by submission | Nov 18, 2012 | Story |
Author : Phro Metal
A chill autumn breeze blows through the trees lining the old, cracked cement path. Their leaves whisper like the fragmented cries of an artificial intelligence trapped on a dying CPU. Save for the weary pale glow of a single, distant skyscraper light, the midnight sky is blacker than a disconnected monitor’s lifeless stare. Homeless, nearly feral cats wander between the tree trunks, playing dismissively with terrified field mice.
A lone man treads down the path in heavy, wooden geta. His even pace clacks, clacks, clacks rhythmically on the cement. Twin swords rattle quietly with his every step, though he pays them hardly any notice. The beauty of his slow, steady march is marred by the jerking of cybernetics running desperately low on power. He would be a pathetic figure were it not for his quiet, burning gaze.
Not far ahead, a lonely street lamp glows like a once-brilliant firefly slowly dying of radiation poisoning. Drawing closer, a small crack splits across the man’s stoic countenance and relief is writ large in his eyes. A few more steps and he finds himself under the lamp, bathed in its yellow hue. As he tosses his head back to expose his face to its rain of photons, steel glints in his neck and shimmers from his right hand. Bathed in the light, his once-labored breathing slows to a low, monotonous rhythm like the mournful melodies of a Noh play. As the light pours over his body, his guard slips and he finds himself tumbling back through memory.
Twelve hours earlier, the man was not alone. His companions numbered five, all dressed in the somber colors of the warriors who lived under the clouds of eternal night. Charged with a mission to dispel those unchanging shadows, to turn back the onward roll of environmental decay, they had headed into the Dark Realm where none of their kingdom dared venture.
Hour after hour, they had marched silently, their cybernetic eyes and composite legs guiding them over treacherous terrain and through forests of mute horror. The deeper they had journeyed, the tenser they had grown, but neither the shriek of a Darkling nor the howl of a Nightwolf had been heard. They all were springs clamped down tighter than physics should ever allow. Numerous times, snapping branches had brought their swords from their sheaths, but never were there enemies to strike.
And then the attack came. It was silentmore silent than the emptiness of space. And quickquicker than Mercury’s orbit of the Sun. With his companions dead before their heads hit the ground, the now lone warrior let his blade fly. Through steel, flesh, and bone, it cut deep and strong. Like the perfectly-placed steps of a wild cat, the man flew through the Darklings hidden amongst the shadows. When at last there was nothing left to kill, the man lit a tiny candle, said a silent prayer over the deceased and set off yet again.
Ten hours of ceaseless marching had brought him here to the first source of light he’d seen in days. As the light washes over his body, his dark brown eyes begin to glow, turning green as they grow brighter and brighter. After some minutes pass, his eyes are as bright as a full moon. At last, with a few blinks, he lowers his face. After seven deep breaths and a moment’s pause, he takes a step forward and then treads back into the darkness.
by submission | Nov 17, 2012 | Story |
Author : Christina Richard
It happened every Tuesday; we were lined up, yawning and drinking coffee as the wireless network light blinked from beneath our hairlines as we waited for our updates. What HR said when they installed the chip was that human networking technology was minimally invasive, and a huge career enhancer. Which employer, in this ravaged economy, wants to pay for staff development when employees could just upload new information from the business’s network? Information sharing, they said, was the new American way. They said the connection was disabled as soon as working hours were over. That as soon as five o’ clock came, your mind was your own again. But as I stood in line that morning, waiting for the training on new security update to be uploaded, I stared towards the back corner of the sea of cubes, where Billy Johnson used to be.
I looked around to make sure no one was watching me. Lucky that all the twentysomethings I worked with never left their cubes without music feeds plugged into the micro USB inside their ear canal. Me, I thought the little plug was painful; if it had not been a mandatory update, I never would have gotten the hardware installed. I held off on letting HR do it until the ultimatum came; install the update, or good luck finding another legal job out there. I came to work one day and saw nothing but an error screen in front of my eyes. I dropped my coffee and stained my blouse because all I could see around the corners of the angry red message box were the hallways leading to the update chamber.
Now here I was, in line again. The standards for network security were being raised since a hacker in Omaha had programmed a building of Wal-Mart employees to cannibalize each other, right there on the sales floor in the middle of the day. Just imagine the single mothers and old ladies without retirement funds tearing into each other, the smiley face buttons still pinned to their blue vests. It was declared a national tragedy. The new security updates were meant to prevent my coworkers and I from going zombie on each other. The line moved, and I was just a few spaces away from sitting in the leather recliner with the master computer feeding information into my brain.
