by submission | Nov 30, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Jopek
A man lies gripping a slowly tumbling boulder of ice and stares into the distance of space.
His broken femur pokes sharply into the material of his white skinsuit threatening to rupture it. His foot and leg are numb, his boot full of thickening blood. Here, deep in the planetary rings, the light is weak and the shifting ice unnerves him. In his concussed state waves of vertigo sweep over him, making orientation painful.
His spaceship will be crossing the planet’s terminus soon, allowing him perhaps one more chance at rendezvousing with it. An explosion has ripped the jetpack from his back and shredded the sample bags he was towing. Now he can only improvise a method of propulsion by cannibalizing his remaining suit pressure.
He’d been trailing Sharon back to the ship when the explosion flung them apart. She had nearly reached the airlock. Twice already he has glimpsed her body for scant seconds before she is eclipsed by the drifting ice fragments.
He can make one last effort to try and reach the ship when it comes about its orbit again, although he has no idea how badly damaged it is. He sights the blue corona of the ship’s tail flare and tracks it unsteadily.
Her body appears then in his peripheral vision, emerging from the ice field, floating amidst mangled metal and accretion stones. As he gapes, suddenly a pocket opens, a random confluence of space with her at its center. The scarlet bloom splashed across her torso is punctuated by the bright yellow lumishaft protruding obscenely from her chest. The lumishaft has activated upon impact and splays morose yellow light in all directions.
He finds the ship again, now arcing towards its closest approach. Through blurred eyes he watches her broken body drifting closer. He feels like he is falling, falling, falling, but the ship is nearly there. Nearly. The ship is coming for him — she is coming for him. The watery reflection of red and yellow in his eyes is joined by the shocking blue of plasma thrusters.
A man lies gripping a slowly tumbling boulder of ice and stares into the distance of space.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Nov 29, 2011 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
The music was deafening. New wave fusion jazz. Whatever the fuck that is. I had an “appointment” with Vinnie “The Fag” Scarpacci. Most men would have been pissed to have a moniker like that. Some would kill you for even whispering it. Not Vinnie. He loved it. He embraced it. He flaunted it by hanging out in shitholes like this. Places that would make the most prissy nancy boy cringe. Weird thing is, the Fag wasn’t even gay. I didn’t care, I was here to collect and one way or another, Vinnie was going to pay.
I found him in a corner booth playing his part to the hilt surrounded by fawning tinkerboys heavily rouged with three inch lashes. “You, you and you, MOVE,” I ordered, jabbing a calloused finger in their simpering faces. They vamoosed like rainbow leaves in a hurricane.
“No need to be rude, Max. Please have a seat. Can I get you something?” He raised a deco style martini glass to his lipsticked mouth. It was filled with a light green fluid. An appletini most likely. The guy sure played it to the hilt.
“Cut the act Vinnie, you know why I am here,” I pulled the lapel of my duster aside to show him the Desert Eagle I carried in a shoulder rig. Even for a guy my size it was hard to conceal that cannon.
All emotion dropped from his eyes. I saw the look that made lesser men shit themselves in fear. I had forgotten about Vinnie’s other nickname, the “Belt Butcher”. He earned that title when he was jumping claims in the asteroids. “Listen you little shit. I can have you chopped into little pieces and fed to your fucking family right before I have molten lead poured into their eyes and ears. Capisci?
He couldn’t scare me. I told him so. He talked pretty tough for a faggot. I told him that too. He didn’t know I had another piece under the table aimed at his fat gut. This I also told him.
“There is something you don’t know, you filthy Russian pig fucker.” He pulled up his sleeve to reveal the phone tattooed on his forearm.
“What are you going to do, call for a shining night to come to your rescue, Princess? Call in your goons to kill me,” I sneered
“I wouldn’t kill you, Max. I like you to much.” He jabbed a button on his hairy arm with a perfectly manicured finger.
