by submission | Aug 4, 2011 | Story |
Author : Michael Iverson
He was still seizing when the light hit his eyes. His head was pounding as he squeezed them shut, but it still tore into him, bright as the sun. His body was convulsing and his arms were trembling as he tried to hold onto himself. He wanted to lift his hands up and shield his eyes, but he was afraid he’d lose his grip and fall off into nothing. All he could see was white, impossible white, the light taking over his entire body, creeping into his soul. His headache faded, the shaking stopped, and he opened his eyes.
Walter was at a dinner party. He was naked. “Do you want some clothes?” An older gentleman with large eyebrows placed his hand on his shoulder. “You don’t have to wear anything, but most people prefer it.” The man smiled.
“This is just like life,” Walter said. He looked around at all the people talking, laughing, and dressed for all occasions.
“It’s a little better, I think.” The old man breathed deeply. “Heaven. Like life, but slightly better. How about those clothes?”
Walter followed him to the closet, and accepted the faded jeans with a nod. He put them on and found them just a little big. “Thank you. What’s your name?”
The old man held out a hand, which Walter accepted. “Frank Cohen, it’s a pleasure. Yourself?”
“Walter,” he said.
“So how’d it happen, son?”
Walter looked back at the old man.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking. Some newcomers can be sensitive about it, but after you’ve been here a while it’s just like talking about the weather.”
Walter glanced around. It was a beautiful house, with a light sage carpet and eggshell walls. There were probably fifty people here. He turned back to Frank. “It’s complicated. It took years.”
Frank frowned and nodded his head. “Cancer, my boy? It got my wife, Cherry, too. A few years after me. You’ll meet Cherry, she’s around here somewhere.”
Walter nodded, and Frank went on. “I had a heart attack in the garage, about a week after Erin’s graduation. Erin’s my granddaughter, of course. Must have been ten years ago, now. Maybe longer. A lot of us lose track.”
Walter glanced at the clock and smiled. “I can understand that. How long have I been here?”
Frank raised his eyebrows. “Five minutes, probably. Not much longer.” He laughed, “You’ve got a long time ahead of you. Would you like to meet Cherry?”
“I’d love to meet Cherry, Frank, but I think it’s going to have to wait until later.”
“Of course, my boy. Just wait right there, I’ll grab you a beer.”
Walter looked at the clock. “No, Frank. I’m sorry. It’s just about five minutes. I’ll be back here later. I’ll look for you.”
The ground erupted into light and collapsed beneath him. He hugged his knees to his chest and shut his eyes. The pounding in his head returned, he felt it throbbing against his eyes. He thought about Frank, and then he was sitting down.
He was in the laboratory. His assistant was holding his wrist, counting his pulse. He took a deep breath and smiled at her. She cleared her throat. “Walter? You were out for five minutes. Did it work? How was it?”
He let his head fall back against the machine. “It worked. Just how we imagined it.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe a little better.”
by submission | Aug 3, 2011 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson
“We’re sorry but there’s no other way Mr. Dunbar. It’s a very rare and inoperable cancer. We absolutely must replicate you if you’re to see your children grow and have children of their own one day.”
“Yes, yes, I know. You can stop saying it. I just hate the thought of this whole duplicating business. Frankly, it scares the daylights out of me.”
“Even more than dying of cancer?”
I pause and think for a moment and then answer earnestly. “…Almost.”
But in the end I have no choice. The nonstop tears from my wife and children are enough, plus I am fortunate enough to have the means to afford such a procedure, so I finally give my reluctant consent.
For more than a week I lie unconscious in the facility while swirling tanks filled with complex organic cocktails provide the necessary building materials for my replication. And as my old body lies unmoving in the input chamber my new disease-free one takes form in the incubator. But even as my nearly completed identical twin lies motionless under glass in the next room I am still myself. The very last thing will be the transference of my consciousness, my essence, my entire being.
