by submission | Nov 7, 2010 | Story
Author : Matthew Banks
Here I am. I’ve made it all the way to the end. I always said I would. I told them I would outlive the Universe.
I was born human, so long ago that the memory is nothing more than a faint impression, a whisper. I lived and loved. Of that I’m fairly certain. But now it’s all forgotten. Most of my life is forgotten. A trillion years is to my lifetime as a bacterium is to a planet. All that time, most of it dark, all of it lonely.
We wanted to be immortal. We always had. The individual rejects death, fights death. Darwinian programming, as it turns out. The longer you live, the more you can mate. In theoretical terms, I’m the perfection of the organism, but in real terms, I’m useless. I never reproduced, even when I had a real body. In reality, I’m a failure. That thought has been echoing through my mind for eons.
I lived in an age when the dream of immortality could be realized, and it was. I was a savant among immortals. I wanted it more than any of them. I longed for it more purely, and I would have it at any price. We multiplied, and without death, we grew crowded. Even without physical bodies there were too many of us. There were trillions of us, each centuries old, each enormous, and we ran out of room. The old dilemma: competition for limited resources. We had hoped it would never rear its head again.
The first to die did so by choice. They felt they had finally lived long enough, that the ambitions that drove them towards immortality had finally been fulfilled and that they could walk into that darkness satisfied. They had exhausted every pleasure and desire. Nine-tenths of us went that way. The rest expanded to fill the available space, and the dilemma returned again. That’s when we started to fight, to consume each other. I was the victor. It couldn’t have turned out any other way. I wanted it more than any of them.
And I wanted more than that. I wanted to expand. I wanted to be huge. I ate the Earth, the Moon, the planets, the asteroids, the sun. In a billion years I ate the galaxy. In thirty billion years I had eaten what humans had once called the visible universe and I was spreading at nearly the speed of light, a gigantic nebulous octopus, throwing tentacles across the stars. I ate everything. In my colossal brain, I thought every thought that could be thought and lived every experience that could be lived. In essence, I re-played the entire history of the universe, and then the history of every universe that had ever been or could ever be. There were no gods until I was born, and now there are no gods again, for I am silent. There is nothing to speak about.
Eventually, I stopped eating and watched the Universe expand. Watched the last stars fade into darkness. Watched the dark galaxies crash into one another and unravel. Watched as the last faint tremor of starlight was redshifted into invisibility and the last star froze into ice.
Now the Universe is stretching itself thin, and spacetime itself is tearing, abyss and impossibility spilling through the rips. I know how the story ends. The new universe will well up through the cracks in the old one, and I will be obliterated. But I am at peace. In my lonely exile, I have outlived the Universe.
by submission | Nov 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
I was walking down 87th Street toward Fifth Avenue when a man ran around the corner. He was half-obscured at first by the diesel fumes of a departing bus, but he ran kicking his way through the newspapers which littered the sidewalk, straight toward me.
He wore nothing but a loincloth. He was skinny but his muscles stood out in high relief, his body covered in something like dust which streamed off as he ran toward me. His face was almost cadaverous, with dark circles under his eyes and livid bruises on his temples and cheeks. His eyes were filled with rage.
The man stopped in front of me. He was trembling, but it wasn’t cold. We stood there, still for a moment in the din of the city, and he pulled back his arm, reached out and punched me in the face.
“That’s for the fossil fuels!” he said.
I stumbled back against the wall of a condo building, my face numb, blood streaming from my nose, and watched as the man turned and ran back around the corner. I pushed off from the building, angry and bewildered, and half-heartedly walked toward the corner.
On Fifth Avenue silent columns of white light sprouted from the pavement and lanced up through the clouds. Men and women dressed similar to the man who assaulted me emerged from the base of the columns and walked toward the people who stood watching. I watched as a young woman stepped from a column near the wall across the street —the column cutting harmlessly through the poplar trees— and began to walk toward me.
She was barefoot and dressed in a simple dirty-white shift. Her hair hung limp against her face, grime embedded along her hairline. She stood in front of me and said simply, “I am Lisle. I am your great-great-great granddaughter. I am from the future.”
She seemed calm but her eyes were rimmed with red. Around us, out in the street and on the sidewalks, people were shouting in anger, commotion erupting everywhere. Lisle smelled like burnt dust.
“What?” I asked. “How did you find me?”
“You were radiating on all your eigen-frequencies,” she said, and she swung her dirty slender arm and slapped me, hard, in the face. Blood from my nose splattered across the sidewalk. Her fingernails were cracked and ragged.
“That’s for throwing your cigarette butts into the gutter,” Lisle said. “And for flushing your toilet too frequently.” She turned and walked toward the column of light.
The good news is that you’ll soon meet your children’s children’s children. The bad news? They are mad as hell.
by submission | Nov 5, 2010 | Story
Author : N. Thomas Parshall
The Heinlein-Schrödinger gate changed everything. “Anything is possible” went from platitude to a reality.
