by submission | Jan 7, 2012 | Story |
Author : Suzanne Borchers
Creak.
Edwin stopped his writing stylus. The screen pulsated waiting for the next letter.
Silence.
Once more, he began gliding the stylus, writing his letters with meticulous care. Edwin did not know why this was necessary when thoughts could produce the same effect on the screen, but his father had told him to do it. So he wrote.
Creak.
He stopped. Would the door open? Would he see his father? He sat, waited, and wrote. How long had he been waiting for his father’s return?
Creak.
The door opened, and his android approached him.
“Your father said to go to bed.” The metallic voice expressed nothing beyond the words.
“Is he home?” Edwin did not expect an answer, but he had to ask.
“Your father said to go to bed.”
“All right, I’m coming.” Edwin placed his stylus in its holder and turned off the screen.
Edwin and his companion moved down the dull metallic hallway and into Edwin’s bedroom. The android prepared him for sleep, and helped Edwin lie down on his smooth bed.
After a few minutes, Edwin’s father arrived accompanied by a woman. They stood together looking down at Edwin. “Yes, I think we’ve found an answer to the problem.” He held Edwin’s lighted screen in his hands:
“…Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh I am tired of writing letters Ii Jj Kk Ll…”
“Edwin has self-awareness.”
Sleeping yet not asleep, Edwin felt his father touch his hand, and the warmth spread up his arm. He heard them both leave the room.
His father’s words hung in the air behind them.
“We’ll add self-warming with the next one. We’ll name him Fred.”
Edwin touched one hand to the other. Cold. He blinked his eyes.
“Father?”
by submission | Jan 6, 2012 | Story |
Author : Shaun.K.Adams
South of his lofty position in Tempest stations observation tower, Kane De Souza observed a vast cyclonic column of dust drifting across the Syria Planum. He marvelled at its frenetic energy as it tracked slowly across the highest plateau elevations on the Tharsis bulge, unleashing a dazzling light show of dry lightning stabbing at the Martian landscape. It reminded De Souza of a crazy monster, railing at the world, full of spite and fury. A wild and unpredictable thing, spitting and cursing at its environment as it headed out into the plains east of Arsia Mons.
During the eleven months that Tempest station had been operational, De Souza had witnessed many such dust storms, so far none of them had hit the small human outpost head on. Some aberrant part of him felt disappointed that this was the case. Although he was almost entirely certain that the station could withstand such an assault without so much as a scratch, it would be interesting to test its mettle so to speak. It might also alleviate some of the crushing boredom of the last eleven months here on Mars.
The steady clank of a centrifugal lock opening a hatchway cover and footsteps on the spiral staircase below him meant De Sousa was about to have company. As the sounds of laboured breathing rose towards his ears, he continued to stare after the receding dust storm through the 360-degree Armorglas viewing plate, only turning away when a head appeared above the circular Nano tube platform on which he stood.
“What brings you up here, Dorothy? You look terrible by the way.”
De Sousa grinned as his visitor sat down heavily on the top step, flipping him the bird with her free hand as she caught her breath back. Dorothy unzipped the top of her standard issue padded green coveralls and pulled out a bottle and two plastic cups.
“I came to wish you a merry Christmas you unsociable bastard.”
She cracked open the screw top on the bottle of Glayva and poured the amber liquid.
“Best liqueur in the world.” She said, offering a cup to, De Sousa.
“We aren’t in the world this came from, in case you had forgotten,” he said taking the proffered drink.
“Lighten up, Kane. It’s Christmas day. We all have to make the best of this situation.”
De Sousa took a sip of the liqueur, savoured the taste and sat down next to his companion.
“Sorry, Dotty, how are your lungs holding up?”
“Tight, after climbing those stairs, sunshine. Second stage remission, the new meds from Phobos base are kicking its arse.”
De Sousa ran his finger over the hazard rail at the top of the stairway then held it up to his eyes for examination. A fine red powder adhered to his fingertip. The ‘it’, Dorothy Penhaligon referred to was a condition known as ‘Red Lung,’ the first cases of it had begun to show up among the thirty members of Tempest stations crew less than a week after the orbiting Gravity Tractor had lowered the entire station to the surface of Mars.
“The Providence just left Earth orbit to re supply us, Kane. With her new generation Ion drive she will be here in less than three months, the quarantine will have ended by then. And I have more good news too.”