Finally I awake in my new body. Aside from being very tired I feel no different. But then quickly a sensation creeps into my gut. My conscience suddenly weighs heavily on me as I think of my old self. I fully understand the consequences. I am in every sense still myself, yet I know that I am a replica, now free of the fatal disease that once grew inside of me. But what of my old diseased body? …You see, that’s the problem with replication, it replaces the sick, but it doesn’t “erase” them. Even though my essence has been transferred away my old body also retains the feeling of self. And thanks to recent legislative changes, it must now wait out its remaining days here at the facility, no longer me but… my imprisoned dying shadow.
I open my eyes and look up through the glass bubble at… myself. There I am but… different. Of course, how silly of me, after forty plus years I am quite familiar with the mirror image of myself. This fellow is backwards. His hair is parted on the wrong side. But I also notice that he is sad. Sad because he knows he has to live out his days here? I can’t say I blame him.
But then another thought creeps in. Wait a minute. His left-hand hair-part isn’t the only thing that’s different. This fellow looks fuller in the face than me, and his color is better than I have seen my own in quite awhile.
Before I can process what I am finally beginning to realize, I start to bang on the chamber’s bubble lid with both fists. The face of Hutchinson my cancer doctor appears solemnly, and quickly ushers my other self away.
Finally they have let me out… cruel heartless bastards. I can’t believe they haven’t kept me from the hospital’s observation level at a time when…
Wracked with painful sobs I look from my wheelchair, to the facility’s main entrance eight stories below, where my loving wife and children are happily and eagerly escorting my new healthy body toward the parking lot.
by Patricia Stewart | Aug 2, 2011 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The veins on the security chief’s cleanly shaven skull visibly throbbed in rhythm with his pounding heart. “Captain,” he protested, “our top priority should be to defend the station’s vital sections, not the habitat ring. If the aliens get into engineering, and gain control of life support, we’ll have no choice but to surrender.”
“If you haven’t noticed, Chief,” replied the captain, “they don’t appear to be interested in anything other than killing the crew and their families. And if we can’t figure out how to stop them in the next few hours, there won’t be anybody left alive to surrender. Now, report on what you’ve learned since the alpha shift briefing.”
Apparently, no amount of logic would change the captain’s mind, so he decided to move on. “According to the video feeds, the aliens are about the size of large dogs. We estimate that there are twenty of them on board. They carry “hand” weapons, but prefer to kill using a stinger-like projection on their heads. They are as fast as the devil. They can cover a hundred meters in a few seconds, and change direction quicker than you can aim your 3P. I don’t even know if a phaser shot will be effective, because we haven’t hit one yet. We need to capture or kill one of them, so we can figure out where they’re vulnerable, assuming they even have a weakness.”
“Do you have a plan to accomplish that, Chief?”
“Aye, sir. But, admittedly, not a very good one. I’m going to use myself as bait, and when the little bugger comes in to sting me, I’m going to shove a six inch hunting knife up its ass.” He reached behind his back and unsheathed an antique twenty-first century serrated steel hunting knife.
“That sounds like a suicide mission, Chief, not a plan,” remarked the captain.
“If we don’t get some intel, sir, we’re all dead. Just make sure I don’t die in vain.” Without waiting to be dismissed, the chief turned and headed toward the auxiliary access corridor.
“Hold fast, Mister,” ordered the captain as he jogged after his security chief. He caught up to him as he opened the four inch thick clear-steel decompression door. “You’re not going out there.”
The chief turned to face the captain, holding the knife in a threatening manner. “My mind’s made up, sir. Now, wait here until I bring you an alien.” He shoved the captain against the far bulkhead and closed the transparent door. The captain watched as the chief walked down the 50 meter long corridor, hiding the knife behind his back. As he neared the far end, the hatch blew off its hinges. Before the chief could react, an alien plowed into him head first, burying its stinger into his abdomen. The impact knocked the knife out of the chief’s hand, and it ricocheted down the corridor, stopping at the base of the decompression door. The alien retracted its blood soaked stinger and streaked toward the captain at unbelievable speed. Luckily, for the captain, it slammed into the unseen door and rebounded to the deck, twitching erratically. The captain opened the door, grabbed the chief’s knife, and buried it into the alien’s torso. A cold, bone chilling blue-green fluid squirted upward onto the captain’s face. “What the…” He turned to Command and Control and yelled, “Quickly, lower the station’s temperature to -20C. These bastards are cold blooded. They’ll slow down to a crawl if we make it cold enough.”