I wondered what happened to people who refused the updates and quit. I’d never heard of it happening, but there were rumors about employees who got transferred. Billy was transferred, or at least, that was what the HR representative in the sinfully expensive suit told us. They said he was moving on to another government position that was “better suited to his abilities” after he hacked his supervisor’s brain and scored a three day weekend for his department.
I saw Billy’s wife in the supermarket a few days later. She was one of those careful people who examined the skin of each apple before letting it swish into the thin plastic bag. When I asked her how Billy liked his new job, her eyes went dull, like the life was being taken out of them, and the apple she was holding fell to the ground and rolled underneath a bin. Then her head snapped back up, and she smiled vacantly. “He’s doing fine. His new position is really a better fit for him,” she said. When she turned, I saw the wireless network light having a seizure beneath the brownish gray of her pixie cut.
by Clint Wilson | Nov 16, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
This is what I’ve been waiting for my entire adult life. All my work has come to this. From the moment I signed up for theoretical physics as a youth, I was destined to arrive at this day.
Countless alternate universes with a finite number of combinations means one thing and one thing only. It is most certainly mathematically probable that somewhere out there there is an exact copy of this universe, identical in every way, right down to its smallest detail. And that means that somewhere out there there is also an exact copy of me, just as creative, just as smart. Everything I have ever done, he has done. Everything I will ever do, he will do. So obviously since I have concentrated all my efforts into building a device to bridge our two universes, he has done the exact same thing over on his side. And this is good.
My fractal amplifier will indeed begin to open a hole in the froth of space-time. But it will be a funnel, narrowing to a finite point, leaving me unable to peer into that other side. Luckily for me though there is an exact copy of myself who has built the exact same device, and if his machine opens a coinciding funnel in space-time at the exact same frequency in his universe, then the two will touch at their points, and if we are correct, they will help each other open the rest of the way.
I sit in the protective booth and key in the final commands. There is a hum as the giant capacitors begin to take on their full charge. City officials will be banging on my door soon enough as I’m sure the power grid is quickly draining in my direction right now. No worry, the laser array sends a bright flash through the room and just like that, the porthole is suddenly open in the middle of my lab.
It is very much a circular hole about three meters across. It looks like a mirror, as on the other side is an identical laser array set up in front of an identical glass booth. This is when I notice me sitting in there.
Ignoring safety protocol I remove my goggles and step out of the booth, just as does the other me. We walk toward one another silently.
“I knew you’d come,” we say in exact unison.
“Of course you did,” we reply. Then, “It’s the only way this would have ever worked.”
I step up to the hole and place my hands palm forward, as he does the same. But unlike a mirror where one feels cool glass, we feel the touch of each other’s skin. Then we suddenly look up and around. “The hole is starting to close! I knew it wouldn’t last long.” The opening is now only two meters across and shrinking fast. What to do? There is so little time. Then the light comes on in his eyes as we share the same idea. “Hurry!” we say.
We twirl one another through the door, me spinning into his side and he into mine. Then as we let go our hands we crouch and catch one last glimpse of one another as the inter-universal porthole snaps shut.
I stand up and look around, knowing he is doing just the same in my lab. And I know that when I speak aloud, so does he. “Now, let’s see just how identical this place really is.” I smile and go to answer the knocking door.
by submission | Nov 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Hugo swallowed his last protein pill, paid his bill, and left the cafe. As he walked out the door, the rocket thrust from a young lady leaving the parking lot by jetpack blasted him with fire. It was only his quick reflexes that prevented him from being badly burned. As it happened, only his right pant leg was slightly singed. Mildly annoyed, he brushed himself off and proceeded to his flying car.
Hugo switched on the engine of his small, helicopter-like vehicle and began to slowly ascend. The aeromobile’s downdraft turned pebbles, bottle caps, and other assorted debris in the cafe’s parking lot into high-speed projectiles. The cafe’s windows and three parked cars all sustained minor damage. As he gained altitude and began to move forward, he saw the wreckage of another flying car embedded in the wall of a department store. Flames and thick, black smoke poured from the crash site.
