The Vote

Author : John Tudball

A chorus of personalised beeps and buzzing erupts from our laps and in record time we’re tapping on our Panels to see if this is the one, if this is the vote we’ve been waiting for. A chorus of groans, Pete swears at his screen. It’s not.

“What did you all go for?” Pete asks the room.

We all voted against. Before the PopularVote app was released, I’d stay up all night watching elections, cheering the political parties on. At work the next day running on just a couple hours sleep I’d always be shocked at all the fresh faces checking their news feeds and learning there and then who ran the country now. At night it felt like everyone cared, like everyone was with me. I hated finding out I’d been the minority. I couldn’t understand the apathy. Well this time I know I’m not alone. There’s nearly a hundred million users logged in.

Pete and Paula are trying to distract themselves with playing TotalArcade. Megan has a videolink up on her screen, watching the big demonstration in Hyde Park alongside clips from the BBC Comedy channel. I’ve got Gallup on my screen, all sorts of fancy graphs and charts trying to predict which way this will go. In this room, across the whole country, we’re all just waiting and everybody knows this.

Every party, every pressure group, every individual campaigner. Anyone with a license is flooding PopularVote with new legislation, trying to take advantage of the numbers to push their agendas before the main event comes through and we all leave.

You need two thirds support from at least forty million responses for a PopularVote to become law. Generally it takes a couple of weeks, sometimes months even. In the last three minutes sixty four million people shouted down the Defense Of Family’s proposed ban on gay marriage. Ten minutes ago a massive seventy three million citizens landed an even fifty-fifty split on increasing soldiers’ pay and before that a Mr Franklyn Neill lost his PV license when 99.9% of respondants did not back him being named president. What on earth would we need a president for when we’ve got PopularVote?

“Okay,” I say, “it’s going to come through in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… NOW!”

The chorus sings again. Everyone laughs but that stops quickly when check our screens. This is it. I vote For. I regret it immediately. When we argued it out last night it almost came to blows, but we all agreed we’d vote together and take the consequences together. I can barely breathe. In roughly thirty seconds we find out if we just declared war.

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The First Warp Drive

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

The ship shook violently as it unexpectedly dropped out or warp. The captain was thrown to the deck where he could feel the tell-tale vibrations of explosions occurring somewhere on the ship. He climbed to his feet and activated the communications console. “Bridge to Engineering. What’s going on Chief?”

“Unsure, Captain. We’re fighting several fires right now. I need some time to sort things out.”

“Make it quick, Chief. I want you to brief the senior staff in my ready room in one hour.”

*****

An hour later, Chief Cernan walked into the Captain’s Ready Room into the middle of a heated argument. “I demand a thorough investigation, Captain. I want to know who is responsible for this debacle.”

“You are an uninvited guest on my ship, Mr. Harris. You are in no position to make demands,” rebutted the captain. “Civilians don’t belong on experimental missions.”

“I’m not a ‘civilian’. I am the personal representative of Senator Schmitt, and if you think…”

“I’ll deal with you later,” interrupted the captain without apology. “Chief, what’s our condition?”

“Precarious, Captain. The Alcubierre drive is undamaged, but the subspace heat exchanger is completely destroyed. Since the efficiency of the anti-matter reaction is so low, we’ll vaporize the ship if we can’t bleed-off the excess energy into subspace.”

“So, you’re telling me that we have warp drive, we just can’t use it”

“Not exactly, sir,” replied Cernan. “We can run the wrap drive, but only until it overheats. Then we have to shut it down until the engines radiate the excess heat into normal space. I estimate that we can run the engines for two seconds, with a cool off cycle of 24 hours. At that rate, it will take us about five years to get home.”

“Five years,” screamed Harris. “That’s unacceptable! You can’t expect me to sit around hear while you incompetent fools…”

The captain slammed is fist onto the top of the conference table and yelled, “That’s enough out of you, Mr. Harris. You say one more word and I’ll throw you into an escape pod and we’ll tow you back to Earth.”

The chief suddenly smiled. “Hey, captain, that a great idea.”

“The hell it is,” exclaimed Harris!

