by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 16, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The soldier sat on the corner of his footlocker in the virtually empty barracks, the barrel of his sidearm pressed against his temple.
A respectful distance away, Major Ramses watched the younger man calmly, speaking in soothing tones with a Southern accent.
“Son, you don’t have to do this. There are people here that can help you, whatever it is you’re feeling…”
The soldier cut him off. “That’s the problem, sir. I don’t feel. There are soldiers in my unit that bleed, that scream, that cry sometimes when people die, but I don’t do any of that. And then there’s this.” He trailed off and raised his left arm into the light. Where the skin had been burned away, metal braided fabric showed through underneath. “I don’t know what the hell I am, but I’m sure as hell not one of you.”
Ramses raised his shoulders in a shrug. “Don’t be so sure,” he chuckled. “Look, son, we’ve been patching you boys up with all kinds of new medical tech. You got shot up pretty bad, and you were out for a while. The docs did the best they could do for you, and look at you. You’ve got a fully functioning arm, no missing pieces. The skin will grow back, or we’ll graft it fresh if it doesn’t. New parts don’t make you any less of a soldier, any less of a man.”
“What’s my name? My tags say Walton, Emmett J., but I don’t remember that. I don’t remember where I came from. If I dug through the skin on my chest, would I find metal there too? I expect I would. I’m not a messed up man, I’m messed up, but I’m no man. Why can’t I even pull the trigger on this thing?”
Emmett pushed the gun hard into the flesh of his scalp, straining with visible effort to pull the trigger, but his trigger finger wouldn’t budge. Gradually he slid the barrel up until it cleared his short cut hair and without hesitation his finger responded, firing off a round into the bunk beside him, the flash burning a path across the top of his skull. He quickly pushed the gun back to the side of his head and tried again to no avail.
“If I was human, I could end this. I don’t know what the hell I am, sir, but if I was human, I could end this right now.”
Again, his slid the barrel up the curve of his scalp until the barrel cleared the top of his skull and squeezed off a second round.
Neither man flinched as he jammed the still hot barrel into his cheek, the flesh singeing beneath the metal.
Major Ramses considered the soldier for a moment, and then spoke almost in a whisper.
“Sicherheit deaktivieren. Sicherheitsautorisierung echo november delta.”
Walton’s German was rusty, and as he traced a line up the side of his face with the barrel of his gun, he worked out ‘Safety’ and ‘Authorization’, and the acronym was easy…
The weapon fired again, the bullet tearing into the soft tissue and stopping cold against his armoured brainpan, the recoil and impact tearing the weapon from his hand.
“I’m sorry son, but even if I let you do it, won’t do you no damn good.” He shook his head in resignation. “We’ll get someone down here to patch up your software. Can’t have you breaking down in a platoon with meat-bags in it, you’ll upset morale something fierce.”
Walton sat startled, hand stinging and head ringing.
“At Ease soldier.” Ramses walked towards the barracks door, pausing only to add “Status-Herunterfahren”.
Behind him, Walton, Emmett J. slumped forward motionless, the haunted look in his eyes frozen in place.
by Patricia Stewart | Aug 15, 2011 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The dilapidated sign above the front door read, “Doctor Hawking’s Tackle and Bait Shop”.
“I don’t know, Anthony,” stated Lamar Gregory of the University of Georgia’s Temporal Physics Department. “Do you really think that’s ‘The’ Stephen Hawking?”
Anthony Toole scratched his head as he studied the Tpadd’s readouts. “According to this, we are at the correct place and time. But personally, I don’t know what to believe anymore. Ever since the library’s records were corrupted by the Metis virus, everything is screwed up. That’s why the government gave us the two trillion dollar grant, so we could travel back in time and get hard copies of the monumental technical papers, and rebuild the database from the ground up, similar to what the Greeks did for the Ancient Library of Alexandria.”
Despite their misgivings, they decided to walk in and introduce themselves. However, when they entered the store, they were practically bowled over by the stench. Fighting the urge to hightail it back to the twenty-third century, they pinched their noses and soldiered on. “Excuse me, sir, are you Doctor Hawking?”
“That’s me,” replied the portly man with a broad smile, minus his left front tooth. “Doctor Hawk King, at your service. What kin I do for you gentlemen?”
