by Stephen R. Smith | Mar 21, 2011 | Story
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.
by submission | Mar 20, 2011 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
The sky is bright, not noonday bright but rather like the flickering of old fluorescent tubes. You can make out clouds against the light, a sort of dirty grey, but nothing beyond them. No stars any more.
Everyone’s panicking, and I’m not sure why I’m not. I’m just sat on the roof to watch the end. Nothing I can do now, really.
It’s strange how quick everything changed and the end came. This time last year we were happy and ignorant at the bottom of our gravity well, not knowing about the universe we lived in. Then, all of a sudden we detected signals from alien life forms. Not one, but multiple ones.
This provoked the panic you might expect, but not as much as what these aliens had to say.
See, when I said signals from alien life forms, I was trying to be precise. Not alien worlds, just their inhabitants, their refugees. Over the last few decades, their planets had been destroyed at an ever increasing pace. Only those with FTL drives had made it out as something ate up entire solar systems and replaced them with nothing. They pointed out their former worlds to us. Their stars still shone in our sky, as they had outpaced the light of their own destruction.
From all over the galaxy and beyond, we saw refugees, all heading towards Earth, for one simple and horrible reason: Whatever was happening was focused on us: the universe was a contracting sphere around our solar system, and eventually around our planet.
The strangest part was that one group of refugees claimed to know why. They were a technomystic sect from the opposite spiral arm to our own, and they claimed to have had a vision of the cause of all this.
It was a man called Ambrose Jones. He was born to middle class parents, had an unremarkable time at school, got a job as a supermarket manager, married a girl who grew up two streets away from him, and died twenty years ago of pancreatic cancer. One small, utterly unremarkable life.
According to the technomystics, whatever had created the universe created it to see this one life, and having seen it, they were shutting everything down.
The sun went last month. The hard radiation from its death would probably have killed us all, except that, as the whiteness took it over, the radiation went with it. At some level I think something wanted us around for the end.
The last cloud I could see just drifted upwards, hit the whiteness, and vanished. As I lie here and wait, something funny just crossed my mind.
Everything happened for a reason.
by submission | Mar 19, 2011 | Story
Author : John Wallace
The subtle, pulsing “bing” alert of an unread MindMessage — MM for short — punctuated the Jazz-Trance track she was listening to through her MindTunes channel stream. She switched to the chatView window on her interface, minimizing the music to the back of her mind.
“What u doin’ babe?” The message blinked until she read it and minimized their chat log.
She patted the soil above the seeds and wiped dirt on her dress. She sent him an eyeView link to show him the neatly packed dirt in the beige ceramic pot with the hairline crack that she’d picked up at an estate sale in her mother’s neighborhood.
“What do u think, hun?” she MMed, proudly carrying the pot into the house where she set it on an appliance.
“Looks dirty. Feelin’ dirty?” he asked lazily. He lay on their bed, dreamily sleepWatching tele-streams.
“Dirty look,” she replied.
“Come 2 bed. I wanna (.)(.) u,” he MMed.
She sighed and rolled her eyes to the right, inadvertently logging off the MindLink server. She blinked rapidly and looked left, accessing the login screen, and entered her saccade passpattern. After IntelLaunching chatView, she MMed: “I’m doin’ stuff, dude. 1 sec.”
She uploaded the seeds’ grow-codes to the appliance and sent it the thought+controls “water” & “light.” The appliance wet the illuminated soil with H2O+.
He MMed a flirticon with a suggestive eyeView link.
She giggled. “Can’t. I’m makin’ ur dinner.”
“Whatjamakin’?”
“Iamakin’ pasta.” She put dried linguine into a steam drawer in the appliance. “Wanna help? U can watch the plant grow.”
“hahaha. I’m fine thanks. Watch me grow?”
“L8er, perv.”
“Ur 2 pure :p”
He opened his eyeView and sat up. “Eat please? :^D~ So hungry!” He rose from the bed and stretched.
“In a sec.”
She sent another eyeView link when the noodles were done and held up the bowl to show off her accomplishment. “Voyez ceci!” she exclaimed.
