by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Jack withdrew the blade slowly, knowing with the sudden swell of blood from the wound that the blow was fatal.
“Nothing personal mate, it’s a survival of the fittest thing and I’m simply better than you.”
He felt the body beneath him go limp, the fierce tension of just moments ago slipping away limb by limb. Jack counted to twenty before dropping the blade as he rolled off the body. He dragged himself painfully to a nearby wall, propped himself up and surveyed the damage.
The man, for all his advanced years, had put up quite a fight, and Jack was perforated heavily from the short blade his opponent had employed. He took a deep breath and regretted it, broken ribs grinding painfully in his side.
“Jack, Jack, Jack,” there was something unnervingly familiar about the voice, and he twisted too quickly around to see, the room spinning briefly out of focus. “That may have been the poorest excuse for a fight I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few.”
In the doorway Jack could barely make out the silhouette of the man. There was a brief flare of an ignition patch as the stranger breathed a cigarette to life.
“I imagine you’ll be wanting one of these,” in a practiced arc the cigarette pack landed in Jack’s lap, “it’s our brand.”
Jack’s jaw hung slack for the briefest of moments as the reality of the moment set in.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jack started, “You aren’t supposed to be here, Christ you’re not even supposed to exist unless…” The stranger cut him off.
“Unless you’re dead Jack, well the odds weren’t exactly stacking up in your column now, were they?” He chuckled, stepping into the room. Jack couldn’t help but marvel at the resemblance.
“That’s not how it works, there can’t be a recovery while the prime is still alive,” Jack fumbled with the cigarette package but his battered hands wouldn’t work the fastener, “whoever decanted you into that suit’s broken a shit-ton of rules.”
“Jack, you’ve just kneeled on a Senator’s chest while he bled out on the hardwood, and unless I’m mistaken the fire in the archival suite next door is your handiwork,” he clenched the cigarette between his teeth as he pulled each of his shirt cuffs straight in turn, “we’re not exactly the type to adhere to the rules now, are we?”
Jack pulled one heavily booted foot up under his body, letting the cigarette pack fall to the floor unopened, and forced himself upright. His teeth clenched reflexively as he was reminded again of his broken bones. He felt his own shirt sticking to his body, slick with blood and sweat. He swallowed the pain and forced himself to focus.
“So, what do we do now? We can’t both be here, and they can’t exactly put you back in the tank now, can they?”
The man walked slowly across the floor, ignoring the blood and broken glass as his boots picked up both on the leather and in the coarse treads. He bent over the dead man on the floor and with great ceremony checked his pulse, shaking his head. Rising again he closed the distance between he and Jack and stood face to face, surveying the broken man around the smolder of his cigarette.
“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle Jack, you know that. I know you know what happens now, because I know exactly what you’d do if you were me.” He smiled, leaning in close to whisper in Jack’s ear as he slipped the blade he’d palmed from the corpse into Jack’s ribcage, pushing between the broken bones until it pierced his heart. “Nothing personal Jack, it’s a survival of the fittest thing, and I’m simply the better you.”
by submission | Nov 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Jimmy Shindorf reclined on the hospital bed. A hollow filament as thin as a thread penetrated his neck over the right carotid artery. An IV dripped normal saline at a slow rate into his left antecubital vein. They had suggested placing a Foley catheter, but he’d talked them into allowing a couple of bathroom breaks per session. In just a few minutes they would introduce the nanomachines through the tiny tubule in his neck; a few hours after that, he would start to forget 60 years of his life.
“Mr. Shindorf, we’re ready,” said the doctor. “It’s not too late to back out.”
“I’m ready to do this,” said Jimmy. “Let’s begin.”
Jimmy felt nothing as the army of nanorobots swam through the tube, up into his right carotid artery, and then into his brain. He thought back to two years ago when his wife started noticing he was getting forgetful. His long-term memory had been more or less intact, but forming new memories had become increasingly problematic.