Toole consulted his Tpadd and began reading, “We’d like to get copies of your papers on black hole thermodynamics, dark energy, condensed matter physics…”
“Whoa, son. If you’re one of them ‘green people’ collecting paper to save the planet, then say no more. I keep a whole pile in the back for wrappin’ fish. Wait here and I’ll fetch you a box.” King walked into the back room and came out carrying an oil stained cardboard box. The lid, which had the word “papers” written in crayon across the top, was tied tight with crisscrossing twine. He handed the box to Gregory, who nearly collapsed from the weight. King watched Gregory tote the box outside, presumably to throw it into the back of his pickup truck.
That was easy thought Toole, remembering how tough it had been to get Patricia Stewart to hand over copies of her celebrated papers on early space exploration. “No way,” she had said, “unless you also take my collection of flash-fiction stories. They’re way better than those dumb old papers.” Toole read a few, and had his doubts. But after three hours of arguing, he ended up taking both.
“Well, thanks for all your help Doctor Hawking,” said Toole, as his fingers queried the Tpadd for their next destination. “Damn, piece of crap,” he lamented as he repeatedly pounded the reset button. “Excuse me, Doctor Hawking,” he said as they both walked outside, “but my Tpadd appears to be malfunctioning. Is there any chance you know where we might find William Robert Duke, the Nobel Laureate in quantum fluid dynamics?”
King thought about the question a moment, trying to figure out what a Nobel whatchamacallit was. Most likely a high-falutin city word for “moonshine”. Aaaaah, he suddenly realized, these fellas weren’t green people, they’re just lookin’ for hooch. Good ‘ol boys, in other words. “Sure do,” he finally said. “You’ll find him up the road a piece. See that smoke risin’ over yonder. Just head toward that.”
The strangers climbed into their fancy floatin’ car, and silently glided away. Uh oh, thought King. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Don’t sneak up on him, boys, or you’ll be pickin’ buckshot out of your hide. And don’t call him William Robert, he goes by Billy-Bob.”
by submission | Aug 14, 2011 | Story |
Author : Isaac Archer
Be careful. Those were the last words Gully had spoken to him. And as he drifted beyond the point where the shallows ended and the real ocean began, Sam’s greatest regret was that the old man would know he hadn’t listened. Again.
Greed is the pathway to the Depths, Gully often admonished him. Looks like he was right. In the seven years since Gully found him, naked and nameless in the sand, the old man had rarely been wrong. But Sam was a metal diver now. He knew he could find his fortune on the ocean floor, and he knew he could go deeper, and search better, than any man on the island. So when Gully told him that the Eastern divers had abandoned their territory, scared off by a fishplague, Sam got on his raft.
Now he slumped against its mast, too far from home to make it back. He could barely see the wound through which the tiny creature had conveyed its paralytic response to his hubris. He guessed that most victims drowned in minutes. Not him. He made it back to the surface in time to watch eternity coming.
The tide carried him toward the horizon as fear gradually overwhelmed his frustration. In time he heard the maelstrom. He recognized its mythic roar instantly, even as he wondered if any other man had made it here alive.
***
Sam’s next thought was: I am dead. Pure chemical terror had taken his mind through the insane rush of the whirlpool and the inexorable, helpless drowning that followed. When at last the water invaded his lungs, he passed out, and on awakening he found that not breathing came as naturally as breathing had. Relief engulfed him then, but not for long. Judgement was waiting.
The light receded into nothing as he descended. He could move a little now – not enough to stop falling, but enough to face the Depths. As the sky vanished, his surroundings began to glow. Wherever he was, it had stone walls, smooth and curved and somehow lighted. Finally, he came to a spherical chamber with two rectangular gaps in the walls. The larger of the two held jagged rocks and a bloated, decomposing arm, and it spilled orange-red light into the chamber. The other was shimmering, black, and opaque.
Too quickly, there was a blinding flash, and Sam was thrust through the black gate. He collapsed onto – a floor? – and vomited water. His vision returned by the time he summoned the courage to look up.
“Welcome back, Commander.” The speaker was roughly Sam’s size and form, but thinner, with strange, translucent plates for eyes. Stranger still, its body was made of metal, the richest, brightest metal Sam had ever seen, more than he had imagined the world held. Greed and power personified. This must be a demon.
Sam stared at it, slackjawed, and it noticed.
“Memory loss? Curious, as your skinsuit appears undamaged. Hold, I have your chemical backup somewhere…” The demon opened a large locker and began searching through its contents.
“That was a hell of a storm you went into – I mean, got caught in. Of course, we activated the virus because we thought your communicator was down. We are lucky it found you so soon, you could have been out there decades instead of years. It has to evolve if you do not know to dive.”