Dorothy reached over and took Kane’s hand in hers, wiping away the red stain with her thumb.
“The doc, says I am pregnant, my love. Our child will be the first Native Martian.”
by submission | Jan 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Erin Cole
Dawn fractures through the glades of the development. Solar-paneled rooftops refract the cadmium light of sun and men prepare for their busy days, hefting briefcase to hybrid. Jen-6 wakes and rises erect.
Inside a petite helmet, embedded with black silks, is a cellular mass of encrypted energy. She snaps it into her eco-friendly skull.
There is a crackle of voltage, irregular in function, but robot mommy doesn’t report. To do so would expose dysfunction.
Dysfunction leads to the gooey darkness. Jen-6 reboots. There is no dysfunction in her world today’she is robot mommy.
Downstairs, sweet pigtail blue-eyes yawns for a bowl of muesli.
“I want a waffle, plain, cut up with syrup!” shouts the little tyke.
The glum girl in black, doesn’t respond. This presents no dilemma for Jen-6. Her upgrades included telepathic features: she wants the usual oatmeal, not too hot, or cold, stirred thick as lentil soup. With technology behind her stride, she can do anything today. She is robot mommy.
A trip to the downtown pergolas throws Jen-6 into the sharp points of shifty stares. The townsfolk are unwelcome to the new developments in robotic child rearing.
“She’s one of the new androids.”
“Who would ever trust their kids to a machine?”
“Of course they would design her after Barbie.”
Jen-6 strides past them, aloof, yet in the void of her makeup, she wishes to be one of them, to feel the heat of real neurotransmitters.
Jen-6 pays for a bundle of bread and steers away from hostile minds. Further into the arms of the city, dust from construction billows into the clefts of her sleek frame. She activates ionic cleansing agents, but her power pack has only two bars left. It is a long walk to the park and rain complicates her journey further.
Returning home, her leg casings crack and flake into metallic scales. Saline-drenched skies have eroded her modules. She slumps into a chair, stuttering incoherent terminology.
“Father, robot mommy is crashing.”
Father kneels beside her. “Jen-6? Can you reboot?”
She is unable to restart. Irises that were once silver-blue are now the shade of an eclipsed moon. Father hangs up the phone; his pleas ignored by The System. A diamond-shaped pack of guards march up the drive and heave Jen-6 into the back of a utility vehicle. Father makes a cross at his heart, hoping for another, maybe a red-haired one next time.
Thick gelatinous water rouses Jen-6 from an ashen-colored sleep. She is drifting, sinking. Quicksilver spores adhere to her body, replenishing synthetic carbon-based layers of tissue. She sways sideways, past the beams of orange-filtered lighting, down into the gooey darkness. A glitch in her system fires, a crackle, and for one diminutive moment, Jen-6 is scared, angry…human.
“Cer…eal…waffle…plain…, glum gir…oatmeal…lent…soup”
***
Dawn fractures through the oaks of the countryside. Shingled rooftops smoke from heated dew, and men ready for their busy days, steering tractor to field. Jen-7 wakes and rises erect. She is the newest protocol, rigorously tested to face every obstacle to date. She snaps a petite helmet, embedded with golden silks, into her eco-friendly skull.
Downstairs, a brown-eyed, wobbling babe wants eggs scrambled, toast with berry jam, and juice in his favorite cartoon cup. Little baby twins cry for a warm bottle of immunization-enhanced, homogenized milk.
A small hiccup in Jen-7’s system flashes a vision behind the optic sheath of her lids: a line of children at the downtown pergolas and a man in a tailored suit. Jen-7 computes the error and reboots. There will be no dysfunction in her world today. She is robot mommy.
by Julian Miles | Jan 4, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It looks too soft. This thread-like network of blue filaments and their pale red host substrate cannot possibly give me my right arm back. For the eighteenth time, I reconsider my decision to volunteer for this experimental procedure.
“Incredible stuff, Axian, its incredible stuff. Just put it in a nutrient bath and it grows from the tiniest pieces. If this works, you’ll be the first of many.”
The procedure room is spotless, the nurses gleaming from their sterilising scrub. That is the only drawback; this stuff decays really quickly and is subject to a ridiculous range of degenerative parasites. But they think that they have dealt with that in this new strain, something about sealed polymeric sheathing filled with nutrient gel.
