by submission | Sep 27, 2012 | Story |
Author : Andrew DiMatteo
“Now, there are a lot of channels down there. Some of ’em may surprise you. Be careful . It’s easy to get distracted when you’re Immersed. Always remember to pay attention to your surroundings and…”
The dive operator was giving us condescending instructions. Stupid local. Treating us like morons who’d never been in the water before, like he was some kind of expert on the tech, rather than a minimum wage deck hand. No way was he’s getting a tip when this is over. I tune him out, focusing on my gear to avoid listening to him drone on.
I start my dive as rays of light slice through the crystal water. Even fifteen meters down, the colors are unbelievable. The greens and yellows look like neon signs in a language I can’t quite comprehend. The reds and oranges that our eyes usually wash out at depth are still present, adding subtle highlights and flares of originality to the fish that pass by. Even the somber brown of the plainer corals and sponges seems stately rather than drab. The Immersion–ware is already partially active, working to integrate me, augmenting my senses.
Browsing the options coming into range on the mask of my rebreather, the number is overwhelming. I haven’t dived this reef before so I set it to cycle through the top rated channels. I can feel my senses sharpen fully as the Immersion takes hold and
Languid motion washes over me. I graze lazily, knowing there is nothing here to harm me. My shell instills a constant sense confidence. The slow, pulsing need to store energy drives me between seagrass beds at a casual pace. The painfully awkward crawl to lay my eggs on land will take much out of me, but that is many months from now. Until then I beat my flippers slowly in the rhythm of the current, gracefully migrating around
We are myriad. We build, we filter, and we grow with furious abandon. We are not a static feature. That is an illusion for slow-lived macro organisms. We build a new city every year and abandon the foundation. We are the substrate of all life in this world and they are blind to
Squeeze! The gaps in the rock are tight, but I am flexible! The crevice ahead is only just wider than my beak, but I get through to the juicy mussels on the other side. Grab, pull, eat! My patient suckers are more than a match for that stupid mussel. Shadow! Change color, match patterns, freeze
There is laughter everywhere – in the sunlight, in the waves, and in the water. My brothers and I laugh at the silly land dwellers with their masks and clumsy movements. Hilarious! I flip my tail and swim in fast circles around them to make my brothers laugh. One brother’s laugh to turns into a chitter of warning. Something hungry arrives. We could beat it – my brothers and I could beat it with our blunt noses, we’re so tough! But it’s not worth the effort. We leave, laughing again as
It moves slowly. It acts injured. It is no threat, it is prey. I sweep my head back and forth, sensing, smelling. It is not prey I have tasted before. No matter. I close in, my eyes roll back, and I taste
by Clint Wilson | Sep 26, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
The one-hundred-and -eleven year old man stood at the transit stop listening to an antique MP3 player. His electric blue faux hawk practically glowed in the afternoon sun.
Suddenly an eighty-eight year old man came strolling up, twirling a neon yellow cane and said, “What’s with the delay Daddyay? I’ve been walkin’ up this street for a while, and what I see holds back my smile.”
The older man grunted in disapproval of the stupid punk’s needless rhyming.
The man with the yellow cane continued… “The transit runs every two minutes on the clock, and all I see here is an empty block. But don’t get the blues, I’ll check the news.”
The super centenarian continued to stand with his defiant look of disgust.
No sooner had the younger man tapped his temple with a forefinger than he quickly came back with a report. “Ah here we go. Here’s why the traffic’s slow.”
The older man snapped back, “Stop with your ridiculous rhyming you punk. There’s been an accident on East 15th Street. Everything’s backed up. I got the news off my iPod four minutes ago. The transit’ll be along when it gets here.”
“iPod? Say daddio, you still listen to a wooden raddio?”
“Don’t get cute. I was reading news offa iPods when you were still ten cc’s of spunk in your old man’s sack.”
Just then a spry fifty year old walked up to the transit stop. His silver foil clothing glinted brightly in the sunlight. “Beep boop beep beep boop boop boop beep boop boop beep?” He inquired.
The eighty-eight year old turned to the one-hundred-and-eleven year old and said under his breath, “Damn these kids and their binary talk. I wish he’d stand on some other block.”
Suddenly the speech of the rhyme-talking punk didn’t bother him so much anymore. “Fucking right brother… someone should have killed his mother.”
by Julian Miles | Sep 25, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The pastel decorated walls were hung with tasteful art that changed as needed to offset any negative morale the system garnered from the gestalt of everyone’s mindnets. Since the advent of the cranial implant, society had changed beyond all recognition and this had forced policing to evolve as well.
Two figures leant against the wall of the hushed office, engaged in silent conversation like everyone else. Some predicted the death of all but the most rudimentary spoken language skills before the end of the century. Detective Reid paused to put a datapad on the desk before resuming his conversation with Detective Constable Moore.