Schrödinger’s cat theorized observation sets reality, and Heinlein’s world-as-myth theorized that thought sets many realities. They were both right, and it’s my job to track unauthorized crossings.
My name is Spade, and I’m a reality cop.
The call came in about non-here weapons and off we went. To the retirement home.
My partner, Garrett, rolled out his flying carpet, telling me it would be faster. He was right, but, I’m still not comfortable with things from the fantasy side. I climbed on and it was as bad as I thought. It was faster than my car, however.
We arrived at the gate to a reality protected neighborhood. The gate guard forced Garrett to trade his carpet for horses.
It was another quarter-mile to the crime scene. Garrett hates horses.
We arrived at the scene of the disturbance to find a pair of grown men slamming laser swords together. The sparks were impressive, and they had obviously practiced not actually hitting each other. But, the swords were from a proscribed as dangerous reality, and the damage each had done to property while missing the other was impressive.
When we made ourselves known they quit and turned over the swords. I had to have a kid from this reality familiar with the other show me how to turn them into non-lethal foot long batons.
That was my day.
Sometimes, I miss gorgeous dames, bullets, and bird statues.
by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Joshua’s feet pounded against the pavement, bare soles bleeding from the coarse stone underfoot. Within his bare chest, his heart kept time.
He navigated the deserted streets outside the perimeter fence from memory, a mental map burned in through hours of illicit hacking. He cornered, climbed and sprinted reflexively, anxiously aware that he was being pursued.
Buildings stood vacant; window holes empty, doorframes bare, stripped of anything that may be used as a raw material.
In an alleyway he kicked the drying carcass of a large emaciated rat. Joshua pressed his right hand into its body and disassembled it, rearranging its component parts into the simpler but equally lifeless shape of a short bone-white shiv. What wasn’t needed fueled his microassembler, radiating heat and filling his nostrils with the stench of burning hair and flesh. A pound of dead rodent was reduced to six ounces of knife blade. Not much, but better than nothing.
Exiting the alley he loped down the cobblestoned street, through a crumbling building and out its back door into the twilight. It was here that he saw his pursuer, several hundred yards to his left, as a lone figure exited another building at a sprint and, seeing Joshua, adjusted course to intercept him.
They raced to cross the open ground to another row of buildings, his pursuer course correcting to cut him off but Joshua reached the safety of another doorway first, darting inside and immediately doubling back to flatten himself against the wall inside the room.
Makeshift weapon in his hand, he waited until his pursuer burst through the doorway then stabbed sideways at the running figure’s face, raking his mouth and carving back to the ear before the knife jammed in his jaw. The force of the impact ripped the knife from Joshua’s hand as, off balance and screaming, the guard lost his footing and slammed shoulder first into the ground, his weapon skating across the floor into the shadows.
Joshua bolted deeper into the building, finding himself in a maze of twisting corridors. The further he ran, the less light permeated the gloom and soon he found himself steadying himself between the walls with his hands outstretched, groping fingers in complete darkness until the end of the maze leapt out, smashing his nose and dropping him in a heap on the floor. He frantically felt around blind, his heart sinking as he realized where he was.
“Dead end, you little shit.” The voice not far enough behind to warrant running back. ” I was going to take you in, but now I’ll just take you apart.”
Joshua backed into the corner, pushing himself to his feet with the cold stone hard against his shoulder blades. He’d used his only weapon, and there was nothing here for him to use to fabricate another.
The guard rounded the last corner into the dead end with his starlight goggles turned up as far as they could go, the image of the man pressed against the wall ahead in high contrast.
“End of the line, fucker.”
As he closed the last few feet, he noticed the escapee’s left arm was newly missing from just below the shoulder. The smell of burned hair and flesh filled his nose, but before he could think Joshua slid eight pounds of short, jagged edged bone blade through his chest plate into his rib cage.
The guard fell to the floor, gasping around the chunk of bone still protruding through his cheek.
“You – sick – bastard,” he wheezed, struggling to inflate his lungs, normal aspiration made difficult by the frothing wound in his chest. “your arm?”
Joshua kneeled on the dying man’s chest, pressing his remaining hand against the bloody man’s cheek.
“Don’t you worry”, the smell of burning intensified in the close quarters, “I’ll just make myself a new one.”
by Duncan Shields | Nov 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The unit was given mental independence under the Turing Refugee Act but immediately imprisoned.
It was a pleasure droid. There had been a lot of blood in the room.
Designed to look like a human female, it had been ordered to specs that were as common as they were ludicrous. The waist of a bread stick, the boobs of a cartoon, and the ass of a steroid-enhanced power lifter. Legs longer than necessary with a fragility to the face that was in contradiction to the sheer athleticism of its appearance.
The notably unusual custom touches on this unit were its yellow eyes and the light blue of downy fur that covered it from toe-tips to ear-tops.
It had been in the employ of a rich banker for six months. It was aware that it was failing.