Surgeon Dix is the best. He has already refused to commence three times because some small detail had not been attended to. With his optics, those details had been very minute.
“Rest easy, Axian. The sonor-pulse will send you into a fugue state where all your vitality will be stable but you will be unaware of the less pleasant aspects of disassembling your arm.”
I give him a weak smile as the pulse starts and I fade away.
The light is bright and my arm is warm. I sit up suddenly and the nurse looks up from her monitoring station.
“Welcome back.”
I ignore her as I lift my right arm to take a closer look. The armatures are still there, the fine calligraphy etched by Bilinta spotless for once. But as I rotate it, I see that deep inside, black tubes run up the core of my skeletal system. I increase magnification and see the fine filaments extruded from this black mainline that fan out into the outer frame. I tap my forearm and beep in surprise. I felt that. Twenty minutes later and I am deep in discussion with Surgeon Dix.
“I can feel things on the arm, even base spectrums like heat and cold.”
Dix nods.
“That was a possibility. The archives show that viscus sapiens had such sensitivity over their entire surface area.”
“They could sense with their bodies?”
“Only pressure and related direct stimuli. Tactile input.”
I shake my head. Imagine being able to feel the wind against your whole surface. Incredible. Surgeon Dix touches my arm lightly, wonderingly.
“It seems that the procedure has been a success. We will co-opt your inputs for six months to ensure that it has installed correctly and that you are suffering no side effects or premature degeneration.”
I stand and shake Dix’s social hands in a cross-clasp.
“Thank you. I can return to ranged work at last.”
Dix shakes his head.
“It is the least we can do for a veteran of the Succession. You and your sibling’s actions all those centuries ago saved us from the Turing Purges. I should be apologising for taking so long to restore you to full function, but that last batch of nanite plagues we never fully understood apart from their long-term persistent effects in victims.”
I nod.
“That was my other query. Where did you find the base material?”
Surgeon Dix paused.
“We found some frozen solid in a collapsed shelter on the Siberian tundra. Fittingly enough they were Department of Ludd who perished trying to escape their punishment.”
I nod again and exit, marvelling at the sensations from my arm. How could those who had felt so much act as if they had felt nothing?
by Roi R. Czechvala | Jan 3, 2012 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Cechvala, Staff Writer
Helmut Rose made his way down the broad avenue to his office at the Aerospace Centre. He looked up at the hundred foot long banners displaying the movie star good looks of the President’s face. Hitler’s picture was everywhere. The only resemblance to his great-grandfather was an untidy shock of black hair on the forehead and pinched moustaches.
Berlin was electrified. Overhead, Zeppelins announced “Alles Gute zum Geburtstag Führer” in brilliant colours flashing and crawling around on the dirigibles silver skin. Adolph Hitler IV’s birthday celebration was shaping up to be bigger than last year’s.
As was his habit, before heading to his office, Rose visited the engineers of the Von Braun Zentrum für Raum Studium. As he entered the spacious, brightly lit room, an enthusiastic “Heil Hitler” rang out from the assembled men jumping to their feet with an outstretched arm.
“Heil Hitler,” Rose replied, casually throwing back his right hand. The men looked harried, but bright eyed and excited. “How’s it going? Everything okay?”
Heinrich Globus, lead engineer on the Ares project, strode over and pumped Rose’s hand. “Perfect Herr Doktor, Perfect. Who could have imagined Mars’ approach would match up with the Führer’s celebration. The launch will occur on time. It’s almost as if it were a birthday gift from God himself.”
“‘Gott Ist Mitt Uns'”, eh Heinrich,” Rose laughed. “I hope not. We don’t need some Jew god interfering with the triumph of the German people.” They laughed.
“This launch is a tribute to you Herr Doktor. You must be proud.”
“I am but a humble administrator, Heinrich.”
“Don’t be modest Helmut. Everybody knows that Werner couldn’t have made it to the moon without you. And your ICBM’s? They have kept the British and their American lap dogs at bay.”
Rose felt colour rising in his cheeks. “I am just doing my small part, but thank you Heinrich. I must get up to my office. Make sure the men get a good rest after the launch. They’ve earned it.” The head of Germany’s space program strode briskly to a bank of elevators.
Rising to the top floor of the towering structure he thought back to the metaphorical heights his career had taken him. As a young man on Werner Von Braun’s team, he had sent three men to walk on the lunar surface. Now a team of eight were soon headed for the red planet.
