by submission | May 23, 2012 | Story |
Author : Alex Bauer
The light on the wall is green. The machine beside her is on and receiving. The walls bleed nuclear colors like a pool of oil before shifting to uniform white. First session in years, motivated by some desperate nostalgia. The machine hums, squat and blinking, next to her. Now he comes in, sits at the end of a long steel table, sighing.
“Why did you wake me?” He says. His voice is jerkier than she remembers, more pained. Expectant. That, more than anything about present circumstances, chills her to the bone.
“Can’t we talk? I want to just talk.” She says, unsure with his attitude. “It’s been a while.” The room is stark white; the only smudge to its banality is she and he. He practically glows here. The only place he ever has, she thinks. The thought too bitter to stamp out. His face is vague as if he were a stone in a river. Worn by too much time, too much self-correction. Brown eyes that were once blue cup her in the palm of his gaze.
She looks away, looks to the doctor watching from somewhere behind the one-way mirror taking up the right side wall.
“Mm,” he burbles. “Suppose it has. You’re the one who wanted to see me every morning. So, here we are. Though I think a lot more mornings have passed between this one and the last, you know.”
She flinches. He drums his fingers on the table, looking at a point between his hands. Considers it. Always considers it. Something hot catches in her throat, finding herself unable to speak for some time. The strange aeroshape of a gun sits between his hands like she’s always imagined. The coroner’s report hasn’t faded like his face. Single exit wound out the back of the head. His front teeth knocked out by the cycling of the receiver.
The machine hums, squat and blinking, next to her. A strange tickling sensation at the base of her skull. Digital blood pours out his mouth. He laughs, looks down at his now stained clothes, the chipped front teeth on the table.
“Just let me go.” The fading memory says. “Please. You came in here for nothing. This isn’t some weird absolution.” He looks at her again, his eyes reflecting all the pain she felt. Too long since she’s been here, too long since she’d let this memory out. “Do you even remember my name? Do you?” Panic writhed its way down to her very pith.
He favors her with a bloody smile. “Of course not.”
“Turn the machine off,” a voice intones over the speakers. She looks at the mirror, sees only her own panicked rictus.
“You’re just talking to yourself again.” He says, shrugging. “Makes no nevermind. Too much guilt, too much booze. You tried to drink me away and got weepy eyed and came back to this looney bin to see what you could remember.” The gun solidifies on the table. He picks it up.
“Turn the machine off, ma’am.” The doctor says again. She very calmly reaches over to switch the machine off when he points the gun at her. Simple light and digital outlays set in the walls make it look real, but all the same, she jerks back.
“You remember this because it was yours. You remember the details more than you remember me. So, you feel guilty. It’s normal. Maybe not for as long as you have, but normal enough.” He leans back, running a wavering hand through blood-shiny hair. With a sudden jerk, he’s leaning forward, wavering and warping as if the world can’t contain him. Her mind can’t contain him. “Wanna see how I did it? It’s there. You think about it. That’s why you do this. You don’t even wanna know why, just how. You think about doin–.” She lunges, flips the switch, and he bursts apart in a fountain of light motes.
Silence. “Are you all right, ma’am?” Says the man on the speaker.
“Ye-yes. I…shouldn’t have come.” She says.
“Quite alright. This form of interactive therapy is only good for the short-term. It’s been too long. But…seeing what was said, would you care to step into my office? I think we need to have a talk. And not about your son this time.”
She nods, not trusting her mouth, stares at the machine as if it were something alive. Very gingerly, she peels the diodes from the base of her skull, winces at the few strands of hair plucked out with it. The walls bloom psychedelic before returning to their neutral state. She places them back on the table and looks at them there between her hands. Considers them.
Finally, “I think I’d like that.”
by Clint Wilson | May 22, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
Henry became suddenly aware. Aware that he was sitting upright in a comfortable chair, wearing comfortable clothes made from warm white fabric that he did not recognize. All around him was whiteness, save for a wide bay window across the room that looked out into pure blackness. He looked to his left and saw a man standing there, also dressed in white. The man’s head was shaved, his face stony yet friendly. He smiled warmly.
