by Roi R. Czechvala | May 18, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
A low, thin fog rolled down the hillside. There was something almost menacing in its approach. When it encountered an object, a tree or a rock, it appeared to stop in surprise as if trying to make up its mind before dividing and going around.
“I must be getting tired. I’m starting to see things.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” replied PFC Nestel, rolling on her back and stretching her body as best she could in the confinement of her reactive armour. “It’s just… cliché.”
“What are you talking about,” LCpl Jeffries asked. He took his eye from the scope of his plazer and regarded his cute but often annoying battle buddy.
“I dunno. I know they’re out there watching us.”
“We’re out in the middle of nowhere, lying in wet grass, the trees dropping those leech things on us, enduring the constant rain of this hell hole planet watching an abandoned fuelling station. Who would be watching us? They’d have to be crazier than we are.”
“I know,” she said testily, “I said it was cliché.” Still, Nici couldn’t shake the feeling. She rolled back over and tapped her helmet, bringing her bioptic implants online and scanned the surrounding hillside for signs of activity. There was none.
“Look, try to get some sleep. It’s not like your missing anything. You’ll feel better.”
“I wish I could.” Something wasn’t right. She could feel it. Despite all evidence to the contrary, there was something going on. At least the fog, barely a foot above the ground, gave her a comforting hug. Still the hair on her arms did it’s best to rise beneath the sheath of her thin flexible armour. She popped her bioptics and closed her eyes.
No sooner had Nici dozed off than Jeffries was shaking her. “Nic… Nic,” he whispered, “I’ve got movement.”
“What is it,” she asked in a bleary voice.
“I can’t tell. The scope’s rez isn’t high enough. Scope it with your beautiful bug eyes.”
She slugged him on the shoulder and tapped her helmet again. Her multifaceted eyes linked to his scope so he could share her vision.
“I’ll be damned.” With her artefact eyes she observed five oriental soldiers beside the defunct fuelling depot waving to them.
“How long do you think they knew we were here?”
Before Pfc Nici Nestel could reply to Lcpl Ron Jeffries question, her head had been severed cleanly from her neck and lay staring to the sky, a scant three feet from her inert body. Her eyes were still recording a scene her dead brain failed to see.
Standing over her helmeted head, an Asiatic Alliance equivalent of a sergeant sheathed a plasteele vibrasword and removed a protective mask moulded in a gruesome rictus designed to instil fear in the hearts of his enemy. He held the head of the young Jeffries in plain view of her bioptics.
Tapping his breastplate, the “fog” of nano surveillance ‘bots, suspended above the ground in a negative charge withdrew into his armour. Casually he tossed the head aside and spat into her pretty dead face.
“Stupid Americans.”
by Duncan Shields | May 17, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
James was sick of his grandfather’s racism. He didn’t care if he was a war hero.
“They’re not people, Jimmy. They have no feelings.” His grandfather shouted from the other room. James loaded up the dishwasher, closed it, and took a deep breath, preparing for going back into the living room. Once a week, James came by to cook his grandfather dinner and keep him company. It was getting to be more and more of a test of patience.
“I mean, I have a brain, right? I know I’m smart. I was raised differently than them. Not in a lab. I had a mother and a father. I know how to be kind to other people. People, Jimmy. People. That dishwasher in there has more compassion than them. I’ve seen what they do to people like you and I on the ‘vision.”
His grandfather was referring to the war footage from the nightly news. Recently the automated soldiers had invaded parts of Eastern Europe to keep the peace. It was their first solo campaign and it was successful. Video of their angular heads and antennae bobbing through the ruined villages was run constantly with updates of our victorious battles.
“I don’t care about these intelligence tests and emotional accelerators they keep talking about. It’s all smoke and mirrors. They’re not flesh and blood. They’re just equations. They don’t eat, they don’t have trust issues, they don’t cry, they just follow orders. They’re just guns that can walk around.”
In recent years, the A.I. on the automated soldiers had gotten to a point that they’d been given basic rights. Some had been promoted. None of them had been granted civilian status yet but many of them had been given passes and allowed supervised visits outside of their compounds with other soldiers.
Soldiers like James. James was fourth generation Army.
“I have to go, Grandpa. I have friends to see. It was a nice dinner.”
“Well you just be careful. I worry about you. The army isn’t what it used to be. Don’t trust those tin cans.” His grandfather said with an angry jut of his chin.
Outside, James clambered into his patrol vehicle to return to base. A body with an angular head and antennae sat asleep at the driver’s wheel. When James closed the door, lights blinked on and the construct at the wheel woke up.
“Hey. Sorry. I was recharging. How’d it go? Do I get to meet him tonight? I mean, that’s General Daimus in there. Some of his strategy helped us win War IV. I’ve reviewed the records but I always get more from someone who was actually there, y’know?” said an articulate voice from the front faceplate of the construct.
“Not tonight, Darren.” Said James. “Maybe next week. But don’t hold your breath.”