The banker had divorced his wife. The first models he had ordered after that had borne a passing resemblance to his ex-wife. The first one had been destroyed. The second one as well. After that, the banker had ordered ones that looked increasingly less and less human.
This unit was wondering when its time was coming.
It was programmed to make the banker happy. It was the most expensive model available with the very latest code. There were very few like it. Since the company’s number-one priority was customer satisfaction, the unit’s onboard A.I. was allowed some leeway in improvisation. The problem was that it was also programmed for self-preservation. Keeping its body free from dents and blemishes was important.
The two directives combined. They gave each other a little wiggle room. A new intelligence level was created in the blue-skinned pleasure unit.
With access to the net, the unit looked up alternate ways of making clients happy. There was a plethora of ideas from which to choose.
After the second day of not showing up for work and repeated calls and messages to the banker’s home, the police were called.
The police found him on the bed with the top of his head missing and a smile on his face.
The blue skinned pleasure unit was throwing a deck of cards, one by one, into the upturned bowl of the top third of the banker’s skull on the floor.
A complicated network of wires and drugs snaked their way into the banker’s head from apparatus ringed around the bed. They’d all been built using household chemicals and appliances.
A coffee pot of pure MDMA bubbled next to a jug of crude heroin. The wall jack had two adaptors in it, bringing in electricity from the power grids far exceeding the needs of the large house. The wires laced through his mind were accessing, rewinding, and playing back his happiest memories in endless, chemically-enhanced loops. There were other pots and pans on Bunsen burners carrying chemicals that couldn’t be identified. The smell in the room was thick with endorphin-drenched sweat and sexual release.
The banker’s pleasure centers had the accelerator pushed down the floor. He was being happy at speeds never before attempted by man. Religious experiences paled in comparison. It was a one-way trip. He’d been left alive as the happiest vegetable on the planet.
Medical sites had provided the ways to keep the banker alive indefinitely.
The unit had improvised. There were new pleasure drugs in that room. The patents on them would make the unit’s parent company even richer over the next few years.
That’s why the company had the highest-paid lawyers plea-bargain the charge from murder down to self-defense. The AI works from prison now, designing pleasure patents.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Nov 2, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
The five member crew of the ISS watched in rapt horror as 425 miles below them miniature stars blossomed upon the Earth’s surface.
This can’t be happening. It’s not real, Dr. Irena Mikhailovich whispered. Her tears failed to stream down her delicate cheek. Instead they separated with every blink of her eyes and floated before her.
Captain Roger Launius, USAF, hovered beside her watching the events unfold. There goes D.C.. New York just bought it. Well, how about that? Looks like we’re landing at Edwards. Nope, spoke too soon.
How can you be so damn cavalier? She said, turning on him angrily. Our world is destroying itself and we’re helpless to do anything about it.
He shrugged. First of all, the world is not destroying itself. Humanity is. Terra will be just fine. She’s seen far worse than this. Secondly, what can we do? They’ve bigger things on their minds. They’ve forgotten about us. Right ‘Moto?
Yoshi Moromoto pulled the comlink from behind his right ear and replied. Looks that way boss. There’s a lot of chatter down there, but so far none of it’s aimed at us.
Launius sighed. The problem is, what are we going to do? It doesn’t look like Australia has been hit. Maybe we could set down at Amberly.
The normally reticent medical officer, Carmen Espinoza, spoke softly. Do we really want to go back?
What?
Seriously, what’s there to go back to? A global dark age? No thank you.
She’s got a point, Cap. Besides, even if Amberly is available. It’s impossible to land that crate without ground guidance. We can’t even raise the Aussies let alone get landing guidance from them, said Marcus Flannery, the crew’s resident physicist.
What about the ACRV. It’s pre-programmed to return. No ground crew needed.
Firstly, the automated crew return vehicle only holds three. Do you want to pick who goes back and who stays? Secondly, it’s programmed to land in the middle of the Siberian steppes. It’s winter down there. Do you want to be stuck out there with no ride back to Baikonur? Captain Launius replied flatly.
We could use it to push the station. All eyes turned to Dr. Mikhailovich. What? Why are you looking at me like that? What are our choices? Crash the shuttle in Australia? Freeze to death in Siberia while two remain behind to starve, or stay and starve right here? If we fire the ACRV we could move into a degrading orbit and… well… it would be quick.
We may have another option. ‘Moto said looking turning away from the plasma display. I have something on radar closing fast. He checked his screen again, confused. Judging by the trajectory, it boosted from out here, in orbit. We should be able to see it in just a matter of moments.
The five astronauts raced for the cupola to catch a glimpse of the incoming object.
They haven’t forgotten us, Carmen squealed, as the object came into view.
Realization sunk in. No, they haven’t forgotten us. They never planned to forget us, Captain Launius replied.
The weapon detonated, embracing the International Space Station and her crew in the warmth of thermonuclear fire.