The demon seized a long, shining tube with a thin spike at one end – a bringer of pain if Sam had ever seen one. It turned toward him.
“Now, hold still.”
by submission | Aug 13, 2011 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
He stared at the body on the ground. He felt like he should be crying, laughing, raging at the universe, something other than just sitting there, but all he could do was sit there and stare. The belt pouch was new – he had never seen it before. Reaching over the corpse, he opened it, pulled out a cigar, a lighter, a flask of whiskey, a grenade. He already had a bad liver, bad lungs, had sworn off drinking and smoking years ago, but it hardly mattered now. He was a dead man, just waiting to die.
It had been a simple plan. His stolen time-belt gave him a big advantage in the stolen antiquities market, and the Mongol battlefield below would yield artifacts worth millions to the right collectors. He didn’t know how they saw him, or why they came after him, but he had had no choice but to fight – the belt had not cooled yet, jumping again would have killed him. Besides, he wasn’t really afraid. A millennium’s worth of technological advantage had overcome his substantial natural cowardice.
He had cut down a few with his beamer before he saw a figure appear behind them, just as in a dozen past skirmishes. Two guns made short work of twenty charging horsemen, and he had just started to swagger over to loot the bodies when he saw it at the edge of the impromptu battlefield. One body that was not that of a Mongol, but of a time traveler. His body.
The Time Patrol forbid it, but when you were out on your own, illegal already, why not? You get attacked, you have no backup, so you become your own. Survive the battle, then jump back in time later, prepared, and help yourself win! It had worked before, and it wasn’t any greater of a risk – no matter how his personal timeline looped, he could still only die once. Besides, the big risk was the initial contact, any later incarnation that had come in to help would know exactly what was happening. He was a little unsure about the continuity of causality, but he was no theorist and it worked!
But now he knew his future, not his past. An ancient blade, an unseen attacker, perhaps a straggler. The horse-amplified cut had come up under his arm, bypassing the armor entirely and cleaving through his armpit into his chest. He had staggered, crawled, writhed before he had bled out. It would have been, would BE agonizing.
He touched the wrapping on his shin, stared at the partly-healed matching wound on the body before him. A gouge sustained finding his overlook was now the measure of the rest of his life. A few days, a week or two at most? Long enough to scab over, not long enough to become skin again. At least he had, or would have, the decency to wear shorts, leave that marker exposed.
He pulled out a pad of paper, began making lists. A 20th century Cuban cigar, a 22nd century Bourbon, a cheap lighter, an incendiary grenade, a belt pouch, his gray hiking shorts. A fight at the Coliseum, Sinatra at the Desert Inn, Lunapalooza 23, the grassy knoll, that place with the strawberries.
The belt pinged, cool enough to jump. He stubbed out the cigar, dropped the empty flask, set the grenade on the body, and pulled the pin. No time to waste on a funeral, he only had a little time left to be living. Time to jump.
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 12, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Geff opened and closed his eyes. The darkness was absolute, so neither state made a difference. He could feel rather than hear the thin air screaming past his projectile encasement, launched as it was from near the edge of the atmosphere at a target halfway around the globe from where he strapped in.
If the engineers had missed one calculation, if the production crew had misaligned one scrap of material.
Now was not the time to think of such things.
Geff gauged the time from the insertion and readied himself for braking and impact, for it was the time to think of those things.
Anyone at the airfield looking at radar would see nothing, his vessel entirely organic. No metal, no electronics, a bernoulli laser guidance system lit the target and optics and thermally activated flaps course corrected on the way down.
It was the highest tech brute force incursion vehicle Geff had ever seen.
As pressure marked a set altitude, explosives deployed flaps and chute panels, slowing the multi mach decent rapidly, Geff feeling the crush of deceleration. Seconds ticked by, then the pressure eased as the panels disintegrated into dust, lost in the late evening cloud cover.
Geff bit into his mouthguard and let his body relax.
The missile struck behind hanger three, puncturing the ground and digging in nearly thirty feet. Inside the vessel, Geff decelerated the length of the capsule itself, the material beneath his feet collapsing into the crumple zone, gradually slowing him to merely a jarring thud as he reached the bottom and stopped.
For a long moment there was silence. Geff flexed. Feeling no broken bones, he relaxed.
“That was the easy part.”
Pushing at the capsule panel in front of him, he set off a series of charges around the outside of the craft, then pushed around until part of the shell broke away, finding himself with a rough access point into a maintenance tunnel. Uncanny precision.
Pulling himself through the opening and finding the tunnel empty he unholstered his Glock and set off along the route he’d been memorizing for weeks.