“È ‘presto’, actually,” he replied after searching the translation. “Quando servite il linguine,” he added immodestly as he silently entered the room behind her.
“Dirt looks good,” he MMed and then softly touched her neck. Startled, she hit him with her elbow and nearly dropped the noodles.
“It’s real basil 4 pesto, sneaky,” she MMed, leaning back against him.
“Yum. Xcited,” he MMed. “I’ve never had basil b4.”
Her reply was lost when the MindLink server crashed abruptly for the third time that week. They blinked and looked left repeatedly, trying to log on. They squinted as their eyes adjusted to the unfiltered light of the everyday world.
“Stupid MindLink,” he spoke. “We’re switching servers. I’m sick of these dropouts.”
She nodded, pulling his arms around her. They watched the motionless soil intently.
“How long’s it take?” he asked, pointing at the pot.
“Dunno,” she replied. “Forever. It’s been like five minutes.”
by submission | Mar 18, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
This is how it ends.
I turn the corner with coffees for us and everything, everything, is on the front yard. I don’t know how she did it (I wasn’t gone long) or how she did it (I thought she loved me). My eyes race over it all and stop at the porch, at her standing there.
I had never dated outside of the Vim Catal and never thought I would. This girl, this Earth girl, convinced me it could work. Her people seemed to see the value of objects as we did; she did not seem to be an exception.
No appreciator of things could throw a complete set of Dorbid Melume’s vidis onto a front yard, a place where they could not hope to avoid scratches, or complete disruption from their proximity to the equally cast out vintage Wultonizers even now sending up a small shower of sparks as they spill out of their encasing Braxe fields.
How could I gather her up in all of my arms after this? How would I feel holding the woman who carelessly scattered my many signed hololids, objects expressive of my earliest attempts at discernment and preservation? How could I forget that in my arms I held the one responsible for the degradation of the only existing near mint copy of Uttie’s “If Space Be My Home” to merely good? Wouldn’t I be haunted in such a moment by images of a rare bust of Prialc, Space Emperor for twenty seven seconds, sinking into the fertile soil of our Ohio?
Perhps I am not meant to hold her again. Her eyes are as steely as Yorka Tleuz’s on the cover of the inaugural issue of ReWtIk, likewise facing me as its spine bends to cracking while I look up and away from it. The sky is dark, very dark. There is, as the Earthers say, a strong chance of showers. This can only be intentional. Can this be a test? It looks like a goodbye, a goodbye with teeth, and not the little things the humans call teeth.
She was the one to draw me in. Her dwelling had copious amounts of unused space, I liked that about her. Her muted interest in collecting was not so strong as to interfere with my own, also a plus. All about her person hung the most pronounced loveliness, this likely sealing the deal. Many times she questioned her own beauty, doubting it for some unknown reason. It was difficult, in these times, to not bring up the general aesthetic shortcomings of humans as a whole.
Rain drops strike my top tuft. A decision is required. I take it all in with a deep breath of Ohio air. I take it all in and hold it, inscribing a full sense memory. Only when the completed nub drops into my back pouch do I act. I reach down with my non-coffee holding middle arms and stretch out the atavistic gliding membrane unique to my federated clan. The winds of the advancing storm carry me onto the porch. Her expression changes. Either she sees that there is so much more to me or she really wants the coffee I hold out to her, still steaming.
I can’t know what’s behind her eyes as I can the tears out front. I reply in kind. She grabs one of my elbows and pulls me into the house with her; it looks to be one hell of a storm. I pull the door closed behind us.
This is how it begins.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 17, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
He reeled out of the stinking alley into me.
He was nearly eight feet tall and looked too skinny to stand. His hair was several different colours but as I looked at it more closely, it appeared to be made of metal. It sparked just after he bumped into me and the colours in it shimmered and changed like the wings of a beetle.
I was fixated on that until I noticed his two extra arms and his tail. I say ‘his’ because his genitals were exposed. He was wearing what appeared to be tight chaps and a red cellophane cardigan.
If he hadn’t been staring into my eyes and grabbing my shoulders, I would have backed quickly away from him like everyone else on the sidewalk did.