The chief waved a dismissive hand at Harris. “I’m not talking about you. I mean we can deploy the sixteen escape pods into two large octagons and fill in the space between them with sheets of polyaluminum. I’ll fabricate superconductive tethers and tie them into the nacelles. That should radiate the excess heat a hundred times faster. We can probably make it home in about three weeks.”

“Still unacceptable,” bellowed Harris. “I have important meetings to atten…”

There was a flash of light and Harris collapsed to the floor. The captain looked at the settings on his phaser and muttered, “Damn, it was set on ‘stun’. Too bad.” The captain looked up and smiled at the shocked expressions on the faces of his senior staff. “Relax, gentlemen. It’s one of the privileges of being so close to retirement. Besides I’ve wanted to do that since that blowhard forced me to take him aboard. He also needs to learn that there are consequences to ignoring the commands of the ship’s captain. Lieutenant Irwin, when Chief Cernan deploys the escape pods, make sure Mr. Harris is in one of them with enough food and water for a month. And please, disable the intercom. I’ve listened to his babbling long enough. Dismissed.”

 

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The Mutation Parlor

Author : Jeremy Koch

Sasha lay on a rust-flecked chrome slab under the rewriter’s dim green light, wincing slightly every few seconds as the self-service amputator locked into place. It slid a sequential series of nine hollow spikes, each six centimeters long, easily into the flesh of her arm, just below the elbow; this was always the worst part, painwise, but it’d be over soon. It was worth it.

The final needle pierced her skin, and then muscle, finally bone. The flow actuator kicked to life with a shudder and a low chugging sound – disturbing, but she was well-used to it now. This was her fourth designer phenotype since her arrival.

The smell – a rank, antiseptic stench of sizzling chlorine – hit her nose just as the amputator’s work became visible. The veins of her forearm and hand pulsed a deep chemical green, and the skin began paring away from the muscle as before an invisible flenser. Blood pooled and then erupted into microscopic bubbles, turning instantly to coppery steam as it pumped from her disintegrating arteries. By this time, the pain was dissipated – indeed, impossible, as her nerve clusters had already gone up in an acrid mist seconds before.

The machine’s clunking sped up. She watched, as always, with glammered fascination as the last of the skin dissolved and muscle peeled back, fiber by fiber, exposing bone that took on a beetle-wing sheen before it too began to crackle and deteriorate. Within minutes the actuator wound down; Sasha was left gazing serenely at the vaporous stump of her left arm.

Deadened nerves in her upper arm registered vague cold as the flow actuator restarted, this time emitting a vigorous sloshing. A pinkish mix of engineered viral solution and bioaccelerant coursed through the hollow spikes; presently viscid, vein-roped masses protruded from the precisely shorn remnant of her arm. New bone, glistening with fresh leukocytes spontaneously generated by the stimulated marrow, sprung violently forth and rapidly sprouted a web of whitish sinew. She felt detached cracking as the ossified growth bent and twisted, forming a wrist joint, and then split, fanning out into five scrabbling fingers. Sasha regarded this consideringly, and, with her intact hand, adjusted a dial on the rewriter’s console. Two of the five fingers split again, and she nodded, satisfied, as the seven digits waved and flexed.

Threads of hard muscle the matte color of gunmetal, woven together with capillaries of contrasting, sanguinary red, enveloped the pulsing bone from humerus to metacarpals. Keratinous talons flared from the fingertips with a series of fleshy pops, casting tiny droplets of pink froth across the table. They’d be retractable when the procedure was done; for now they gleamed wetly beneath the ambient illumination.

It was almost finished now. She could perceive feeling creeping back into her limb, as a light itch she had come to relish, and strove to master her excitement till the machine had completed its work. The itching crescendoed and crossed into pain; with ground teeth, she studied her skin knitting itself neatly over reinforced bone and hyperoxygenated muscle. Then it was over – the nerves settled into sync with her brain, and she carefully curled her new hand into a loose fist. The needles retracted, leaving oozing holes, and Sasha reached for a packet of iodine and gauze. After applying them, she stood and spread her wings with a yawn, the emerald tint of their translucent membrane nearly invisible under this light. “I already can’t wait to do this again,” she thought as she sought the exit. “Next time I’m getting the brain job.”

