescope jockeys had already guessed weeks before. This was another probe, seemingly identical to the first, heading inbound for the center of the largest landmass of Earth. It would land just to the east of Lake Baikal, in the Russian Federation, in seven hundred and fourteen days.
After months of intense hotheaded political debate and scattered but intense societal unrest, it was decided by the powerful but ultimately cowardly leaders of this small insignificant marble of a planet that we did not want to be known. The risk was far too great. It would be better to remain small and insignificant and lonely than to have to face the other.
As the probe was still out of visual observation range and passing behind Saturn for a last slingshot braking, hundreds of carefully arrayed nuclear warheads rained down on the shores of Lake Baikal and the diverse wildlife until recently protected there.
Fifty billion miles away on a small Spartan school ship, a young student frowned at her wrap-around panel of telemetry displays as the probe’s cameras focused on a desolate lifeless wasteland, crushing any hopes she had at further funding.
by submission | Jan 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Ray Gregory
I could get any woman in this bar I want, but she’s the one. I mean, what a babe: blond, built, just check out those knockers! Now she’s hitting on me even harder than I’m hitting on her, like neither of us can wait.
We find a corner table. The place is packed, everybody busy with their own chatting and hooking up. So who’ll notice, right? I slide a hand under her skirt, inch my fingers up her warm, silky inner thigh.
She grabs my wrist. “Not here, big boy. Let’s blow this dive.”
“Sure, babe” — I can’t even remember her name. “My car’s right out front.”
Her eyes twinkle. “So’s my van. It’s plenty comfy too.” She drags her tongue across her gleaming teeth, then her full, ripe lips.
Next thing I know, I’m pushing through the crowd, hustling her out of the place. We stumble to her van, groping each other all the way. She yanks open the back door. “Climb in there, big boy.”
I bow, sweep my hand. “Lady’s first.” I mean, why not ogle her fine ass wriggling into that van?
She grins, swats my ass. “Forget the gentleman act. Get in there — and get ready.”
I giggle like the drunken — and excited — fool I am, then climb into the dark interior.
“That’s a good boy,” then she slams the door closed behind me!
“What the…” I spin, grope for the door handle, but there isn’t one. No windows either. I feel around in the darkness. Just the smooth, cold metal door and walls.
“Don’t be afraid.” It’s her voice from a speaker. She sounds weirdly professional now. “We’re still gonna — mate, but under controlled conditions.”
“Mate? Who the hell are you? Let me outta here.” I bang on the metal walls with my fists. It’s like I’m trapped in some black-as-hell echo chamber. Help me, somebody. Anybody?
“Don’t worry. The subjective experience should even be pleasurable. Isn’t pleasure, especially the pleasure of sex, what you care about most?”
“Stupid bitch!” I pound the door. “What the hell kinda freak are you?”
She snickers. “I seem to be smarter, and more human, than you.”
“Let — me — outta — here.”
“Just lie down now and get comfortable, then I’ll — join you.”
I bang even harder. “Let me the fuck outta here!”
“Don’t be such a baby. Didn’t I tell you there’s nothing to fear? What, are you even afraid of yourself?”
I stop banging. “What are you talking about, you crazy bitch?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? I’m you — half of you anyway. I’m your feminine side. You suppressed me years ago. That’s why you’re purely male now, and such an asshole.”
I stumble backward. “What the…”
“Remember the last time your girlfriend, Brenda Olsen, discovered you cheating on her? That was the last straw for Brenda. So one night while you were sleeping, she had a team from Psychotronic Simulations scan your brain.”
“Brenda? She what?”
“Psychotronic Simulations reverse engineered a new and enhanced version of your mind’s feminine side, namely — me. The body I used to lure you into the neurofusion chamber was just a luxury sexbot.”
My jaw drops. Suddenly I’m more scared than drunk.
“You see, Brenda arranged an intervention, or more precisely, an integration. It’ll be a wonderful merger too: you and me, a complete person again, plus monogamous and faithful too. So be a good boy now and lie down for me. It’ll be easier if you just relax, just think about — oh, maybe flowers and butterflies.”
by submission | Jan 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Sarah Crysl Akhtar
They said no pets. I’d felt a little guilty, a little bit not quite truthful, but I hadn’t made a home for it or anything, no tank on the windowsill; just sometimes carried it inside, from the garden, and then took it back out again. If it wanted to be friends with me, I’d thought defensively, nobody said I couldn’t have a friend!