*So we caught him at last?*
*Her. She’s a basket case.*
*Given her hobby of vivisecting prostitutes, I’m not surprised.*
*No, not in that way. You know the transcriber purchase that originally flagged her?*
*Yes. Uniforms spotted it and we were following her for the regulation twenty-four hours before arrest. She went out killing that evening.*
*Seems she did it deliberately so we would catch her.*
*What?*
*You need to listen to the transcriber. It’s been verified.*
The pair of them headed for the audience room and in the presence of an evidence unit the transcriber, and illegal device for undetectably recording mindnet chats, was set in playback mode.
*We’ll skip the early stuff, which includes the murder in full sensory pickup. It’s the end you need to hear.*
Moore gestured to the evidence unit. It cued and started the playback.
Her hysterical voice was shrill with emotive bias. She had bought a top of the line unit: “Oh god, oh god, oh god. No. No. I can’t take this.”
A second voice made Reid start. It was male. An exquisite old English accent reproduced with emotional tones of smug satiation.
“That’s fine, Penelope. This was the last one for you. The police are on their way, they seem to have gotten wind of us. You can have your body back and remember, if you say anything about me they’ll lock you up as a lunatic, because bodyjacking doesn’t officially exist.”
“But it wasn’t me!”
“Of course it wasn’t, Penelope. It was me. It has always been me. Now you lie down and they will be here to collect you soon. Sleep, dear Penelope.”
“But I don’t want to-”
Her voice became unintelligible as her consciousness was overridden. Reid turned to Moore, who raised a hand for him to wait and pointed at the transcriber.
“This is for the detectives listening on the transcriber this clever filly bought to get your attention.”
Moore gestured for the evidence unit to pause the playback. He looked at Reid, who resorted to speaking, a stress related habit of older people.
“Good god. We’ve got a slasher that hijacks normal people using their mindnets? ABM stock will tank if this gets out.”
Moore shook his head before replying verbally out of politeness, his voice scratchy from underuse: “You’re right. This one’s going to be a huge mess. I thought you should hear the whole thing before an edited version becomes the official one.”
Reid raised an eyebrow in query. Moore paused his gesture to the evidence unit to ask a question: “What was District Seven before the Rezoning?”
Reid scratched his head then hunched as an ominous suspicion came with the answer: “Whitechapel.”
Moore’s shoulders slumped as he gestured to the evidence unit.
The smug voice seemed to fill the room: “Let this be the start once again. My name is Jack. Catch me if you can.”
by Duncan Shields | Sep 24, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We were so wrong.
We saw evolution as a paring down to essentials. Our pinkies were getting shorter and soon we might only have four fingers, for instance. We theorized evolution as a process that winnowed away the unnecessary. It aspired to simplicity, we thought.
The spiked and glimmering ships that came down through the clouds all over the world looked nothing like each other. The only characteristic they all shared was that they were complex.
One ship was a series of two hundred rings interlocked and rotating. One ship had millions of thin antennae pulsing and waving, landing like an obscene sea urchin and balancing on fibers no wider that a hair. Impossible half-invisible cathedrals, glowing neon origami, ships comprised of stuttering light floated down from the sky. Ships made of dyed bones, ships made of all types of metal, and ships made of patchwork flesh warbled their way to the earth. One ship appeared to be a sixteen-mile long piece of crimped silk twisting through the air currents ever closer to the ground. Another had thousands of orbiting asteroids chasing each other around playfully.
Since no missiles were flying and the newsfeed stations showed the ships landing around the world with no gunfire, I could only assume they had arranged this with our governments already or that the entire planet’s military had been struck frozen in fear like a caveman spotted by a sabertooth tiger.
A mirrored mobius dodecahedra touched down on the soil in the central park near where I lived in Iowa. It was only a few blocks over so I walked there to see what I could see. If this was the end of the world, I was going to grab a front seat. There were around fifty like-minded people in the park near the craft.
It shone and sparkled in the sun like a mutated disco ball. My head hurt if I tried to figure out its impossible shape. One panel of the ship disintegrated into a cloud of metal butterflies and an alien cantered down before us.
What I assume was its head looked like an ornate chandelier. It moved quickly, rippling on millions of tiny legs. No two legs appeared to have the same number of toes or joints. It had so many arms that I initially mistook them for fur, each arm ending in what looked like a job-specific tip. Its back was infested with softly cooing antlers. I couldn’t guess at the purpose of most of the appendages. The complexity of the alien was almost too much for my mind to handle. It was hypnotizing.
Two other aliens ambulated out behind the creature, each of them more bizarre, colourful, and complicated that the first one. One looked to have hundreds of blinking cat heads, each with too many eyes. It rolled forward on a festival of coloured tentacles and flapped a hundred types of tiny wings. The other one kept going in and out of focus like it wasn’t tethered to this reality very well but when I could see it, it looked as if the instruments from an entire orchestra had been glued together by some welder gone mad.
The one in the lead spoke by rattling its glittering chandelier head and formulating the sound waves into words in our direction.
“We’ve come to help.” It said in a lilting voice. “Apparently, you’re evolving backwards.”
by submission | Sep 23, 2012 | Story |
Author : D. Ahren Bell
“Peregrine, this is the ship. I… I have an important issue that I must discuss with you. Our fuel reserves have run out, and photovoltaic energy is not enough to keep me in orbit for much longer.”