The last thing I saw before I blacked out from excruciating pain was a smile that would have made a shark piss itself.
“Max? Wakey Wakey.” Vinie’s words sounded like they were coming from within my skull.
“Feeling Okay?”
No, I wasn’t. I couldn’t get my eyes to focus. From one eye I saw Vinnie’s bloated face, from the other I saw the door of a strange room. I couldn’t get them to focus on the same spot. I felt like I was cross eyed and under water.
“How do you like your new home?”
New home? What was he talking about? I tried to speak but couldn’t. “I’m paralyzed,” I thought.
“Want to see?”
Vinnie held up a mirror. All I could see were two eyes connected to a naked brain suspended in… “Oh shit.”
“See Max, I told you I wouldn’t kill you. You’ll live a long, long time,” he laughed as he walked away. “Oh, there is one other thing,” he said turning back. “Your mother, your father and your sister? They quite enjoyed their meal before… Well, you know.”
by featured writer | Nov 28, 2011 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Featured Writer
The eighteen foot tall robot stared down at the park worker in pleading disbelief.
Sam jabbed the giant’s leg with his broom, “Come on, off you go. You can’t stay here anymore!”
“But I don’t comprehend this request. My place is here in the park.”
Sam felt a lump rise in his throat. He didn’t like sending the big loveable lug out on his own into the great big world either, but he had no choice. “Okay that’s enough of that. You have to go now Pauly. I mean it, scoot!”
Reluctantly the massive animatron turned and shuffled his way out through the park gates. He turned back one last time and uttered one more useless plea, “Please Sam, you know my place is here.”
Sam stood wordlessly, leaning on his broom, tears welling in his eyes. He did not answer, but instead thought to himself, stupid fuckers, I can’t believe they won their case. That poor bastard was designed to entertain the folks here, programmed to love it as a matter of fact. His place isn’t out there with them.
But what could he do? The SAF (Society for Android Freedom) had in fact won their landmark case and, as the law dictated, were now able to enact Initiative 09. All animatrons, regardless of job or station, were to be immediately ‘set free’ to make their way in the world as each and every one of them saw fit.
Two hours later found the giant in a heavily populated urban district. He saw other animatrons wandering free but fearful through the streets. Some begged for money, work or lodgings, to which human passers-by were not always kind in response.
“You had your day in court metal mouth!”
Or pathetic poetic attempts like, “I hope you run out of power in an hour and rust away in the rain, silicone brain!” (Followed by drunken high fives from rambunctious pals.)
To the inexcusably insulting, “Oh what, you didn’t you think this through? Serves you right rotard!”
But what the majority of these humans didn’t seem to understand was that most droids, including Paul himself, had not wished for anything but to continue on with their well-thought-out preplanned lives. There was security there, purpose. Now a few radical humans with their far-fetched crazy ideas of enslavement and entrapment had ruined it for everyone.
Paul stopped suddenly in his size 38-triple-H tracks. There at the entrance to the alleyway stood a group of rough looking men. The largest of them, still far less than half of the android’s height, addressed him by his full name. “Hey Paul Bunyan. Where’s your big blue ox?”
Happy to find someone that knew him from his amusement park role Paul answered gladly. “Oh Babe was only holographic and never an actual animatron. Otherwise you would see him roaming these streets as well. Are you a fan of our stories? I’m afraid I don’t recognize you from the park.”
The tough grinned and looked from side to side at his henchmen, then back to the droid. “Relax fella, I was just making polite conversation. What I really want to do is… uh… help you get your new life together.”
“Really?” Paul asked in pleasant surprise. “That is quite welcome.”
“Yeah of course.” The man grinned again toward his cohorts then rose up on his toes and asked, “Say pal, you ever done any debt collecting before?”
by submission | Nov 27, 2011 | Story |
Author : M. J. Hall
We wait.
We the shadow-women, the marginalized, the dispossessed. We wait, for our time of power is near.