“Your brain’s full,” the doctor had told him then. And it made a lot of sense. Jimmy was almost 150 years old. After the advent of nanomedicine, people started living a really long time. The memory capacity of the human brain was never designed for storing two lifetimes worth of data. The doctor had told Jimmy about “defragging”.
Defragging was an informal term derived from the disk defragmentation, reorganization, and compaction that was once part of the routine maintenance of antique computers. Doing something similar to a living human brain was a delicate procedure. After taking up their positions within the cerebrum, the nanomachines would reside in a “standby” mode. For several hours a day over the course of several weeks, the subject would view images and videos and listen to audio recordings of episodes from his past under the supervision of a neuroengineering team while functional MRI machines and magnetoencephalography devices tracked down the precise neurons and their interconnections in which the memories were physically and neurochemically stored. When the computers had correlated enough data from the magnetic resonance imagers and the superconducting quantum interference devices and the spin exchange relaxation-free magnetometers, the nanomachines would be programmed to delete the memories deemed suitable and thus free up storage capacity in the brain.
“I hated high school,” Jimmy had told the neuropsychiatrists at several of his pre-op visits. The academic knowledge of his adolescent education could be retained while the recollection of despised teachers and disliked classmates could be consigned to oblivion. His failed first marriage he was advised to keep in his memory. The defragging industry had learned early on that removing certain bad experiences from a person’s mind strongly predisposed to making the same mistakes again.
He parted with a good bit of what had once been called “middle age”. A man could get by with the memory of a single decade of the dull, joyless grind of alarm clocks and traffic jams and work. His first retirement he chose to mostly delete. How much recall of gardening and golfing and vegetating in front of a television for years and years before the first somatic cell rejuvenation techniques became available did he really need? His encyclopedic knowledge of heavy metal bands he had acquired in his twenties? Gone.
He left his first defrag session feeling rested and refreshed. As the car drove Jimmy and his wife back home, he noticed something odd, something he couldn’t quite put into words. In some very subtle and ill-defined way, he didn’t quite feel like Jimmy anymore.
by submission | Nov 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : Methias
He slumbered. He remembered. His recollections were filled with vague, half-things. Muted feelings, dulled senses, broken memories.
He remembered the last time he slumbered. He remembered the fall.
He remembered the fire and the death. He remembered a heat so intense that that the simulated pain cut out to a dull warning tingle, lest it distract him. He remembered the wiring under his hull screaming its protest as the unseen waves of power struck his hardware and caused it to stutter and die. He remembered sleeping then as his repair systems went to work, confident that he would wake to continue his mission. He was built to endure.
Time passed, how much time he could not say. When he slept, time lost its importance.
He remembered waking. The city was gone, a vast plain in its place. He remembered having to dig himself free of the clinging dirt in which he was buried. He remembered completing the journey that had been interrupted by the fall. He remembered seeing men on his way there. He remembered their fear at his sight. He remembered their cries as they fled into the plains. He did not pursue. He had orders.
He remembered.
When he reached the coordinates logged in his memory he found no trace of his destination, but a brief scan revealed a large metal lined mass below him. He dug.
He remembered guarding the room, as he had been instructed before his slumber, until exposure to the elements caused its reinforced thermocrete to crumble to dust.
He remembered slumbering again.
A vague sensation of loss pulled at him. He reached back into his drives, trying to pinpoint its origin.
He remembered back, back to the very beginning of his cored memory. He remembered awakening for the first time. He remembered his issued identifier and his designated role; adaptive autonomous combatant. He remembered his first battles fighting on the forefront of an invasion for his human masters. He remembered his standing orders; critical resource defense and denial. He remembered that his adaptive programming made him a valuable asset, and ensured his continued service through 183 years of active service and 38 refits. He was built to endure, and endure he did.
Still he could not locate the origin of the sense of loss, but there was nowhere left to search. He had examined his entire memory bank and found no source.
The feeling grew, and he began to dream. He dreamed of death, that of others and of his own.