It took nearly fifteen minutes to reach the fueling tanks buried beneath the hanger floors, by which time he imagined a large contingent of soldiers would have gathered at the hole he created top side. He hoped the hole would have caved in on itself, masking the true nature of the impact.
Up a ladder into a brightly lit hallway. Geff worked his way carefully towards the pilot’s ready rooms without seeing anyone. Inside he secured a helmet and gloves which mated perfectly to his suit. Again, the depth of the intel and the precision of his engineering team was commendable.
Weapon stowed, gloved and helmeted he stepped out onto the hanger floor, walking purposefully towards the shimmering craft that rested on pedestals at its center. He couldn’t tell if he was being observed, as any look away from his target would show uncertainty and invite unwanted attention.
Geff reached the entrance to the craft without any resistance at all.
“This is almost too easy.” The thought troubled him, but he climbed inside, and with a brief struggle deciphering the glyphs and the Cyrillic translations tacked up beside them, he closed the outer door.
Geff moved quickly to the cockpit, studying the control surfaces and the scattered notes of the local engineers. Engrossed as he was he was startled by a voice inside his head.
“You intend to remove me from this place?”
“Yes, I certainly do.”
“Good. I wish to leave. What did you bring to free me?”
Geff stopped fumbling at the controls. This was a warplane he was stealing. Wasn’t it?
“What do you mean, you should be equipped with every weapon we need to blast out of here, that’s kind of the plan.”
Geff could feel a flood of disappointment and resignation in the voice inside his head as it spoke again.
“I suppose that means you’re a prisoner now too.”
by submission | Aug 11, 2011 | Story |
Author : Cesium
Andelie stands atop the Fisher Building, gazing across miles of open air at the Monolith. It is formally the Colonial Administrative Headquarters, but it is always called the Monolith. Its imposing black form towers over the rest of the city. Fisher is the only building that comes close.
The Fisher Building is nominally the future corporate offices of Fisher Insurance, an immensely profitable and perfectly unremarkable corporation of which Andelie is also nominally an employee. It has risen story by story into the sky over the past decade. It is now only weeks from its official opening. Its unofficial opening will come significantly sooner.
Andelie adjusts her goggles, zooms in on the base of the tower. The motorcade is just pulling past lines of rippling flags into the entrance. They are later than she expected, but not behind schedule. The schedule is theirs. Andelie can afford to wait.
A scudding wisp of cloud obscures her sight for a moment. She looks away, touches a finger to her phone. The countdown starts.
Beneath her feet, illicit machinery moves into position. Industrial-grade fabbers complete the final stages of years of preparation. Surplus construction materials left deliberately unrecycled in the basements are covertly loaded onto high-speed lifts.
Careful deceptions and generous bribes have kept the Fisher Building’s true purpose hidden since its inception. The Monolith is well defended against terrorist attacks and armed siege alike. To decapitate the irredeemably corrupt government in an appropriately spectacular fashion requires a more innovative approach.
The clock ticks down to zero.
Down the face of the building, windows lift open and retract. Rail cannons extend, locking into position. The first salvo comprises kinetic and incendiary shells, fabricated from innocuous raw materials. Wind speeds and atmospheric conditions are known; angles and tolerances have been calculated precisely. Andelie watches the guns fire, perfectly synchronized.
The side of the Monolith bursts into plumes of dust and flame. Automatic turrets are already returning fire, but the Fisher Building’s active and passive defenses, which are overengineered for mere earthquakes and storms, adequately shield it. The architects of the Monolith, however, did not anticipate that it might face a skyscraper bristling with hostile guns.
Flying drones approach, but veer away before coming into range. The automated safeguards against colliding with tall structures are hardcoded even into military aircraft. They can be overridden, but it will take time.
The second salvo of explosive rounds shatters the weakened skeleton of the lower floors. The Monolith sways, bleeding acrid smoke, then collapses in on itself with an elegant rapidity. A cloud of dust enfolds its base and blossoms out through the city.
Just like that, it’s over. Time has run out.
The ultimatum to the armed forces, Andelie knows, has already been broadcast. She does not expect significant resistance. The weapon she stands upon should be intimidation enough. “Good work,” she says into her phone. A new age has begun, she thinks.
A stiff breeze ruffles her clothes and exposes the ruined stump of the Monolith. It was the Colonial Administrative Headquarters, but now it is only the grave of the old regime. The Fisher Building’s imposing silver form towers over the rest of the city. No other building comes close.