 

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Final Exam

Author : Ian Eller

At Gemin’s command, “Begin,” Arwa activated her station along with the rest of the students. The lab, spacious and white, was bathed in intense light from a dozen moments of creation. Arwa sacrificed a brief moment to look up from her work station. Ever so briefly, the instructor Gemin’s wandering gaze met her stare. She flushed and turned back to her work.

Arwa swore silently. Vanity and hope had cost her much. Through the orb lens she saw a uniform field of humming energy. This would not do. Her fingers caressed the controls on either side of the orb, sending signals through the tiny tear in reality and tipping the scales ever so slightly. The imbalance caused clumping and cooling and things began to form within. Arwa smiled and dared to waste another second.

Gemin was standing over another student who was manipulating his controls fervently. There was a low hum and discernible whump from the student’s station and it went dark. Gemin patted the student comfortingly on the shoulder before continuing his observation of the class.

Arwa’s attention snapped back to her own work. Through her orb she could see a web forming. She manipulated the controls, making ever so slight adjustments to the controlling variables. Even as she was satisfied with the growing structure within, she heard more sounds of failure throughout the lab: whumps, buzzes and pops.

She zoomed in and sped up the clock. Already the first generation of stars were going nova, bursting infinitely bright for the briefest of subjective moments, seeding the newborn universe with clouds of gas and dust. Here and there she adjusted the values of the fundamental forces, pushing her little bubble of a universe to evolve as she chose.

She was confident in the balance of forces, so she zoomed in her focus, from super cluster to cluster to galaxy. She was scanning the spiral arms, making ever more minute adjustments, watching as stars coalesced, evolved, died and exploded, igniting adjacent clouds into new stars, and so on.

She felt him over her shoulder, looking at what she had made. She felt the rest of them, too, all failures, waiting for her to fail too. Their expectation, along with Gemin’s presence, hardened her resolve and she swept across the field of newborn stars, slowing and speeding time, adjusting and readjusting variables.

The exam was almost complete, time almost up, when it happened. It came in the form of a distinct tone, emanating from the edge of a random arm of the galaxy upon which she gazed. They all understood the tone; Gemin had exposed them to it on the very first day of their class so very long ago. It was the sound of sapience ringing out from one tiny speck in the vast expanse of the little universe she had kneaded and molded into being.

Arwa looked up, beaming with pride, ready to accept Gemin’s praise and approval. He smiled. Whatever he had to offer her suddenly disappeared, however, as the tone ringing from her orb fell silent.

Exasperated, she turned back to her work station and scanned and adjusted and manipulated. She knew it was futile, however. The little universe was already cooling into inactivity. Heat death.

Gemin placed his hand on her shoulder. She released the controls and sat back in resignation.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” said Gemin, giving her shoulder a comforting, if altogether appropriate, squeeze. “You passed the exam.”

“But it was so brief,” she nearly wept. “It didn’t last more than a moment.”

Gemin nodded sadly. “It never does.”

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Fly Trap

Author : Brian Varcas

OK, time to get going again. I mean, what else is there to do but try to get back to the ship? I can see it only a hundred yards away. It shouldn’t take more than another couple of hours to reach it.

If only we’d known before we landed that this planet had a mischievous side. When we surveyed it from orbit all our instruments showed a breathable atmosphere, no life forms and a gravity of 1.2g’s. After planet fall we headed out on foot to begin our full geological survey of the area.

After about an hour I was feeling surprisingly tired and short of breath. Looking around I could see the other 5 crewmembers also looking laboured. “Time out, I think guys,” I said.Thumbs up all around. We sat down and compared notes.

The desert landscape here was pretty barren; ochre sand and occasional brown rocky outcrops. Our ship, looking like a silver blue dragonfly in the distance, was the only relief from the drab terrain. In the distance there was a range of purple mountains, which hinted at a more varied geology so we decided to head back to the ship and fly there. Our tests in this area had so far revealed nothing of value.

As we talked, I began to feel more and more weary. It was taking a great deal of effort to even sit upright. I could see everyone else was having the same difficulty.