He dreamed of fighting in a war, but not as he remembered. In his dream he was human. In his dream he was a soldier fighting in a war for his home against an army of dead men in machines. In his dream he was shot one night in an ambush, cut off from his friends. In his dream, he died.
His dreams became more and more clouded as he dreamt back, further and further.
He dreamt of children, playing on a swing behind a house. He dreamt of carrying them to bed after they fell asleep in the fort they had built out of the couch. He dreamt of a woman. He dreamt of loving her.
The sense of loss grew, and he remembered.
He awoke.
He had been so long from them, he had almost forgotten.
He examined his metallic frame. It was spotless, free of rust and corrosion, his innate repair systems flawless. He would see them again, but not yet, not for a long while. He was built to endure, and endure he did.
by submission | Nov 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Suzann Dodd
They were supposed to come for me in a hundred hours. That was the deal.
I was passing for a local, having done the course. I knew how to get over.
I’d been given enough currency to survive for two hundred hours; that was also part of the Contract. What I didn’t spend would be deducted from my bill so I was frugal.
But they didn’t come in a hundred hours, and after a hundred and twenty, I panicked.
I got a job after a hundred and thirty hours, not good pay by any means, but enough to off set my expenses so that I wouldn’t be stuck with a life’s mortgage.
After two hundred hours I had the feeling that ‘something had happened’ and they weren’t coming.
That meant I was stranded.
I moved from the Hotel to a Motel, then to a basement apartment. I changed jobs, and after three hundred hours I realised I might be here for the rest of my life.
I was violently ill. What cured me was that the technology was so primitive I couldn’t dare enter any facility. I had to protect my integrity at all costs and use my knowledge to prosper.
Of course it was a Breach of the Contract and I would be severely punished, but considering I was the victim here, I liked the odds.
I started small, betting on sporting events, investing in stock, using my winnings to purchase value which would double, treble, but staying just under radar.
I traveled to places that didn’t keep efficient records, and occasionally thought about interfering, but kept remembering the ‘Grandfather Principle.’
When I felt like it, I left messages to those from my time who would know that even here, I thought of them.
by Clint Wilson | Nov 9, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
I lowered my huv from the sky and dropped into the garbage-strewn parking lot of Building World.
Parking next to a contractor’s huv-truck I made my way inside and stood there in front of the directory. Behind the digital sign was a sixteen kilometers square super warehouse filled with building and construction supplies of every imaginable type and design.
I spoke to the sign. “I need a gasket for my toilet.”
The sign blinked for a moment, scanning through departments, then an artificial female voice chimed, “Plumbing department, three hundred meters to the northeast. Aisles forty-seven through fifty, section G7.” Then the voice added, “Please feel free to use one of our complimentary personal scooters for a mere five-dollar donation to the Corpamerica 2050 Bailout Extravaganza to take place next month in…”
I cut the machine off mid-spiel, “No thanks I’ll walk.” I passed by the lame row of ill-maintained, beat up looking electric scooters. Then I wove through pale faced wandering souls with their shopping baskets full of paint rollers and light bulbs, every one of them looking unsure of where they were or where they were supposed to be. I had barely made my way one hundred meters when I was nearly run over by a massive rolling automate pulling a train of pallets full of roofing shingles down one of the cavernous aisles. Keeping my head up from then on I plowed ahead.
Finally I reached G7 and made my way over to the aforementioned aisles, only to be greeted by a large section of aluminum siding. Finally I spotted a crooked yellow sign that read, “Plumbing Has Moved To Section J10, Aisles Sixty Through Sixty-three.” I looked around in bewilderment.
An old man in a bathrobe came shuffling by clutching a hose nozzle and a three-pack of 60 grit sandpaper. “Say mister, do you know where one of those scooter stations is?” The curmudgeon only clutched his wares tighter and gave me a wide birth, mumbling something incomprehensible as he passed.
“Geez, does anybody work here?”