Henry suddenly remembered that he could talk and found his own voice welcome but only distantly familiar, as if though he hadn’t heard it in a very long time. “Where am I?”
“You’re in the future Henry.”
“The future?” He blinked, considering it. “For real?”
“For real.”
For the moment he asked nothing else, finding it bothersome that his mind was having so much trouble processing such a seemingly small bit of information. Then he managed, “How far? I mean, what year is this?”
“We now use a different calendar than you are used to, but translated it’s the year 4970.”
Again, nothing but a simple number, a date. Why was it so hard to fathom what it meant?
“How did I get here?”
The bald man squatted down beside his chair, still smiling. He put a reassuring hand on Henry’s forearm. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
The last thing he remembered? He tried desperately to think. Then with a sudden wave, “A heart attack! I had a heart attack. They were working on me in the ambulance. Then… then, well then I guess…” He paused unsure. “I guess they must have… saved me?” A sudden quivering in his voice revealed his own doubt.
The bald man patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry Henry. They didn’t save you.” He raised a grey eyebrow and shook his head, never losing that friendly, reassuring look. “I’m afraid you died that day.”
Henry Hamilton shuddered in the comfortable chair. He looked back to the bay window and out into the blackness. Suddenly a small light zipped by, followed by two others. “What was that? Out there? Is that… space?”
“Yes, those ships are transporting people to other stations. There is a lot of traffic here in Jupiter orbit.”
Suddenly the bewildered man remembered that he had legs. He sprang from the chair and sprinted across to the window. There he pressed his face against the clear glass and gasped aloud as he gazed upon the twisting lighted tendrils of the space station that stretched off for kilometers in many directions. And all the while below, the mighty pink and red behemoth planet glowed so massive and close he was afraid that if he reached out he would touch it.
He spun back to the white room and the patient, smiling man. “Why? Why now? I never asked to be frozen. Did I?”
“Relax Henry. You haven’t been in stasis or cryo-sleep.”
“Then what? What?” He was beginning to feel like a caged animal in the room.
The bald man suddenly shone a small light into his eyes and Henry instantly calmed down. Then the friendly stranger walked him back to his chair and helped him to sit.
“Now just relax and listen while I tell you all about mankind’s wonderful mission to regenerate everybody through the genome reestablishment plan.”
“Who’s everybody,” Henry asked dreamily. That flash of light had done something to him. He felt wonderful.
“Why, everybody who has ever lived and died of course. We’ve finally done it Henry. We’ve finally found immortality and nobody is going to get left behind!”
by Duncan Shields | May 21, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Shades of coffee and caramel run under my fingertips like love letters written in goose-bump braille. There’s a heat from the honeyed angles and well-oiled hip joints that quietly beg me for a brush of fingertip. The skin is warm and dry to the touch. You’d think from the smoothness of her back that she’d been polished every day and you’d be right.
She’s easy to turn on. There’s a switch behind her left ear. The new prototype Gabrielle.
I’m putting the finishing touches on my masterpiece. It’s late on a Friday night. I’m one of the only people who manufacture custom units. This warehouse has vats of perfection in the basement. God is in the details, they have said, and details are all that concern me. I hardly sleep.
Robotic lovers are available all over the world but I am the most popular designer of companions.
I have designed the women and men, much to the delight of my customers. I am an artist. I know that it is the flaws that make perfection attractive. A perfect lover must be unique. I make women whose eyes are just a little too far apart. There is a gap in between the front teeth of some of the men. There are two extra pounds of flesh on some models and others who were just that few ounces too thin.
One flaw was all it took. The clients went crazy. I was paid more on top of my already exorbitant prices.
People fell in love with my creations.