Twenty minutes later, with fog billowing from his nostrils, he simply said, “Okay men, let’s go hunting.”
by Duncan Shields | Aug 1, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I was sixteen when they came.
They touched down in large ships all over earth, silently with no visible means of propulsion. Jagged, asymmetrical leviathans ridged with glowing seams and thousands of softly humming translucent spikes as tall as skyscrapers. Their spindled undercarriages contacted the ground and there they impossibly balanced, footprints with no more square footage than a volkwagen bug. Islands on tiptoe with their furthest spires still in space.
A triangle of light spasmed open in their base and they came out.
They floated silently and ghostly like their ships did. They were made of a dark metal that could be made intangible at will. Red sensors ringed their masses. No two of them were the same size. Their appendages dangled, chunky black tentacles of many different widths, some cables nearly dragging on the ground as the beings floated out of their vessels. The smallest one I saw was as long as a cat and the largest was the length of a bus balanced on its bumper.
The missiles we’d fired at their ships at first contact still hung there in the upper atmosphere, barely moving in some sort of time-retardant field. The bullets and shells that had been fired at them from the ground troops did the same. So we stopped. We didn’t know if our stilled ordnance would go off when the visitors left. Our noisy impotence in the face of their silent superiority became embarrassing.
They scanned everything. They took no interest in us except to regard those that came close to them with a whirring chirp of blindingly quick quadrary math. Scientists and mathematicians figured out their language but the numbers still didn’t make sense.
Small ones for flowers but long ones for gardens, small ones for trees and massive ones for forests. Medium ones for buildings but huge ones for cities. London’s number was bigger than Vancouver. Damascus had a larger number that Paris. Water seemed to make the math go recursive and eat itself.
A temporal theoretician named Davis figured it out after some terminally ill humans approached the aliens in search of a divine cure. They were measured and forgotten by the aliens and left disappointed to succumb to their diseases. Those measurement numbers took on meaning after their deaths.
We don’t know how long they’ll be here but the aliens appear to know how long each of us will live.
People seek them out now. It’s a dare to get yourself measured. New parents bring their children, newlyweds find out how long they’ll have together, and one presidential candidate famously got measured at a press conference but the result was scandalously disappointing.
The aliens seemed to have a sense of time like we have a sense of smell. Common opinion is that the passage of time whorls around them and that they are more sensitive to it. That they smell time in chains and whips, in spills and gusts, in pours and dams. When we speak to them, they seem to only measure our word lengths and move on. Perhaps they’re entropy police cataloguing the known universe. We don’t know if they’re sentient or automated.
We are not intelligent life to them. They speak in measurements and nothing else. How they invented space travel is a mystery to us.
All I know is that I was measured yesterday and I have another forty-three years to live. I plan to make them count.
by submission | Jul 31, 2011 | Story
Author : Waldo van der Waal
I sat down heavily on the rickety chair at my console. A quick look towards my brother confirmed that he, too, was feeling the firm fingers of fatigue. Four straight days of coding will do that to you. Four straight days of inventing and shaping and testing… I opened a couple of beers and passed one to Stephan, who sipped from it with gusto. After he wiped his lips, he said: “I’ll flip you for it.”
Going back to our childhood, we always decided things by chance. Never age or skill or any kind of decree – just by a roll of the dice; a flip of the coin. And each of us had the scars to prove that the odds really are 50/50. “Do you think that’s what the Wright brothers did?” I asked him, drawing deep from my beer. His rejoinder was quick: “Does it matter? Can you remember who was piloting their flyer when they first flew? Everyone knows the Wright Brothers. Not many people know them individually.”
So I relented. He fished a coin from his pockets, and got ready for the flip. As the coin left his thumb, I called “heads” – I always called heads – and watched as he caught the coin and clapped it firmly on the back of his other hand. A quick look in my eyes, with a little wink, then he lifted his hand: Tails. Stephan had won.