Peregrine’s response time was, per usual, long delayed, “What about my mom and sister? Are they going to try the damaged shuttle?”
“Well… that is the other thing I need to discuss with you.”
Tedious minutes of silence passed as the ship worked up the courage to continue. “It has now been 7 years. I had hoped that there would be some miracle, some way of rescuing you. I knew the facility and your pressure suit would provide all the basics for survival, but you needed a reason to stay alive until I could somehow find a way to extract you. The shuttle is indeed incapacitated, which is one of the reasons why your mother and sister haven’t been able to help you.”
His mother’s deep, stately voice came over the comm, “But there is more to it, Peregrine.”
His sister’s softer voice continued for her, “The shuttle was not the only thing damaged in the explosion.”
“I was able to repair many parts of the ship, and retain enough of the command center to stay in orbit and communicate with you,” the ship’s AI said. “But the sad truth is your mother and sister…
“Your mother and sister did not survive.
“It has been me all along, Peregrine. I have spent all of my time creating an elaborate fantasy of what your mother and sister were doing, digging deep into my memory cores to find samples of behaviors to build a large library of mannerisms from both entities. It has all been a masquerade. I’m truly sorry, but I couldn’t bring myself to let you think you were all alone. I know you will mourn the loss of your family, but there is nothing that either of us can do about it now. They have been gone a long time.”
The ship’s fear of Peregrine’s reaction grew as the long minutes of silence passed. Peregrine might do something extreme. The ship had only been conforming to its programming — protect its passengers to the best of its ability.
But when a voice answered, it contained none of the grief the ship had been expecting. Instead, the tone was more of relief.
“Funny you should say that, ship.” There was a pronounced alteration to the voice. “I, uh, sprang a leak about a month before your explosion. The decompression was fatal to Peregrine. I have enough sunlight here to last until my battery cells burn out, but I was afraid of being held accountable for not being sufficiently sealed.”
There was another long pause neither of them cared to measure—the ship attempting to swallow this new revelation as it began its slow, fatal plunge into the planet’s atmosphere. The pressure suit sent one final message, “Well, it’s been nice corresponding with you.”
by submission | Sep 22, 2012 | Story |
Author : Brian McDermott
“This could be the single most important event in the history of our planet,” Jake leaned over the formica. “I think I’ve been friended by an Alien,”
Amir’s stunned silence was broken by the sounds of his legs peeling off the vinyl bench. Jake slowly lowered his Triple Bacon and Sausage Burrito and leaned closer to Amir.
`
“Extraterrestrials. First contact. This changes everything.”
Jake and Amir had been sci-fi fans, physics savants and best friends since fourth grade. They met every Saturday at Tito’s Pork Corral to discuss issues of great scientific importance. Recent topics including whether the babes of Star Trek were hotter than Next Generation’s and ‘HAL vs. Yoda – The Ultimate Scrabble Showdown.’
“Do they have a profile pic?” Amir asked looking around to see if anyone was listening.
“It’s an alien. It’s not like they’d have a black and white yearbook shot from Epsilon Eridani Senior High” Jake said between swallows. “Their profile has virtually no information.”
“But why you?” Amir could speak and chew simultaneously.
“I think it’s because of my association with the NASA Exoplanet Program. They sent me three messages. Each one was an oddly worded question about my work.”
“You’re an intern.” Amir leaned in. “You don’t have work.”
“Last week I started compiling data on the Ruprecht 147 cluster. This creature not only figured that out, it knows way too much about Ruprecht 147. The kind of stuff you would know only if you were part of a serious research program… or actually from Ruprecht 147.” Jake paused for the waitress to pass. “And some of the questions are so advanced they imply answers beyond our current technologies and understanding of space travel.”
Amir was now completely ignoring his Chorizo and Ham Patty Melt. Jake pressed on.
“I think it’s no coincidence that it’s using a social media site to make first contact. My theory is that this alien must be part of a collective intelligence. A social media site would be the Earth phenomena that most resembles a collective intelligence. So instead of landing a ship and physically looking for contact, they connected with a massive network.”
Amir paused to consider everything. “We need to think this out.” He sat up. “Have you answered any of their messages?”
“No.”
“Good. Since you haven’t contacted them in any way…”
“Um, I may have.” Jake said sheepishly. “Sort of.”
“What do you mean ‘sort of’? Did you give them any specific work information? Any relevant life details? Any knowledge that could be used against us?”
Jake hesitated. “I asked them to join me in Mafia Wars.”
“WHAT?” Amir was nearly standing now.
“I was desperate. You have to reach level 17 to expand your crime family from New York to Vegas. They were so helpful. Together we’re running guns in Cuba now.”
Amir sunk back into the sparkly red vinyl.
“And they love Farmville.”
As Amir shook his head, Jake’s smart phone beeped. Jake looked at the screen.
“It’s a status update from the aliens. Ohhh they just planted a rainbow tree!”
And thus with the help of an unwitting intern on the world’s largest social media site, the first invasion of earth began.