And you don’t think of something, a hamster or a toad, as being the same as you. You might think, my pet’s so smart! But smart for a hamster, of course.
And you don’t think, do you, about what things so small as that want? You don’t ask yourself, does this goldfish really want to go home with me and live in a glass bowl? You’re the only one with a choice about it.
So I was sad, putting the little thing back in the garden for the last time; the last time looking into its little bright eyes that looked back at me with recognition and, I thought, affection. I patted it on its little furry behind and said scoot! and turned away with the wet glimmer of tears in my own eyes.
Little things like that, smarter than you think, can get back inside if they want. You’d notice a cat or a dog of course, but something that small, hops in, creeps in wherever it finds a way, if it wants.
Crept out of something the grownups carried in, once we’d taken off and it was too late to do anything about it. Clever, not to hide in my things. It’s kids they always distrust, that you won’t follow the rules, that you don’t understand how important they are. The adults get only cursory scans, because of course they know everything, don’t they?
We go a lot of places we’re not invited. Big and smart and with all those really high-tech weapons–is a gerbil going to stop us?
They hadn’t liked us coming at all, and even though it was just one research station to start, they actually were smart enough to know that was only the beginning.
I must have had a natural immunity that only got stronger, from picking it up all the time and all. Of course it knew that because I wasn’t dead. And it did seem to like me. Back home, in our own garden, all carbon-based life forms, it found plenty it was able to eat. It was already pregnant or whatever you’d call it, with little things like that, and they’re just like rats, or rabbits, or whatever, they breed really fast.
That natural immunity, turned out it was pretty rare, and the first contact was usually all it took. They weren’t vicious, or anything. I know; after all, I’m sort of like their pet, now.
It was just, they didn’t want us coming back.
by submission | Jan 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Page LePage
My wife is angry. I have no idea what I’ve done.
“DESTRUCTION SEQUENCE INITIATED.”
It’s at times like these that I know my brother Shen was right when he told me I should have married something with more sophisticated logic calibration — or at least a better emotional processor.
“SELF-DETONATION IN 10, 9, 8–”
I grit my teeth together. “Abort auto-destruct.”
Her eyes twinkle at my concession, a miniature light show in progress in her sockets. “REQUEST GRANTED.”
“You know, Delta, I really wish you wouldn’t initiate your emergency protocols at the first sign of conflict.”
She stands there mutely.
I sigh. She’s never been much of a conversationalist. I’d skimped on those features, too, on the initial install, not wanting a companion who’d talk my ear off. I’ve had enough experience hanging out with Shen and his model Gamma with her incessant “did you know” followed by interjections of factoids only tangentially related to the situation at hand. “Boy, honey your skin looks lovely today.” “Did you know that the skin is the largest organ of the human body, while the liver is the largest organ in the human body?” No thank you.
But sometimes, the silence gets to you. If you can call it that. There’s a subtle humming when she’s operative. I thought I’d learn to block it out after a while but no dice. I often ponder switching her off.
“YOU WERE THINKING ABOUT GAMMA AGAIN.”
“No, Honey, I wasn’t,” I say.
“THAT IS A LIE.”
Technically she’s right of course. I was thinking about my Shen’s wife but not in the way she’s implying. “Delta, it’s not like that.”
“YOU WISH YOU HAD PURCHASED THE GAMMA MODEL. YOU CONSIDER ME AN INFERIOR UNIT.”
Again, what she’s saying is true, though taken out of context, blown out of proportion. I wonder what aberrant biorhythms she’s picking up, how she detects my deception. She either has a specialized chip or was initialized to be insecure and skeptical. Either way, it’s highly irritating. I sigh. “It’s late, Delta. Are you coming to bed?”
I hear her internal fan kick on, and the whirring grows louder. She is apparently working through complex processes, working out an algorithm to weigh pros and cons. I turn from her, change quickly into my pajamas, crawl beneath the covers.
“REQUEST GRANTED,” she finally replies, switching off the light and climbing in beside me.
Touch is the one sensation the designers got absolutely correct. She backs into me so I’m holding her. Her skin is soft and warm. I smooth her stray hairs from her face. “Good night, Delta,” I say. As her gentle hum lulls me to sleep, I let my mind wander, make a quick mental note to call Shen tomorrow and see if he and Gamma would like to have dinner.
“YOU’RE THINKING OF HER, AREN’T YOU?”
It’s going to be a long night.
by Matt Thomas | Jan 11, 2012 | Story |
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