“Pour gras que serachi marta kursk trench ma jakatra, triestin?” he screamed at me. He looked at me, waiting for an answer.
“Uh, what?” I said.
“Oh. I see. English. Okay. What day is it?” he said to me. His breath smelled like over-ripe strawberries.
“Uh, Wednesday?” I answered.
He looked at me with that expression like he didn’t understand my language again. He looked at a device on his wrist. I guessed it was a translator. He acted like it was broken. He spoke again, louder and more slowly this time,
“What day is it? Centrus? Martus?” he said.
“Wednesday.” I said back to him.
He shook his head and looked behind him into the alley. There were sounds of a struggle and some impossible sound. If I had to describe it, it was like a sheet of glass being ripped in half. It sounded like something pivotal to reality was being split by force.
“What the DATE, then? The DATE? It’s supposed to be the 46th! Is that correct?” he yelled.
“46th? That’s not….it’s the 13th. March the 13th.” I answered.
“Maaaaaarch” he said and looked at me as if to confirm that he’d pronounced it correctly. I nodded. He looked at his wrist translator in terrified frustration. I realized that his eyes were different colours and that they never blinked at the same time. First one, then the other. Every time.
“Posska DAMMIT!” he yelled and let me go. He seemed to realize that even though I’d spoken to him in the correct language, my information was useless to him.
It was like he was a time-traveler except his frame of reference was useless at his destination.
There was a blue glow from the alley. The traveler tucked in all four of his arms and ducked into the crowd. It didn’t help.
Tentacles shot out of the alley and entered the traveller’s back. He was dragged back to the alley’s entrance. He spread his arms wide and grabbed the bricks on either side of the entrance with his impossibly long arms, forming a giant X. He looked at me with clenched teeth. His watch device broke and fell off his wrist. He glanced at it and nodded towards me.
“Remember-” he said but a charge of energy came through the tentacles and he shuddered. He was lifted into the air for a moment before disappearing quickly into the shadows of the alley.
There was the sound of thunder and then a sound of reality zipping itself up.
People around me kept on walking. I lay on the sidewalk looking at the entrance of the alley. I looked at the wrist device the traveler had dropped. I scuttled forward, picked it up and brought it home.
I’m looking at it right now, daring myself to try it on.
by submission | Mar 16, 2011 | Story
Author : Jordan Whicker
We’d been asking the wrong question all along.
It was first posed by some fringe intellectuals: “Do they feel pain?” Initial research showed that yes, stimuli that might be regarded as ‘painful’ would invoke any number of reactions that could be described as self-preservatory. The breadth of these reactions even raised some eyebrows in the academic world and garnered one or two op-ed pieces in some of the more liberal media outlets. Aside from the canonically expected mechanisms like flinching and defensive posturing, a whole subset of pheromonic and what could only be described as supra-neural – neural firings that existed within the organism but at the same time beyond it – illustrated the very depths of our ignorance on this particular topic.
Research continued at a snail’s pace after that point, funded mainly by the type of eccentrics who were likely to have read past the headline of the spattering of articles that actually made it to print. Yellow donate buttons nestled into homepage corners and direct appeals from a plethora of sites that together didn’t garnish one-thousandth the traffic of a celebrity gossip blog represented humanity’s devotion to the fledgling field. Not that this matters, necessarily, as even if we reallocated the entire budget of the Department of Defense and conscripted every biologist, chemist and physicist in the country would we have begun to ask the right question in time. A question that after the fact seems as clear as day and even easier to answer: “Do they feel anger?”
Yes, they do. We know that now.
For many thousands of years we have fine tuned our dominance over the beasts of the earth. Cows bred too fat and too apathetic to move at more than a trot. Pigs confined to one room prisons, their madness and that of those around them the only available distraction. Chickens that reach slaughtering weight before they have time to grow bored of their confinements. Although numerous, none of them ever posed us a threat.
We slipped, though. Let them into our neighborhoods, cultivated them in our parks and around our schools. Along our highways and surrounding our airports. There is nowhere safe left – nor was there anywhere that ever really was.
We all remember the morning that the trees awoke. Those few of us that still live, at least.