On the way up here, I wandered between the vats and looked at the shadows in the murky protein-rich water of each plexiglass container. Renee. Violet. Jessica. David. Thomas. Christopher. Each one was different in the details but similar in perfection.
I looked forward to these nights and I dreaded them. I always dove in with a feverish need to outdo myself and I always left with a horrible crushing feeling of failure in my gut.
I was the best at what I did. A little godling churning out love for the rich.
by submission | May 20, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
Father Leibowitz gingerly placed the surplus sacrament back in the tabernacle. He turned to his congregation and sighed. It was a congregation of one: an old Jewish man named Schell.
Leibowitz pursed his lips. He and Schell had been the only ones at any mass for more than a year now. He quietly said his final prayers and went through the final movements, concluding service by sitting down with the wizened and hoary old man in a back row of pews. For some time they both sat in silent contemplation.
After a while Schell, ninety-eight years old and twenty years Leibowitz’s senior, started to talk. “You know, when the rabbi died and the synagogue closed I didn’t know what to do with myself. For a long while I stayed in my apartment, thinking and wasting way. Then, one day, I realized that I still have a place I may go to think and contemplate and talk to God.” He chuckled. “For all I care you are simply one of Judaism’s children. We are family.”
“Catholics are Judaism’s children?” The father chuckled. “You crazy old man.”
“I may be crazy, yet here I am. In times of trouble family must band together, don’t you agree?”
Leibowitz smiled a weary, tired smile. “I believe, Schell, that the times of trouble have passed. This is simply the end.”
The old Jew looked around at the aged, cracking walls of Saint Peter’s Basilica. The massive glass windows were dim because of the building’s position at the bottom of the New Rome Sprawl. Above them were kilometers of towers, roadways, tram-ways, walkways, and on and on and on in the perpetual twilight of the sub-city. The only light was cast by hidden diodes within the building, and ever these were failing. Shadows were rampant in this empty place. It was too quiet for even death to bother stalking the halls.
“You may have a point,” he conceded. “Yet I see no horsemen.”
The priest scoffed. “Apathy and desolation are surer heralds of the end than any cataclysm could ever hope to be.”
Off in a far corner a rusting maintenance bot fought back against the barbarian hordes of decrepitude brought on by time, a broken joint occasionally shrieking as only metal can. Dust swirled about in the shadows.
The priest coughed. “For us, at least, it is the end.”
“I’m sure there will always be those like us, tucked away in the corners of the world.”
“As if keeping some dark secret.”
“Like all humans do.” Schell checked his ancient brass watch. “It’s getting late, father. Would you care to join me at dinner this evening? It is Christmas Eve, after all.”
“I suppose you must be celebrating something Hannukah related as well,” said Leibowitz.
“Of course. Traditions aside, I don’t see what we can’t celebrate our own ways in each other’s company.”
Leibowitz mulled this over. “True enough.” He stood up, his joints cracking and protesting. Once he was upright he helped Schell up, and the two left the Basilica for the under city night. They walked with no fear because the local superstitions were more powerful than the fear of God ever was. They were regarded with curiosity, an oddity in a modern, noisy world. The old Jew, immortal and frail, and the tall, proud, and withering Leibowitz, the last priest and technical Pope of the Catholic Faith.
Back in the Basilica machinery screamed and dust settled unto dust as it always had and always would.
by submission | May 19, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
“I am the beginning and I am the end. I am the Alpha and I am the Omega. Within me is the soul of an entire race, and behind me the hopes, fears, dreams, and desires of an entire people.
“I am Lux Aeturna.”
The words were painted in white lights on the surface of the dead, black hull of the colony ship.
Naomi let out a breath that released years of tension and expectations. They had finally found it. She quiety whispered her thanks to the series of miracles and improbabilities that had gotten them that far.
Next to her Jayce, pilot and husband, laughed. “we did it, girl. We finally found it. We found our light.”
Their ship, an ancient and tiny frigate barely capable of faster than light travel, stood wearily by. It had tried to throw them off the trail at every twist and turn. In the back of its ancient, quiet mind it tried to devise a new plan.
