by submission | Dec 3, 2011 | Story |
Author : Robert Vennell
I stumble down the road through the hazy tungsten half-light. Padded headphones suck out the ambient noise and replace it with the hum of distorted guitars.
An empty street, a dim coating of artificial light and the buzz of electric instruments.
I have to remind myself I’m really here. It feels like I’ve withdrawn into some back-room in my head, and am now watching my life play out through my eyes, as if it were happening to someone else.
From this vantage point i begin to speculate on what a bizarre and unnatural circumstance this is. That on a small planet orbiting a relatively small sun in an ordinary solar system on the outskirts of a galaxy like any other; a bipedal primate such as myself is walking down paved roads illuminated by synthetic lights listening to recordings of manufactured music.
In the light of these thoughts I can’t help but feel greatly pessimistic about humanity’s chances. Surely a species that no longer concerns itself with its own survival cannot exist indefinitely.
I turn the corner and press on, no particular destination in mind. A white cat stalks across the road, catches sight of me and then bolts off in the opposite direction. It occurs to me that there the other species that inhabit our planet are constantly engaged in a struggle for survival, and yet to we privileged homo sapiens born into developed nations surviving is easy. To meet the challenges of life the human brain underwent rapid expansion in brain capacity to the point where we have developed societies and structures that render the struggle for survival almost irrelevant. Now the hard part is trying to keep those advanced brains of ours constantly entertained and stimulated.
From the moment we wake up in the morning to when we go to sleep at night our minds are occupied not with things to aid our survival but things to keep us from boredom. Tasks and jobs we can do so that our lives can have purpose and meaning. Television, movies, music, literature; things we can consume to keep our brains active and ticking over.
I wonder if such an unnatural system can sustain itself.
A street light catches my eye. It is flickering and buzzing, and eventually it burns itself out and the street is cloaked in darkness.
Suddenly my brain feels stuffy, the constant pounding of music in my ears aggravating and i take my headphones off and revel in the cool breeze rushing against my ears. Reconnecting with the sounds of the world around me, i feel like I’ve slipped back into my body for a time.
My dreamy speculations about the fate of the world seem dramatic and unimportant now. I amble off towards a distant street light, reassuring myself i will go to bed earlier in future.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 2, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I am too old to enjoy the future. I am physically unable to.
People, like older trees and metal from the ground, could not be retro-engineered. Transporters were finally here but everyone who had dreamed of their existence could not use them. Anyone already born at the moment of their invention were forever denied the use of them.
It was a magic man-made molecule. A destabilizer, a cataloguer, and a quantum anchor pairing that, when activated, allowed for a temporal reversal field to happen to all particles attached to its field. Basically, one pressed ‘play’ and the object with these designer molecules took itself apart down to the base level. When the completion trigger was transmitted to a sister pad, it activated a ‘rewind’ function on the other half of the quantum anchor pairing, making the object build itself again by performing the actions backwards in time. The time debt repaid itself to the trillisecond and the universe remained in balance.
In effect, it made transporters a reality.
The only hitch was that transportable objects needed to be manufactured from the base up with the molecules embedded into their chains. This presented no problem to ferroplastics, ceramics and chemical compound agents which were the basis for most building materials and household utensils destined for the moons or the outer rim.
It was a simple operation to have the molecules chemically bonded into the DNA chains of an embryo but only in the first trimester. A new generation of people were being created with the ability to flit between transporters both on Earth and her fifteen colonies in the solar system. It worked for other biologicals as well. NuMeat and ReFish were plentiful among the planets.
The rest of us were planet-locked.
Cargo slingships pushed Gs that would crush a regular human, let alone an old one like me. Passenger ships were fewer and fewer in number with the new generation’s ability to transport instantly. It drove ticket prices into a cost bracket only the superrich could afford. And I was not rich. I could never leave Earth and even when traveling around my own world, I was restricted to fuel-burning planes and buses with the other old people.
I’ve read about getting old. How events around you seem to speed up. How life gets harder and faster while your ability to deal with it weakens. I feel that it must be more apparent now than ever before in the history of mankind.
I am not merely slow. I am going extinct. The other seniors and I are the last few remaining members of a pruned branch of the human race. Airports and bus stations are only for the aging and the already ancient.
We have an official classification now. While the rest of humanity is still referred to as homo sapien, we have been re-designated as homo tardus. Slow humans. The young ones simply call us ‘tards.
It is humiliating to have to move so slowly. I dearly wished to be a part of a future with transporters and now that it’s happened, I have my nose pressed against the glass with no ability to take part. Myself and the other science fiction fans who have lived to this moment are cursing our longevity, growing bitter.
We take trips together and huddle in our apartments, watching vintage science fiction shows using antique ‘DVD players’ and 2D ‘televisions’ with tears in our eyes as our numbers dwindle.
by Julian Miles | Dec 1, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Seventeen days to travel two kilometres through the most extreme security ever deployed. My rations are finished and I have drunk the last of my urine. The moon is bright yet anyone monitoring the meeting hall roof would find nothing. The scions of Iga have not been lax in their attention to the arts of the unseen.