Long ago, the elite decided that natural means of reproduction were far too messy for those of great wealth and status. As the clone banks churned out replacement generations, the ruling class forswore the pleasures of the flesh for more aesthetic pursuits. The conservative leaders built their clean cities on the surface, in the light; while we, the primitive and carnal, we were banished to the secret places underground.
But gradually, creeping through the shadows into the undertunnels of the city, the influential found us, the pleasure-women. We had hidden, we members of the oldest profession, when the Conserves turned society against us. But having turned away from prurient pursuits, it was those same Conserves who then sought us out, found our warrens in the tunnels, richly draped in silks and velvets. Our sensual dens, they found.
From us they learned passion and ecstasy anew, all the gratification that flesh can give, all the desire that had been purged from the sterile Aboveworld. The libidinous, lascivious, satyric realm was ours to teach, and they learned.
And we learned, too . . . .
We learned their secrets. All their whispers in the night, their murmurs in sleep. We listened . . . .
The leaders, the rulers in this capitol city, whispering to us in the darkest hours underground. A quiet susurration, barely heard above the rustle of silk, all the humdrum details of a bureaucrat’s routine. They murmured to us, we the illiterate and disenfranchised. What would we know of leadership, of intergalactic policy? How could we understand all the secrets of empire and polity?
They came in our beds. They spilled in our sheets, whispered in our ears, all the secrets of this capitol planet. We learned . . . .
And then we met. We, the shadow-women, relegated to the dark places underground. We met, and spoke, and shared our knowledge.
Our mothers—mothers brewed an herbal infusion, a sweet tea, to ease the clientele into sleep. But somewhere along the generations of pleasure-women, we realized another quality of the tea. Words whispered as the client sleeps become impulses, yearnings, desires upon waking.
We learned. We spoke. And now, we move . . . .
There are many of us, secreted away in the gloom. But to each one of us, so many of you come for comfort, for pleasure, for easement. So many, many elites in a city of rulers, on this imperial planet that rules the entire ‘verse. So many, many ears into which we whisper suggestions that become urges, inexorable compulsions upon waking.
We, the shadow-women, the pleasure-givers. We meet, we decide, we direct. From the deepest depths, from the shadows, we rule.
A vote? Tomorrow? Yes, but for now, drink. Relax. Sleep. Let me whisper in your ear . . . .
We wait. You snore. We whisper . . . and we wait.
by submission | Nov 26, 2011 | Story |
Author : J. S. Kachelries
This will be my greatest invention! Of course, my invention bar is not set very high. The phaser thing sort of worked. It was able to set the living room curtains on fire, but I got second degree burns on the palm of my hand when the damn thing overloaded. My transparent aluminum project turned my wife’s collection of frying pans into a melted lump of not-at-all-transparent scrap metal. All I have left of the “holodeck” experiment is a black den with a yellow grid pattern, and about $10,000 of worthless projection equipment. But this will be different. This will be the world’s first working transporter. To paraphrase Dr. McCoy, I will be rich beyond the dreams of Avarice.
I’ve been working on the transporter secretly in the garage, because I’ve been trying to keep a low profile ever since my wife walked into the force field that I had set up in the bathroom. She was really hot, literally. But, she eventually forgave me for that one too. After all, she’s a psychologist, and they want to see the good in people. Besides, I have a flawless back-up plan. I turn on the ol’ charm, and she melts like a Changling at an orgy. Okay, I know what you’re thinking, “This guy is obsessed with Star Trek.” Nothing could be further from the truth! Believe me; I have it completely under control.
Anyway, back to my newest invention. I only had a four hour window to complete my test before my wife and Wesley returned from the movies. It took me three hours to collect the final components from the TV, microwave, vacuum cleaner, and other various household appliances, and assemble them into the transporter and receiver platforms. Now, all I needed was our pet cat. “Heeeyyy, Spot, it’s time for you to boldly go where no feline has gone before.”