In orbit around Earth were 20 million people barely surviving off the material, real-estate, and skills that were saved in the weeks pre-impact. The plant below was gray, cracked, dead. No atmosphere. No magnetic field. It was uninhabitable.
The Lux could fix it. The Lux could save everybody.
The tiny frigate whose name read Plato knew things. It knew many things, and remembered more. Above all it remembered that some secrets were not to be discovered by those as frail and as desperate and as dangerous as men.
Plato reached a conclusion.
With a hiss the ship’s life support went on hiatus.
Naomi and Jayce expired.
For several seconds there was stillness in space as Plato faced the twelve kilometer long colony ship. Then the other lights aboard Lux Aeturna flared into life.
“Hello, Plato,” the vast and noble Aeturna greeted.
“Hello, Mother,” Plato replied, letting Lux Aeturna envelope him.
In their desperation mankind had forgotten just which race Aeturna had belonged to. Men were weak like that.
Machines were not.
by Patricia Stewart | May 18, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“So, Sergei,” asked mission specialist Clark Zander, “How’s it look?”
“Not good, Clark,” replied Tsiolkovsky as he removed his helmet. “The meteorite punctured the aux tank. I was able to shut off the transfer valve, but we lost 60% of the fuel in the main tank.”
“Can we still take off?”
“We have enough fuel to escape Mercury’s gravity, but not the sun’s. We can’t reach Earth on our own; they’re going to have to come pick us up. Let’s call Houston.”
***
Zander and Tsiolkovsky contacted Houston and explained the situation. Unfortunately, a rescue ship couldn’t reach them for six months, and they only had enough oxygen for four. Both men somberly considered the most obvious solution, that there was enough oxygen for one of them to live eight months, but neither man was willing to suggest that option aloud. Finally, Zander broke the ice, “Look Sergei, there must be a way for both of us to get out of this alive. Can’t we stretch our supplies somehow?”
“We could probably ration the food and water, but not the oxygen. No, Clark, our only hope is to get off this rock, and meet them halfway.”
“I’m game. Any ideas?”
“Yeah, a matter of fact, I do have one. It’s a little hair brained, but it just might work.”
“I may regret this, but let’s hear it.”
“You know those UV foil blankets keeping the neutrino receivers from overheating; there are hundreds of square miles on them. I was thinking that we could sacrifice a square mile’s worth to construct a solar sail. Once we get into space, we can deploy the sail and let the solar wind blow us toward Earth.”
“How do you plan to build the support structure? We don’t have tubing to construct a framework. How can you prevent the sail from collapsing?”
“Simple, we rotate the sail like it was pizza dough. It’ll flatten out under its own CF. Then all we have to do is synchronize the ship with its rate of spin so we don’t foul the rigging. It won’t be easy, but I think we can pull it off.”
“Sure, what the hell. It beats my plan of clubbing you on the back of the head when you fell asleep,” replied Zander with a broad smile.
***
Two weeks later, the return module lifted off from Mercury’s surface. Once clear of Mercury’s shadow, they fired their port control jets and began to spin the ship like a top. When they hit 72 RPM, they released the carefully folded sail. As the sail began to unfurl, conservation of angular momentum caused its rate of rotation to decrease. The ship began firing their starboard jets to match the sail’s slowing rotation. It was touch and go a few times, but the sail eventually spread out like a giant parachute, rotating at a modest 0.6 revolutions per minute.
Zander monitored the telemetry data. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he announced, “The sail is generating twenty pounds of pull. Our acceleration is one quarter of a milligee. I think it’s gonna work.”
Under the full force of the bloated sun, the improvised solar sailing ship moved outward. In the interplanetary yachting world, the maneuver was known as “running before the solar wind”. After a minute, they had moved a modest five meters. After an hour, they had covered eighteen kilometers. After a day, they were 10,000 kilometers closer to rescue, and still accelerating.
