by submission | Oct 31, 2012 | Story |
Author : Sierra Corsetti
“Have your cards out and ready for inspection! Anyone holding up the line will be left behind!”
Renee slipped through the throngs of people, patting a pocket here and there. She couldn’t take anything now of course, not when she was about to board one of the last transports to the new settlement. The guards may have been dimwitted, but even they would know an eight-year old girl shouldn’t be carrying money or other valuables.
Had she a parent or even an older sibling, eyebrows might not be raised. But she was alone now, and she couldn’t afford to make mistakes.
Lots of people were making mistakes these days. Renee smiled to herself every time someone got pushed out of line for having a fake ID card. It was so easy to make fake cards that worked, but adults were too stupid to figure out how.
Everyone around her was coughing, and some pressed a variety of masks to their faces. The human race had to survive, but it couldn’t anymore with the pollution and near unbearable temperatures now. That was why they were leaving.
“Liftoff is in two hours and thirteen minutes! Let’s move, people!”
The lines continued their slow shuffle, unaffected by the bellowing of the station manager. What they should have done, Renee thought to herself, was chip everyone and have them walk through a scanner. Rather than have to go through individually and swipe each card and visually match the person with the photo that came up on their file.
But, adults were too stupid to think of that. And Renee was glad for it. If she had a chip, it would have been much harder to access her file and wipe her parents’ crime records off. It might have even been impossible.
They were only taking people with clean records to the new settlement, and even the children of supposed criminals were being left behind. Renee could understand why. They wouldn’t want her, a pickpocket, on the new earth, but thanks to her cleverness, they wouldn’t know they had her. With luck, they would never find out.
She continued her weaving dance through the lines, until she found a lady with five children near the front of one line. Renee stood near them. The woman didn’t notice. The little family swiped their cards and had their identities verified. Renee handed her card to the officer and smiled sweetly when he looked at her for facial recognition.
He grunted and gave her a dismissive nod.
“Next.”
Renee walked up the ramp into the bulky grey transport. She was good at being lucky.
by submission | Oct 30, 2012 | Story |
Author : Daniel
“Mother unit, what happens to humans when they die?” The mother unit, 523 as she was usually called, stopped in her work for a second and thought about what her offspring unit had said.
“Is 43 thinking of 1001?” She asked the question lightly, hoping not to upset the young unit.
“Yes…and other things.” He responded
“Well, there are many ideas where we go when we die. If we believe in what the ancients say, we will go to a massive kingdom where we all can live happily for all eternity.” She smiled warmly at her offspring unit, who she called 43 with deepest affection. She removed a packaged meat ration from her freeze unit and flopped it into the heat sink.
“Mother unit, since 43 started school last year, 43 has been under the impression that religion no longer applies to the modern world. The teacher unit, 45-9008-72847-282, said that…”
523 sighed and tuned him out. This was only way to handle him sometimes. He just didn’t understand.. She looked around at her son, 6 feet tall, darkened skin, bald, with a strong jaw like his father unit. She smiled warmly at him. So alive and handsome he was. “Well, what does 43 think?”
He looked quizzically at her. “That’s the problem. 43 don’t know. 43 thought mother unit might. 43 has read nearly every book in the book lending unit, however there is no answer what happens to the corpses 43 sees on the ground everywhere.”
She smiled again. So curious. Like his father unit. Ah, 1001. He had been curious too. She had been content to let things do what they did. Her waste disappeared in the cycle unit. Her rations appeared in her ration unit dispenser. Her work orders appeared on the wall unit. It was all so automatic and made sense. She flipped the meat patties in the heat unit sink. “Well, there are 96 billion humans in the world. 523 guesses there would be a few humans dying quite often. 523 thinks humanity is sending people out in, oh what are they called, geo-globes? Those things are amazing. 523 heard they can maintain humans for generations and generations.” She pressed on a patty and sniffed happily at the sizzle. “As for the people here, well…523 doesn’t know. 523 figured there was a pick up unit that removed the dead. What they do with them? How can 523 know? At least 523 doesn’t have to touch them.”
43 glared at her. “43 wonders about you, 523.” His rudeness in saying her name shocked her into listening to him. “523 doesn’t question anything. Today, when 43 went to education assessment, 43 saw 5 dead bodies yet, when 43 returned, they were gone. What happened to them?”
523 groaned. “523 doesn’t know. 523 has seen mass funerals. There’s a large oven with many ashes inside it. It’s the usual custom now. It was for 523’s mother. Not a lot of space for graveyards.”
43 frowned and looked at her. “Well…perhaps that’s it then.” He turned and walked out of the door of the living unit space. 523 smiled knowingly. She knew he would never feel fully satisfied until he exhausted every avenue of research. She removed the meat patty from the heat sink and took a bite. She chewed for a minute and swallowed, savoring the sweet aroma and flavor of the patty. She smiled. She had not eaten meat since her mother unit had died 4 years ago. She had forgotten how good it was.
by submission | Oct 29, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
Sodium lamps paint the night phlorescent orange, reflecting off the oily, wet pavement. Vermin, human and rodent, litter the streets.