With Spot happily munching on the fillet of salmon that I had placed on the transporter pad, I booted up the laptop and initiated the transport command. I’m not exactly sure what happened next. I know the lights went out, there were a series of relatively “minor” explosions, the garage windows blew out, and there were fireworks bursting from the transporter pad. Spot yowled like I had shut the car door on his tail, again. When I got my vision back, Spot was gone. I guess he transported somewhere, but he wasn’t on the receiver pad, or anywhere in the garage. Oh, this is not logical; the uneaten salmon remained smoldering on the transporter pad. Why hadn’t it transported along with Spot? Looks like I have a mystery afoot. That’s when I heard my wife’s car pulling up the driveway. I had been hoping for more time. Oh well, I opened the garage door manually to let her in.
“Scotty, do I smell smoke? You promised me no more inventions. Is that part of the stereo?”
Hmm. I wonder how Jean-Luc would handle this. I looked into her dark black eyes and said, “Hi, honey. How was the movie? Uh, by the way, you didn’t happen to see Spot anywhere when you drove up?” Her scowl made her look like an angry Romulan, but I guess that’s being redundant. I could hear the wail of fire engine sirens, again. This might be harder than getting an interest free loan from a Ferengi. Okay, it’s time to engage the ol’ charm. “Imzadi, is that a new outfit you’re wearing? Wow, you really look great. Have you lost weight?”
by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 25, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Major retrieved the chewed tennis ball Max had laid at his feet and loaded it back in the meter long, ice-cream scoop of a throwing arm he was using to launch it. Max bowed and jumped, eyeing the ball with keen interest as Major cocked the stick behind one shoulder, and stepping into the throw launched the ball a hundred meters or more down the field.
Max took off, tracking the ball as he raced, legs a blur of motion until he leapt, coordinating perfectly the point at which gravity brought the ball close enough to the earth for him to intercept it, landing gracefully and decelerating in an easy fluid motion. Giving the ball a few idle chews, he loped back to where Major waited.
“Good boy Max,” the dog having dropped the ball again at Major’s feet, he now sat dutifully while Major scratched behind his ears. His tongue lolled, he panted and watched for signals as to what to do next. All of this he’d been designed to do, the scratching didn’t give him actual feelings of joy or pleasure, but he’d been programmed with the appropriate feedback responses so that, if Major hadn’t been the one to build him, the man petting him wouldn’t have known any different.
“Good boy Max,” Major kneeled down and looked the faux Shepherd in the eyes, cradling the big dog’s head in his liver spotted hands as he scratched behind both ears. “Maggie would have loved you to bits. Such a pity she passed before you were ready.” Major stared past Max watching a plane paint fluffy white lines across the sky far off in the distance. “I wish she was still here Max, I miss her, you know?” He brought his attention back to the dog, still panting, still waiting.
Major smiled. Max would never leave him, he’d never run away, never grow old and die. He’d play ball, go for walks and lay at Major’s feet with him forever. He’d built him just so.
The wind began to pick up, and Major pulled his jacket collar up against the cold.
“Come on boy,” he patted his hip as he turned to walk back across the property to the house. If they hurried they could get back before the weather turned and the sun dipped below the horizon. Max dropped obediently in step beside Major, loping easily through the grass as they made their way back to the forest trail.
As they reached the edge of the woods, Major slowed, and Max waited patiently for him, walking ahead and then doubling back to the slower moving older man.
“Not feeling too well I’m afraid Max,” he slurred, his left foot dragging slightly in the dirt of the trail. He reached out for a tree to steady himself, missing by a wide margin and fell in a heap on the ground, a thick layer of pine needles cushioning his fall only slightly.
Max turned and padded back, then lay down to where he could make eye contact with his master.
“Max,” Major wheezed out the words, “Good boy Max. Don’t leave me…”
Max lay still, his tongue lolled, he panted and watched for signals as to what to do next.