“I have no breath to hold,” joked Darren898. James didn’t laugh. Darren898 felt bad immediately. Humour was a hard thing to understand and he knew he’d gotten it wrong this time. Again. Even though both of them had been through three battles together now and saved each other’s lives a few times, Darren898 still couldn’t make James laugh after a visit with his grandpa.
They drove back to the base in silence, both lost in thought and trying to shake the shame they felt for different reasons.
by Patricia Stewart | May 16, 2011 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Earthmen first encountered the Sprites in 2384. The Sprites were fist sized glowing spheres that emitted a pulsating white light. However, the light defied known physics. Normally, a prism would refract white light into a colorful spectrum, but not the white light from the Sprites. When passed through a spectrum, the light simply vanished, but would reappear as white light if passed through a second prism.
It was originally assumed that the Sprites were a natural phenomenon, like ball lightening. But as scientists attempted to collect them, it became crystal clear that the Sprites were both evasive and intelligent. All attempts to capture the Sprites were fruitless. Eventually, it was concluded that they were a harmless interstellar life form, so they were permitted to roam freely among the stars.
Initially, the apparently harmless Sprites began following small recreational spaceships, similar to the way pilot fish swim alongside sharks and stingrays. Among the élite, Sprites became a type of status symbol. The more Sprites you had attending you spaceship, the better. Over the years, the sprites also began attending interstellar passenger liners and large cargo ships. Since the Sprites didn’t interfere with ship operations, most captains tended to ignore them. Eventually, crews became accustomed to their presence, and even felt apprehensive when signing onto ships without Sprites. Sprites were considered good luck omens, and by the end of the century, they were attending all non-military space faring vessels.
However, when the war broke out with the Epsilon Reticuli Empire, Sprites became a strategic military asset when it was discovered that their normally white light turned crimson whenever a Reticulian warship approached within a light year. As the war ramped up, military vessels actively sought Sprites as early warning devices. The potential military value of the Sprites even prompted the Earth Alliance President to issue an executive order requiring citizens to surrender their Sprites to the Government. At the height of the war, the bulk of the Earth Alliance Fleet, including sixteen Battlecruisers, thirty-two Destroyers, were poised to engage the Reticulian fleet in a pivotal battlefront along the outskirts of the Denebola System. As the opposing forces aligned their starships in preparation for battle, the Sprites glowed bright red. As if fearing the Reticulian forces, the Sprites began to nestle closer to their Alliance ships in an apparent effort to seek protection. Then, in rapid fire succession, the Sprites blew themselves up, severely damaging the propulsion and weapons systems of their host ships. On cue, the Reticulian warships swooped in and finished off the helpless and bewildered ships of the once powerful Earth Alliance.
by submission | May 15, 2011 | Story
Author : Brian Varcas
“OK, so what did you really think of it, now we’re on our own?”
She had made all the right noises when the agent was showing us around the place; “Yes, I think I could see us living here…it feels like home already” that sort of thing. She’s always way too polite in these situations.
“Well, I really don’t think it lived up to the advertisement. I mean, where do these agents get their cheek?”
She was right of course. The advertisement had all the stock phrases:
“Desirable location”
“Flexible accommodation”
“Ready for immediate occupation”
“Plenty of character and atmosphere”
Atmosphere! That was a good one. You can always tell a place where the previous occupiers have died…there’s a certain smell and everything looks so drab, lifeless and sad. It would take a hell of a lot of work to make that place liveable again.
“So”, I asked, “what are we going to say?” I already knew the answer.
“We just say it’s not what we’re looking for and arrange to view the next place on the list.”
The “list” was getting shorter all the time and we didn’t have forever to find our new home so I decided to argue the point.
“You know, that place could be OK. Yes, I know we couldn’t get it back to its former glory overnight but what’s the hurry? It would be good to be able to stop the search and settle on somewhere.”
She gave me one of her looks; the one that said, “you’re just looking for an easy way out of this, you lazy shit.” She wasn’t far wrong.
“Well, we could take another look, I suppose…” I could hear the reluctance in her voice. “I mean, you’re right, we’ve got to find somewhere or we’ll end up homeless.”
We sat in silence, mulling the options over. Finally I made the decision for both of us by entering the details of the next place on the list into the dashboard navigator and making a 180-degree turn. We would have to go past the place we’d just viewed anyway.
As we got nearer, we could see just how lifeless it was! This was an absolute bombsite and there was no way we could bring our people here.
My partner was gazing out of the window at the “bijou residence, priced to sell”. “The previous occupiers really made a mess of this place before they left.”
I slowed down so we could take in the scene one last time. “Yes, it must have been one hell of a party!”
As I set our course for the wormhole which would take us to our destination I turned to Malklrinkla and, with mock drama and gravity, announced, “We are not alone…the universe is full of idiots just like us”.
by submission | May 14, 2011 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
The first thing he noticed was her neck.