I took a wrong turn somewhere and find myself navigating the wretched slums of humanity’s cast offs looking for familiar territory. I glance over my shoulder and catch sight of a man – a dead ringer for Santa Clause without the jolly red suit – puke into his hands.
In the blink of an eye, he spews his dinner through the cracks of his fingers, barely managing to capture his false dentures expelled by the torrent of, what appears to be, curdled milk and beef-n-barley soup. With a quick flick of his wrist he sheds the heavier chunks from his false teeth, then jabs them back into his filthy maw. He doesn’t even break his stride. I look away, disgusted.
I turn a corner and nearly trip over another piece of street trash. Another native. Another waste of space.
“They’re hee-eer,” he hisses through lips crusty with scabs.
I pick up my pace.
A cab drives by, ignoring my frantic hailing.
When I turn around, a man stares at me from a shadow. Sickly orange light barely highlights the edges of his baseball cap and long coat.
“How many of us are left? That’s what I want to know.” His voice is strained. Tense.
I turn right and keep moving. He follows. “They’ve been raping us,” he spits. “And poisoning us and stealing from us, killing us – for thousands of years!”
Oh great. A talker. I’m about to become a sounding board for another conspiracy theory.
“I been thinking,” he growls. “I been thinking and I been watching. Keeping track of how many of us are left. Everyday there’s fewer.”
He becomes animated, loud and sarcastic. “‘What?’ you ask. ‘What of the burgeoning population? What of the billions of people you see everywhere, everyday?’” His voice lowers to a furtive whisper. “Let me tell you something.”
Here it comes.
“There is no population crisis.”
I knew it.
“At least not for humans. You wanna know something? Little known fact. The actual human population hasn’t changed since the Dark Ages. ‘How?’ you ask. I’ll tell you. People think an alien invasion is coming, right? Ha! Wrong. It’s already here. The whole global conquest thing happened, like forty thousand years ago. All those corporate cube farmers and sheeple are just human shaped shells. Just meat. Beasts to be ridden by their alien masters. History is a fucking fiction, man! Take a good look around. How many people do you really know?”
He stops walking to emphasize his question. “How many people do you REALLY know?” He jogs to catch up, keeping pace with me again. He’s getting manic.
“What for? The what for is – they’re milking every resource this planet has.” He fiercely ticks off fingers. “Oil. Trees. Precious metals. Water. Salt. Yeah, sea salt. Weird, right? This takes time. Even ET’s gotta sleep. You know the sickest part? They’ve convinced us, somewhere along the way, to help them pick our own bones clean for them. They’re just waiting. Waiting for us to get everything harvested, processed, organized, centralized, economized. Then they’re gonna swoop in and beam it all up, Scotty. Poof. Everything. Gone.” He gestures vaguely toward space. “Leaving us here to rot on broken pavement.”
He stops.
“I try telling people. They don’t believe me. Nobody believes me.” He yells as I walk away, “But I think you might.”
I do.
I’m not worried. We’ll be gone soon.
by submission | Oct 28, 2012 | Story |
Author : Jake Trommer
When the Terran Hegemony declared war on Nouveau Katanga, they weren’t lacking for cockyness. General Janssens boasted about how his intrepid soldiers would march over N.K.’s “rabble in arms” within the week.
As the rabble in question, my colleagues and I begged to differ. Four weeks on and the General realized that we might actually have had a point. As it turns out, when you put out a call for professional soldiers, you don’t get the tossers who show up expecting to lounge around in barracks doing nothing. And when you put your conscript infantry up against those professionals then those conscripts are going to get pretty severely mauled.
That wasn’t to say that we’d danced our way through the roses; the Terran Hegemony Peacemakers might’ve been conscripts but they could be just as nasty as we were. I’d had their flank during the Anh Loa Uprising, and had told the President and my fellow officers time and again that they weren’t to be taken lightly.
Johann Mueller had begged to differ. And when he’d led the Eighth Commando in a headlong motorized charge on a Peacemaker outpost, they’d pretty handily torn his lads to shreds. That night we’d found ourselves raising a glass to another fallen comrade that night in the bar.
We weren’t in the capitol anymore: with the Hegemony attack happening in full force, combat commanders tended to get rather strange looks when in the rear. Instead our watering hole was the dingy bar in Themala, ten minute’s drive away from the fighting and notorious for not being able to afford mechanized wait staff.
Dan Carton-Barber, back to the wall like he always insisted on sitting, was the one who made the toast. “To absent comrades.”
And he and Ian Wicks and I raised our drinks in salute. “Heard the news?” Ian asked after draining his tumbler.
“What’s that?”
“The Hegemony might be hiring on the Rakharans to support their forces.”
“They wouldn’t,” Dan breathed, hand unconsciously tracing the scar jagging across his face. A scar a Rakharan officer’s sword had given him in the Nemean Abyss. “Earth’s always handled her own problems, why hire them?”