After getting home and putting his car in the hangar, Hugo picked up the newsreel the “paper boy” — an antiquated term that for some reason people never abandoned — had thrown on his front lawn. Hugo went into his den and loaded the microfilm into the reader. The words “The Daily Gazette” appeared on the screen. Immediately beneath them appeared “August 3, 2000”. Hugo turned on the radio and after the tubes warmed up, big band music filled the room.
For an hour, Hugo caught up on the latest news. General Atomics was going to make another attempt to launch a manned rocket to the Moon. When GA’s fission rocket blew up shortly after launching last week killing everyone aboard and spreading radioactive debris along the eastern seaboard, there was serious concern they might be discouraged and not try another launch. General Atomics’ stock was up five points on the news they would try again. Should have told my broker to buy a hundred shares of GA last week, Hugo thought.
He scrolled the microfilm to the technology section. He read about an “electronic brain” at the University of Pennsylvania that could perform 5,000 mathematical operations in a single second. And the engineers had somehow crammed all that computing power into a mere 1,000 square feet of floor space. Hugo found this very impressive, although he couldn’t think of any practical use for such a calculating machine.
Hugo skimmed through the remaining sections of the film spool. He perused an item about the President meeting with the Russian Czar to discuss the potential threat posed by the Kaiser. He read that the Brooklyn Dodgers would be playing the Giants next week at Ebbets Field. He saw what sort of jumpsuits fashionable men and women would be wearing this winter.
At last, Hugo came to the letters to the editor section. One amusing missive caught his eye. The writer rambled about “the way we live now”. He claimed the rising incidence of cancer was caused by waste from atomic power plants. The death toll from aeromobile accidents, the letter said, was catastrophic because most people didn’t have the skill and reaction time to safely pilot flying cars. Ray guns, videophones, slidewalks: the author disparaged them all. He even warned that zeppelins filled with flammable hydrogen were “unsafe at any altitude”.
Hugo shut off the microfilm viewer and lit a cigarette. “Why would they publish such anti-humanistic, Luddite claptrap?” he said aloud. Some people will never be satisfied, he thought. Why, I bet that malcontented crank will live to the ripe old age of 50!
by Duncan Shields | Nov 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The sentence was passed. The switch was flipped on the transporter and Caleb’s protests were cut off in mid-scream. The concrete block fused with his head.
The first transporter accident taught us a valuable lesson about the covalency bonds between atoms. We already knew that it was the strongest force in the universe. To disrupt even a few of those bonds released the power and destructive energy of an atomic bomb.
Fear made us put safeguards in place to make sure that no transporters could accidentally force two objects to try to fit into the same space at the same time. Two things the world isn’t short on, though, are crazy people and ways around safeguards.
Jackie Shaugnessy was one such crazy person. She wanted to destroy the television station where her ex-boyfriend worked. The possibility of destroying the entire city or even that side of the world was a bonus to her. She was off-balance with love grief.
She also had a degree in microcircuitry and beam theory. She worked all week to disable the safeguard programming and hardware. She was very good at it. She even changed the spatial projectors. A receiving station wouldn’t be needed. She’d just appear wherever at the co-ordinates she entered.
She would have had several patents to make her rich beyond her dreams if she hadn’t gone through with her little act of terrorism.
On Friday the 9th of December, she set the co-ordinates, stepped on to the pad and pressed her remote control. With tears in her eyes, she disappeared from her apartment on the south side of Brooklyn.
Her molecules flew through space.
And reassembled in the wall of her ex-boyfriend’s office. There was a mild jostling at an atomic level but nothing happened other than that.
Her ex-boyfriend looked up from his morning coffee to see the tips of two shoes, an arm in a pink sweater, most of a breast, and a cascade of hair protruding from his wall.
He dropped his coffee cup and shouted. He screamed louder when he recognized the sweater. When he ran over to the grisly find, he grabbed the hand that was hanging from the wall.
It grabbed him back.
There was no way to undo what she had done. That section of wall with her embedded in it is still in a sub-basement of a government facility. No part of her head is exposed so the only way to communicate with her is by touching her hand. The parts of her that are exposed get older. She can still breathe somehow. She’s kept alive intravenously.
This little accident became the basis for the Shaughnessy punishment.
Caleb Johnson was convicted of crimes against humanity two decades later and sentenced to the Shaughnessy punishment.
He hung limply between the arms of the bailiffs, his head encased in a cube of concrete for the rest of his natural life. He would be fed through an IV and kept alive at the state’s discretion.
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.”