She had a certain way about her when she laughed, like she had to throw her whole head back, like this laugh was something bigger than she could easily contain that emerged from her like Venus from a seashell, and when she laughed, it exposed her neck.
Joey was out on the pull when he saw her, not in a sleazy way, but looking for a girl he could really get to know. When he saw her at the bar, he plucked up the courage to go up to her and…
…they were talking, and it was so easy, they’d only known each other a few minutes and it was so natural, like their aims were the same in life. He was listening to her talk, not like he sometimes listened to girls, waiting for an opportunity to get a good line in and slowly persuade them he was a good catch. No, this time he really wanted to know about her. Already after only a moment she mattered to him, and…
…they were kissing almost before the cab door closed. he had to break away from her to give the driver his address, and when the cab got to his flat he left way too much of a tip, but he just didn’t care. She was amazing, he was crazy about her, she was crazy about him, and…
…afterwards they cuddled, sharing each other’s post orgasmic glow. This is where he’d be smoking a cigarette, if he smoked. Instead, he looked at her and she looked at him, and he couldn’t think of two people in the world who were happier. And then…
…she opened her eyes, saw the ring, and she knew. She said yes before he could even ask. She saw the ring, and she knew, and that in itself said everything he needed to know. They would be getting married on the eve of midsummer, and…
…he realized it had been half an hour since either of them had said anything. There was a TV on that neither of them was watching. He looked over at her and tried to think of something to say. She looked up, and his eyes went back to the book he wasn’t reading. Silence, never broken, descended again, and…
…she was leaving him. The bitch was leaving him. She’d met someone who made him happy, she said. Joey wondered how it was possible for anyone to make that cold woman happy. God knows he had tried, for years. Without knowing he was doing it, he broke the seal on the second bottle of whiskey, and…
A slight buzzing sound let him know the simulation had finished. He realized, self consciously, that he had been staring straight ahead for a minute or so. The woman at the bar saw him, met his eyes, and smiled. The smile was so familiar to him and he didn’t even know her name.
He shook his head very slightly.
“Sorry,” he said, “I thought you were someone else.”
by submission | May 13, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
Reconsidering old things, as she was that week, Marlene unpacked the first robot she had built, the robot named Robot. She had not so much as thought of the robot in years and, seeing it again, was surprised to find it not so shoddy as she remembered. It powered up and passed its diagnostics. This was to be an uncertain week ending in even greater uncertainty and Marlene was comforted by the presence of the robot named Robot.
Monday found Marlene fixing a fussy unit for a wealthy collector. She did not want to jeopardize her focus by stepping away. Instead, she called out, “Robot, go to the deli and get me a ham sandwich.” Upon hearing its name, Robot turned on its heel to obey.
The small mechanical being negotiated the sandwich transaction successfully. Robot then placed it in the spare parts drawer that took up much of its lower belly. When Marlene received the greasy, smashed once-sandwich, she said, “Next time put it in a little paper bag and bring it home.”
Tuesday arrived later than it should have and Marlene’s schedule made it impossible for her to take the time to replenish her shop’s oil reserves. She called out, “Robot, get me a quart of oil from the hardware store.” Servos whizzed as the automaton went off on its errand.
Robot communicated to the clerk the type and quantity of oil it required. The little robot insisted that the clerk pour its order directly into a small paper bag it had brought along. The clerk complied with laughter. By the time Robot had returned home, half of the oil had leaked out through the paper bag. Marlene, smiling a bit, said, “Next time, put it in a can and bring it home.”
Wednesday was rainy. Marlene was tired from recent deadlines and flush with cash from the payment of several invoices that came, rather unusually, on time. Resting on her couch, she called out, “Robot, go to the optical and pick up my order.” Robot stomped out in its usual stompy way.
Robot sloshed into the optical and received the custom mirror for Marlene’s iluxtrascope. Robot then folded the mirror several times so that it would fit in the small can it produced from a storage compartment. Back home, Marlene said, “Next time, wrap it in protective coverings, lash it to a dolly, and bring it home.”
For all of Thursday, Marlene looked at old images and listened to old music. Her only commands to Robot were “Robot, perform monkey” and “Robot, headspin”.
When Friday finally rolled around, Marlene ran about her flat, alternating between frantic shiftings and long, drawn out contemplations of the appearances of things. She was hopelessly behind in her plans. She called out to Robot, “Go to the spaceport and fetch me Banyan.” Robot did as commanded.
Robot waited patiently at gate 78B2 holding a small sign that said “Banyan” on it. A man stopped before Robot and bent over. “Hey little guy, I didn’t expect to see you here. Remember me, Banyan?” Robot effortlessly wrapped the man in protective coverings and lashed him to a dolly. When Robot returned home, Marlene told it to shutdown. She gently pulled the wrappings away from Banyan’s face. He was smiling.
“Next time,” she said, “write better software.”
“This time,” Banyan said, “I’m going to do a lot of things better.”
She smiled.