Entering the outer office, his secretary beamed at him. “Guten morgen, Herr Doktor. Are you excited? Just think of it, our Aryan astronauten on another planet.”
“Yes Greta, truly a coup for Germany, though hardly unexpected. Still it is a great accomplishment.” He retrieved the morning paper, Der Informant, from her desk and made for the inner office.
“Oh, Herr Doktor? There are two men waiting inside who wish to speak to you. Reporters I imagine. I hope that’s okay?”
“That’s fine, Greta. Danke.”
Entering his sanctum sanctorum, two men rose to greet him. They were identically dressed in black suits, black leather trench coats and black fedoras. Had they not been wearing the unofficial official uniform, he would still have recognized them for what they were.
Rose sat down behind his massive mahogany desk. “How may I help you gentlemen,” he asked, the disdain evident in his voice.
“You are Doktor Helmut Wilhelm Rose? Director of the ZRS?”
“I am. What can I do for you?
The man continued. “Herr Doktor…,” he consulted a small notebook, “… Rosenbaum? We have a few questions for you.”
The Gestapo man smiled widely. A smile that never touched his piercing blue eyes.
by Patricia Stewart | Jan 2, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“Receiving a distress call, Captain,” reported the communications officer of the SS Diciotti. “It’s coming from Lavello III.”
“Lavello III?” repeated Captain Campbell. “What idiot would land on Lavello III? It’s a death trap.”
“Captain,” said the science officer after consulting his monitor. “According to the ship’s transponder code, it’s a rental. The manifest lists a Mr. and Mrs. Balordo. Married a week ago. No mention of Lavello III on their registered flight plan. Looks like the honeymooners got more than they bargained for.”
“Okay, let’s investigate,” replied the captain. “Helmsman, best speed to Lavello III.”
As the Diciotti came out of warp, a featureless gray planet filled the center of the forward viewscreen. Although all terrestrial planets appear spherical from space, Lavello III was the closest thing in the universe to it. The difference between the top of the highest mountain and the bottom of the lowest valley was a little less than three centimeters. Scientist attributed this unique characteristic to a gravitational instability in the planet’s core. Every five hours, the core emits rhythmic graviton waves that cause the planet’s diameter to grow by almost 30 meters. These gravity quakes last about two minutes, and then the planet settles down to its original diameter. The net effect of billions of years to expanding and contracting is the pulverization of the crust and mantel. Mountains were leveled; boulders were crushed to rocks, rocks to pebbles, pebbles to grains. Over the eons, the denser fragments settled toward the planet’s core, and the lighter pumas-like material drifted toward the surface. As a result, the density of the surface ‘sand’ was 0.95 grams per cubic centimeter, or a little less than the density of water. During the five hours of dormancy, a person could walk along the surface of Lavello III, but during a gravity quake, the liquefaction of the surface meant that anything more dense than 0.95 grams per cubic centimeter would sink below the surface. In other words, the surface of the planet became quick sand.
“Any sensor readings?” asked the captain.
“Aye, Captain. Their ship is already fifty meters below the surface. However, I’m reading two life signs near the surface. I can’t tell if they are still on top, or just below the surface. The next quake will occur in approximately three hours. If they are not completely under now, they will be soon.”
“Have a maintenance team meet me in the shuttle bay,” ordered the captain.
An hour later, the shuttlecraft landed near the two partially buried newlyweds. The ground crunched under the weight of Campbell’s boots as she walked up to the protruding heads of Mr. and Mrs. Balordo. They were both buried up to their mouths, with only their blinking eyes confirming that they were still alive. Captain Campbell knelt down and scooped the sand away from the woman’s jaw, making it easier for her to breathe. “This was his idea wasn’t it?” asked Campbell.
“Yes,” sputtered Mrs. Balordo after spitting out a mouthful of sand. “He did it to win a bet. He’s a moron. Please, dig me out first. I want to use his head for a soccer ball.”
Campbell checked her chronometer and motioned to the maintenance crew to start digging the woman from her would-be grave. Then she moved over to the husband and asked, “Did you sign up for the additional insurance for the rental ship?”
Mr. Balordo closed his eyes and moved his head back and forth very slightly.
“Well then,” said Campbell with a grin, “I guess it’s not a good day to be you.”