I reach down to crush the vials filled with a cocktail of combat drugs that replaced my testes. With a rush of false invincibility they bring me to a state of readiness alien to any except followers of my ryu. Even in these times of star-spanning technological dominance, there is still a need for men of dedication and purpose.
Below me, ‘Mad Mike’ Santori hosts a gathering of his elite: officers and brutal men of less honour than garbage collectors. I see him step out in front of them and it is time for the pretenders to realise their unworthiness. I roll forward to smash through the crystal panes, showering those below in razor-sharp shards as I drop twenty metres to the floor and kill twelve men on the way down. Graphene tipped caseless deforming rounds cut through their expensive ballistic armour as if it were cheap cloth. I land and roll, continuing to pick off those with range weapons.
Another thirty-eight shots and they are a further thirty-four men down. The door guard enters to deal with me. He looks like a monstrous mechanical samurai in his powered armour. I wait until he fires his pulse cannon before running in an arc that curves in front of the greatest concentrations of my opponents. He fires in bursts with deflection for where I should be for someone with only enhanced speed. He succeeds admirably in wreaking havoc amongst those he tries to protect before I leap six metres to descend on him; my sword screaming as air molecules part before its single-use molecularly aligned edge. I bisect him from crown to right knee before rolling and coming up in a leap that lands me in the remaining cluster. They grin and ready their weapons, then die as I execute a flawless ‘Eight Gates’: a movement created centuries ago to kill an octet of surrounding opponents. It has not lost its efficacy.
I am kicked five metres into a pillar by an absolute brute. My reinforced bones dissipate the point of impact damage and my sealed backpack takes the blow from the pillar on its shock fields. I use the rebound to speed shurikens through his eyes.
As I return to the centre of the hall, the doors crash open and troops pour in. Mad Mike laughs as I use every weapon and technique. In the end, I only kill a hundred and seventy-three of them. He has thousands. They surround me, crowding the hall and the grounds outside to see the lunatic who dared to strike at their leader. He steps forward, katana held lazily.
“You fool. Did you think to kill me here, in my stronghold?”
“Never. I am assured that you will kill yourself.”
He sneers and with a passable flourish runs me through five times, wrenching the last so my intestines spill onto the floor, the intricate webbing of polymer reinforcing grey against the crimson.
I feel dizzy as my blood deserts me and I take a breath before my heart stops. Heightened awareness feels the coupling release in my backpack as the system detects my lack of heartbeat. I look up at the moon through the shattered panes and whisper “Iga” as the six kiloton S-nuke detonates.
by submission | Nov 30, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Jopek
A man lies gripping a slowly tumbling boulder of ice and stares into the distance of space.
His broken femur pokes sharply into the material of his white skinsuit threatening to rupture it. His foot and leg are numb, his boot full of thickening blood. Here, deep in the planetary rings, the light is weak and the shifting ice unnerves him. In his concussed state waves of vertigo sweep over him, making orientation painful.
His spaceship will be crossing the planet’s terminus soon, allowing him perhaps one more chance at rendezvousing with it. An explosion has ripped the jetpack from his back and shredded the sample bags he was towing. Now he can only improvise a method of propulsion by cannibalizing his remaining suit pressure.
He’d been trailing Sharon back to the ship when the explosion flung them apart. She had nearly reached the airlock. Twice already he has glimpsed her body for scant seconds before she is eclipsed by the drifting ice fragments.
He can make one last effort to try and reach the ship when it comes about its orbit again, although he has no idea how badly damaged it is. He sights the blue corona of the ship’s tail flare and tracks it unsteadily.
Her body appears then in his peripheral vision, emerging from the ice field, floating amidst mangled metal and accretion stones. As he gapes, suddenly a pocket opens, a random confluence of space with her at its center. The scarlet bloom splashed across her torso is punctuated by the bright yellow lumishaft protruding obscenely from her chest. The lumishaft has activated upon impact and splays morose yellow light in all directions.
He finds the ship again, now arcing towards its closest approach. Through blurred eyes he watches her broken body drifting closer. He feels like he is falling, falling, falling, but the ship is nearly there. Nearly. The ship is coming for him — she is coming for him. The watery reflection of red and yellow in his eyes is joined by the shocking blue of plasma thrusters.
A man lies gripping a slowly tumbling boulder of ice and stares into the distance of space.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Nov 29, 2011 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
The music was deafening. New wave fusion jazz. Whatever the fuck that is. I had an “appointment” with Vinnie “The Fag” Scarpacci. Most men would have been pissed to have a moniker like that. Some would kill you for even whispering it. Not Vinnie. He loved it. He embraced it. He flaunted it by hanging out in shitholes like this. Places that would make the most prissy nancy boy cringe. Weird thing is, the Fag wasn’t even gay. I didn’t care, I was here to collect and one way or another, Vinnie was going to pay.
I found him in a corner booth playing his part to the hilt surrounded by fawning tinkerboys heavily rouged with three inch lashes. “You, you and you, MOVE,” I ordered, jabbing a calloused finger in their simpering faces. They vamoosed like rainbow leaves in a hurricane.