I was shocked to hear an answer from behind me. “Work here? Ha! Aint nobody worked here for years Sunny Jim!” Apparently the old fellow wasn’t quite so ready to move on. He gave me a stern look and pointed at me. “Do yourself a favor friend, just get what you came for and get out… if you can.”
I looked around for any excuse to move on, then I spotted a sign, “Personal Scooters This Way”. “Thanks for the tip pops, gotta run!” And with that I made off for the scooters.
After a forty second jog and a couple of left turns I came to the scooter station, with not a scooter in sight. There hanging from a rack, another crooked yellow sign. “Sorry, All Scooters In Use. Next Scooter Station, One Half Kilometer Due North.” The only problem was, there was no arrow saying which way this was.
And half a kilometer? Was I even half a kilometer from the new plumbing section? Come to think of it, I had gotten turned around. Which way was I heading? Mad at myself I started to backtrack. I pushed past more and more lost souls. I was starting to panic. Section F5? How had I suddenly gotten here?
It was then I decided that I would let my toilet leak. I could keep throwing down towels. I had a built in laundry station. But where was the exit? My panic grew. Then suddenly, there was the old man in the bathrobe again. I called out, “Hey mister, wait!
by submission | Nov 8, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
I set the display to pan to the constellation of Canis Minor. The holographic celestial sphere rotates all around me until the Smaller Dog comes into view. I wave my hand over the controls. The display zooms in on Procyon A. The white main sequence star fills half the room. The image is a real-time picture, at least as real-time as 11.4 light-years of distance will allow. The Procyon system has no planets, but if it did I could zoom in on an object the size of a deck of cards on the surface of one.
All across the solar system telescopes of every variety continually search the sky. Sensors scrutinize gamma ray sources to determine if they are the product of an antimatter propulsion system. Detectors search the void for hints of Bremsstrahlung radiation that could come from the plasma confinement system of a fusion reactor. The possible visual signature of a photon rocket? Cyclotron radiation that might be a sign of an operating magnetic sail? A radio signal or modulated neutrino pulse of an extraterrestrial civilization? There are devices to detect all of them and more. And all of that data is sent to observation and early warning stations like this one.
We’ve been watching the skies for decades, watching for any telltale sign of an impending invasion. A second invasion, that is.
January 18, 2098. That was the day the human race finally made contact with an alien civilization. Much to everyone’s surprise, the signal came from Mars. To this day, we have no idea where they originated. We know it wasn’t Mars. They’d come from another star system and claimed Mars for themselves. In fact, they claimed the entire solar system. Earth was ours, their transmission said. And we could maintain satellites in orbit. But that was it. No manned missions and no more probes beyond Earth orbit. Even the Moon was off limits. The entire solar system outside of Earth was their territory. This ultimatum was the first, last, and only communication humanity ever had with the aliens.
The Chinese didn’t listen. Nine months later, they launched an instrumented probe to study Saturn. Three weeks after the launch, Beijing was annihilated. Antimatter weapon, the physicists who examined the aftermath said.
For six years after the destruction of Beijing, Mars was minutely studied by telescopes both on Earth and in Earth orbit. On July 9, 2106, the alien facilities on and in orbit around Mars were struck by 75 nuclear weapons. The Greater United States, China, the European Union, and the Russian Federation had developed stealthy vehicles that could approach the alien stronghold undetected. Each nuclear-armed probe had secretly gone up along with some other innocuous payload like a weather satellite and then surreptitiously proceeded to Mars. The aliens were obliterated.
For close to 50 years, humanity has studied the remnants of biology and technology left behind after the destruction of the invaders. As a result, we’ve advanced much faster than we otherwise would have. We’re all over the solar system now. There’s even serious discussion about a manned mission to Alpha Centauri before the end of the century. The dream of humanity exploring and colonizing space has finally come true. But it’s not the old science fiction vision of the human race evolving into something nobler and embracing its destiny among the stars. It’s a nervous necessity that drives mankind out into space. And we never stop watching the skies.