“What the hell is going on? I feel like shit” Svetlana Borowski, our Senior Geologist shouted. “No idea, but I reckon we all feel the same way,” I answered. “Let’s get back to the ship.”

We couldn’t even get to our feet. We barely managed to get to our hands and knees and began crawling towards the ship, about half a mile away. Impossibly, our instruments now showed the gravity at 4.8g’s!

Crawling here feels like trying to swim in a pool of peanut butter! It takes so much effort just dragging myself a couple of inches that I have to rest every few minutes. The sand seems to be changing, becoming viscous and it sticks wherever it touches. It’s beginning to burn my skin and the material of my suit seems to be slowly disintegrating. Three of my crew are still with me, the two others seem to have stopped and are not responding on the com. I know they are probably only 50 yards or so behind me but it might as well be 50 miles. I can’t help them. I can’t even turn to see them.

Night is falling now and it’s getting cold. Only a couple of hundred yards and then I can get off this fucking rock! But I feel so tired now. The ground feels soft and comfortable when I lie still. Maybe I could rest for a bit longer. Maybe I could sleep for just a few minutes…

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Biding

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

The conversation had started in the lab, but while I could work there, I never was at home with my thoughts in that space. I suppose that’s how we came to be in the study. I took a scotch, neat. He declined.

“You can’t honestly be considering turning me off,” he stood across the fireplace hearth from me, fingers dug into the leather back of the chair he’d positioned between us, “you self centered son of a bitch, even you can’t kill yourself for your own edification, the paradox would drive you mad.”

He had a point, and I think that were I in his shoes, I’d have used almost exactly those words.

“I can’t leave you running around loose now can I? At some point someone’s going to start asking questions, and if this can of worms gets opened up out of doors…” I trailed off, leaving the thought hanging. He knew where I was heading with it.

“Listen to me,” his voice dropped to a whisper, every syllable enunciated with hammer stricken clarity, “you can’t kill me. I am you. Killing me would be suicide, and you and I both know you are not capable of such a thing.” He paused. “I know what you’re thinking, because every thought that goes through your head goes through my mine too. I know what you’re worried about, the potential danger, because I am you, or at least you up to that point a few hours ago when you instantiated me.”

“Then you also know that there can’t be two of us, and as the original flesh and blood, I have no recourse but to shut you down until I figure out what to do. Honestly, I didn’t really think this would even work.”

“Bullshit. You knew it would work, I know you did. You just didn’t think past that moment, did you?” He began to pace the room. “The problem with that line of reasoning is that there’s not two of you, there’s one of me and one of you, and you could no more kill me than I could kill you.” He stopped at this, and turned again to face me.

I felt the anxiety bubble up inside me. “We’re the same, you’re an exact carbon copy of me, and we can’t both exist…”

“Again, bullshit!”, he cut me off, “I was a copy of you, but the moment we were two our thought patterns diverged. Case in point; you’re not scared that I’ll turn you off now, are you? I’m bloody terrified of it. I know that deep down you don’t think the metal me is nearly as human as the flesh and blood you. But it’s that difference that makes us unique, and killing me would be murder. Neither of us has that in him.”

He was right. Damnit, I was right. My head started to hurt.

“In two days time, Penelope will be back, and if she finds you here, finds us like this, she’ll tell someone. I love her, but that woman couldn’t keep her mouth shut if she were under ten feet of water.”

“In two days time, I won’t be here. I’ll disappear. Look, I know we can’t both be here right now. But I’m in no hurry to be. I’ll go, find somewhere out of the way to wait out the rest of your life. I’ll find an orphanage maybe, take a birth certificate from a stillborn and by the time you’re near death, I’ll be of legal age to inherit and then some. I’ll find you, you promise you’ll will your estate to me, and I’ll stay away until it’s time.”

I listened to what he was suggesting, but didn’t really have to. I’d been thinking the same thoughts myself, more or less.

“You’ll need money to get you started. And my passport. We can fashion you a more convincing face before you go.”

We stood staring at each other for a long time then, each alone with our own thoughts.

“We bloody well did it, didn’t we?” I broke the silence, barely holding back a grin.

“Of course we bloody did.” He put on his best approximation of a smile.

 

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