“No need to be rude, Max. Please have a seat. Can I get you something?” He raised a deco style martini glass to his lipsticked mouth. It was filled with a light green fluid. An appletini most likely. The guy sure played it to the hilt.
“Cut the act Vinnie, you know why I am here,” I pulled the lapel of my duster aside to show him the Desert Eagle I carried in a shoulder rig. Even for a guy my size it was hard to conceal that cannon.
All emotion dropped from his eyes. I saw the look that made lesser men shit themselves in fear. I had forgotten about Vinnie’s other nickname, the “Belt Butcher”. He earned that title when he was jumping claims in the asteroids. “Listen you little shit. I can have you chopped into little pieces and fed to your fucking family right before I have molten lead poured into their eyes and ears. Capisci?
He couldn’t scare me. I told him so. He talked pretty tough for a faggot. I told him that too. He didn’t know I had another piece under the table aimed at his fat gut. This I also told him.
“There is something you don’t know, you filthy Russian pig fucker.” He pulled up his sleeve to reveal the phone tattooed on his forearm.
“What are you going to do, call for a shining night to come to your rescue, Princess? Call in your goons to kill me,” I sneered
“I wouldn’t kill you, Max. I like you to much.” He jabbed a button on his hairy arm with a perfectly manicured finger.
The last thing I saw before I blacked out from excruciating pain was a smile that would have made a shark piss itself.
“Max? Wakey Wakey.” Vinie’s words sounded like they were coming from within my skull.
“Feeling Okay?”
No, I wasn’t. I couldn’t get my eyes to focus. From one eye I saw Vinnie’s bloated face, from the other I saw the door of a strange room. I couldn’t get them to focus on the same spot. I felt like I was cross eyed and under water.
“How do you like your new home?”
New home? What was he talking about? I tried to speak but couldn’t. “I’m paralyzed,” I thought.
“Want to see?”
Vinnie held up a mirror. All I could see were two eyes connected to a naked brain suspended in… “Oh shit.”
“See Max, I told you I wouldn’t kill you. You’ll live a long, long time,” he laughed as he walked away. “Oh, there is one other thing,” he said turning back. “Your mother, your father and your sister? They quite enjoyed their meal before… Well, you know.”
by featured writer | Nov 28, 2011 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Featured Writer
The eighteen foot tall robot stared down at the park worker in pleading disbelief.
Sam jabbed the giant’s leg with his broom, “Come on, off you go. You can’t stay here anymore!”
“But I don’t comprehend this request. My place is here in the park.”
Sam felt a lump rise in his throat. He didn’t like sending the big loveable lug out on his own into the great big world either, but he had no choice. “Okay that’s enough of that. You have to go now Pauly. I mean it, scoot!”
Reluctantly the massive animatron turned and shuffled his way out through the park gates. He turned back one last time and uttered one more useless plea, “Please Sam, you know my place is here.”
Sam stood wordlessly, leaning on his broom, tears welling in his eyes. He did not answer, but instead thought to himself, stupid fuckers, I can’t believe they won their case. That poor bastard was designed to entertain the folks here, programmed to love it as a matter of fact. His place isn’t out there with them.
But what could he do? The SAF (Society for Android Freedom) had in fact won their landmark case and, as the law dictated, were now able to enact Initiative 09. All animatrons, regardless of job or station, were to be immediately ‘set free’ to make their way in the world as each and every one of them saw fit.
Two hours later found the giant in a heavily populated urban district. He saw other animatrons wandering free but fearful through the streets. Some begged for money, work or lodgings, to which human passers-by were not always kind in response.
“You had your day in court metal mouth!”
Or pathetic poetic attempts like, “I hope you run out of power in an hour and rust away in the rain, silicone brain!” (Followed by drunken high fives from rambunctious pals.)
To the inexcusably insulting, “Oh what, you didn’t you think this through? Serves you right rotard!”
But what the majority of these humans didn’t seem to understand was that most droids, including Paul himself, had not wished for anything but to continue on with their well-thought-out preplanned lives. There was security there, purpose. Now a few radical humans with their far-fetched crazy ideas of enslavement and entrapment had ruined it for everyone.
Paul stopped suddenly in his size 38-triple-H tracks. There at the entrance to the alleyway stood a group of rough looking men. The largest of them, still far less than half of the android’s height, addressed him by his full name. “Hey Paul Bunyan. Where’s your big blue ox?”
Happy to find someone that knew him from his amusement park role Paul answered gladly. “Oh Babe was only holographic and never an actual animatron. Otherwise you would see him roaming these streets as well. Are you a fan of our stories? I’m afraid I don’t recognize you from the park.”
The tough grinned and looked from side to side at his henchmen, then back to the droid. “Relax fella, I was just making polite conversation. What I really want to do is… uh… help you get your new life together.”
“Really?” Paul asked in pleasant surprise. “That is quite welcome.”
“Yeah of course.” The man grinned again toward his cohorts then rose up on his toes and asked, “Say pal, you ever done any debt collecting before?”