From that moment on, we both knew how the rest of the evening would play out. He went to get ready, while I prepared the device. To anyone peeking into our shed, the myriad of wires and pipes and screens would’ve looked just as alien as the Wright Brothers’ flyer must’ve done more than 100 years ago. But they believed they were onto something good – and Stephan and I? We knew we were onto something good as well. Something that could shape the course of human life for eons to come – if only we could give it wings, like the Wrights did.
Stephan walked back into the shed just as I finished preparing. He had on a pair of faded blue jeans, a t-shirt and a leather bomber jacket. Old-fashioned but classic – perfect for our test. He glanced at me, smiled nervously, and proceeded to affix himself to the device – straps, cables, electrodes… He knew the drill.
Then, when he was ready, I looked fondly at my brother, and cleared my throat to say something. But he held up his hand, stopping me before I could say anything. He looked around our shed, maybe checking that everything was ready, or maybe taking it all in once more – the dusty equipment, the haphazard technology… Then he nodded at me.
I walked over to my console, and with just the briefest of looks towards Stephan, I executed the command. There was no sound. No light, no fanfare… But even so, Stephan had disappeared in a millionth of a second. The electrodes and wires swung lazily backwards and forwards, in the spot occupied until moments ago by my brother.
by submission | Jul 30, 2011 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
“When do you have to leave?”
“Couple weeks.”
“Is it set in stone?”
“You know I can’t stay in one place for longer than a month. Guild rules.”
She lay quiet, pressed against him.
“Maybe you could put in for a leave?”
He pushed up one his arm, looking down at her warm body, framed in blue lines from the ceiling vents.
“I can’t stay,” he said. “I have a job to do. I service this whole sector.”
“But I thought — maybe you wanted to stay?”
“With you, you mean.”
“We’re very good together. I feel–”
“For me? Or because you’re lonely?”
“I want you to stay.”
He settled back in the cushions. The blue star overhead glowed dimly, in its passive phase for a year before the flare season started.
“How long is your service here?” he asked.
“Fifteen years, and then I retire.”
“Do you know how long I’ve been traveling?”
“I don’t know.”
“Twenty years in personal-time. I stopped paying attention to real-time after the first month. Every time I get into the FTL pod the universe goes on without me. I can’t worry about it.”
“I’ve only taken the trip once,” she said. “To get here.”
“We don’t stay anywhere because we have to keep moving. I have a thousand more assignments to service before I can retire. That’s one per month, and I’m twenty years down. I have sixty to go.”
“Real-time?”
“It makes no difference. I don’t age in the FTL pod. I think I started my tenure over a hundred real-time years ago, but it doesn’t matter too much. All the out-system stations need us, and we can’t stay or the system breaks down.”
She was crying, silently. “But you could stay. We could send a tightbeam to your Control Network and they could take you off the rolls. We can live here together.”
“I don’t travel to settle down,” he said. “I travel to make sure none of you go mad from the isolation. We have no other purpose.”
“You have free will. You can choose to stay.”
“And the next station has to wait an extra month for personal and sexual contact,” he said. “It’s not possible.”
“So go now, then,” she said, a sudden surge of anger drying the tears. “No sense keeping them waiting. I’ll just wait here for the next gigolo to stop by. You have no other purpose, after all.”
“Whatever you want,” he said. “I’m here to service you and you alone. If you want me to go–”
“No! Don’t leave me!” She came up and clutched him, desperate, feeling for his face and pulling him down in a passionate kiss. They coupled hard and fast and she slept in peace. When she woke up, he was making breakfast.
“Are you ok?” he said.
“I’m sorry. It gets harder every year. I’ll be fine.”
“I can stay my whole shift here, if you want, so you only have three months to wait for the next one.”
“That would be nice.”
He brought her coffee and they drank together, looking up at the vents where the blue sun shone. Instruments on the asteroid’s surface constantly recorded and transmitted information about the star’s cycles, valuable information for the Collective.
“It’s not so bad,” she said at last. “I’ll get over you. But I’ll be dead long before you retire.”
“I’ll remember you.”
“Promise?”
He looked out at the stars. A hundred lightyears to the next station, and a hundred more after that, and further and more and on and on.
“Forever,” he said, and smiled.