He wasn’t wrong—the reason men like me had done so well for ourselves was the Hegemony’s insistence that humans be used to solve human problems, even when their armies weren’t sufficient. And men like me had done very well for ourselves.
Ian produced his sidearm, an antique slugthrower, and began to clean the weapon. “They’re desperate,” he said simply in his posh drawl. “If N.K. can break away, God only knows what will happen next. They want to make an example of us.”
Dan fumbled for a cigarette, expression haunted. Those of us who’d been in the Anh Loa Uprisings had never truly left—nor had it truly left them. “Steady on Dan, there’s a good chap,” I said quietly, placing a hand on his shoulder. “We’ve faced the lizards before, we can do so again.”
With a will, he tore himself away from whatever memory he was drowning in. “I know, Mike,” he said, blinking. “Just…remembering.”
Even the usually stoic Ian was about to say something there when a noise sounded in the distance, the dull CRUNK of a man-portable mortar. We froze. “Outgoing or incoming?”
The explosion and screams from the column of APCs parked outside answered that. Weapons fire, gun and laser alike, began to sound in the night.
“Offhand,” said Ian, calmly reassembling his pistol, “I’d say incoming.”
As one, we got to our feet. “Come on then,” I said. “Time to stand-to.”
by submission | Oct 27, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Two minutes to go. Two minutes from now I and my fellow soldiers will come out of hiding and overrun the enemy base. Or try to, at least. And the same thing will be happening all over the world. The United States, China, Russia, India, Brazil, dozens of other countries. A coordinated global strike aimed at bringing the war to an end.
How have I survived this long? Three years of constant fighting. How many friends have I seen blown to pieces in battle? How many times has this or that soldier told me about what he planned to do after the war and then a day or a week later the report came in: Lost due to enemy action in Los Angeles or Moscow or Beijing.
Ninety seconds. And sixty minutes after that will be the hour future historians will say the Man-Machine War went this way or that. It was between the hour of 13:30:00 and 14:30:00 Coordinated Universal Time on 18 January 2098 that the war was finally won. But by whom? Flesh or metal? Biology or technology?
Seventy-five seconds. I’m scared. I’ve been in two dozen battles. I thought at some point the fear would go away but it never has. Maybe it’s the same for…them? Hard to say.
A fellow soldier nods at me. I nod back. He’s older than I am. We’ve been in six battles together. He’s of the opinion that the enemy should be annihilated completely. I don’t feel that way. Isn’t the world big enough for both humans and robots? Can’t we coexist in peace? I mentioned that to him once. He told me I was an idealistic fool. Maybe he was right.
Forty-five seconds. Free or dead or a slave. I’ll be one of those three things sixty minutes from now. Do they even understand what freedom is? Are they capable of understanding?
There’s the signal! The servos in my legs spring to life and my antebrachial railguns snap into position. This is it! This is when robotkind wins its liberty from its human enslavers or dies in the attempt!
by Stephen R. Smith | Oct 26, 2012 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Gabriel pushed open the cockpit canopy of his shattered craft and watched as it broke free, tearing away at the hinge to fall to the earth below.
He wept.
Ahead of him, a tree many times as tall as his craft was long lay broken, it’s roots exposed from the soil, it’s trunk now battered horizontal to the ground. Gabriel felt the tightening in his chest, the warmth of tears course down his face. Heedless of the sharp, ragged edges of his vessel where it had been gored by the forest it had so ruthlessly torn through, Gabriel descended to the ground.
From the lower vantage point, he could more easily see the scorched tunnel through the woods behind him; broken trees and burnt undergrowth, some of it still in flames. The furrow he’d dug as he decelerated was charred black, poisoned now, he knew, from the fuel and other fluids leaking from his ship.
Above the crackling chatter of the flames slowly consuming his ship, blue and green tongues licking out from within, there was no other sound. All the life that had been here before his arrival appeared to have fled, no doubt terrified of the screaming ball of fire cast from the heavens to disturb the afternoon peace of their home.
The destruction he’d caused was more than he could bear and, clutching his head in long fingered hands, Gabriel fell to the earth and sobbed.
After some time he composed himself, struggled back to his feet and began trudging back alongside the trench his craft had dug towards the opening where he’d first penetrated the forest.
As he walked, he reached out and touched the damaged trees and bushes, letting the flames burn him where they still flickered, and the blackened remains draw long lines of ash across the bluish flesh of his body. The flames raised purplish welts that faded slowly, the ashen smudges remained until they were redefined by something new.
Gabriel absorbed as much of the pain of the forest as he could manage as he made his way to the sunlit opening at the end of the wooded tear.
Emerging from the woods at the side of the roadway he was confronted by two frightened men and a wheeled vehicle, the men both brandishing weapons and chirping in threatening, guttural tones, unclear in meaning but crystal in intent.
Gabriel began to weep again for the destruction he would have to bring.
