by submission | May 5, 2024 | Story |
Author: Michael T Schaper
Serena felt a little strange as she stepped out of the clinic and into the street.
Not surprising, since she’d just made herself immortal.
She stopped to check the road before going any further. It was full of people going about their business. She thought she might recognise some of them, but then she’d never been good with faces.
No one seemed to have noticed her. Good. She slipped into the crowd, just an ordinary member of the public. The only difference was that one day they’d be dead, and she wouldn’t.
It had been boring in the clinic, she remembered, and the time had passed excruciatingly slowly; apparently it took a long while to download her entire consciousness. A headache was surely on its way.
But it was worth it, as long as she wasn’t caught.
This was still a highly experimental process, the legality of which was questionable. Enough people had died to make medical regulators reluctant to authorize it.
So all of this was on the sly, an ethical and practical grey zone. Even the clinic had been keen to get her away and out of sight as soon as they’d finished.
No wonder she was feeling uptight.
Serena noticed a movement out of the edge of her vision as she walked down the road, and tensed up momentarily. But it was just a woman walking past. For a moment Serena thought she looked somewhat familiar, which made her suspicious. But then reason won over and she ignored the stranger.
Be calm, she told herself.
Serena settled down at an outside table at the next cafe she came across. Best to act normal, as if she’d been doing nothing in particular.
She thought about what she’d just done. Amazing, really. She’d set in train the continuation of her own personality, all downloaded and stored electronically somewhere. Then a few skin grafts, so her DNA could also be preserved. When she passed away, it could all be downloaded into an avatar and – viola! – she’d be back. Or at least as close as possible.
Speaking of which, she realised with a start, where was her copy of all that data? The clinic had promised they’d upload it all up into the cloud, and also send her a backup copy. But she’d left in such a hurry they seemed to have forgotten.
“Hello?”
A figure loomed up out of nowhere and faced her across the table.
Serena realised with a start that it was the same woman who’d passed her just minutes ago. The face was somehow familiar to her. Friend or foe?
The stranger sat down, summoned the waiter and ordered two cafe au lait. “One each,” she declared. “I’m sure it’s still your favorite. And the caffeine might help your headache.”
How did she know that? Serena’s heart started beating rapidly. Had this woman been watching her come out of the clinic? Who was she?
They sat there in the midday sun, silently, awkwardly, and drank their coffee, Serena petrified as to what might happen next. An arrest?
She cursed her luck. All that angst, and at the end of it she didn’t even have her download. She could feel the headache continuing to pound away.
“Are you following me?” she finally summoned up the courage to ask.
The stranger looked over once more, and smiled. “Of course I am. I’m going to be with you for a long time to come.”
“Are you?”
“Well, it’s what was paid for.”
Serena studied the woman opposite her one more time, and then realized the face she was looking at was her own. And if that was the case…
“You’re my backup, aren’t you?” she asked, relieved to have figured it out.
The woman just smiled at her, a sad pitying look.
“No. You’re mine.”
by submission | May 4, 2024 | Story |
Author: Robert White
“I always thought the Kremlin or the White House would start it, you know, trip over that whatchamacallit, the nuclear football,” Erik said.
“I don’t think it’s actually a football,” Alan said. “It’s a suitcase with a bunch of buttons.”
“Cops jumped ship like everybody else,” Erik said. “Half the town’s looting and murdering the other half. You hear any sirens?”
“Mostly geezers left,” Alan said. “Scared shitless of leaving their houses. Before my mom took off, we bolted doors and jammed furniture against windows. Too many crazies walking around since they saw that meteor.”
“Asteroid.”
“Whatever, dude. Thing’s gonna pulverize the country. Tsunamis hundreds feet high. The Great Lakes will rain down boiling water on our asses. You think it matters what we call it?”
“We can still run.”
“Run where? The roads are littered with abandoned cars. Every highway jammed with people trying to flee. You can’t run or walk far enough to be safe.”
The only station reporting described shootouts at the airport; rogue pilots were stealing anything with wings.
Neither Erik nor his best friend conceptualized a world without TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. A world without internet, television, or radio. No cable, no Wi-Fi, nothing to transmit the sound of a human voice or an image from point A to point B. A world of silence punctuated by outbursts, sobbing in the night from houses where the residents paced like prison inmates. Terror over the coming catastrophe paralyzed countries as far from impact as New Zealand. People mobbed churches and mosques begging God to stretch out a hand to stop this Mount Everest-sized rock of nickel and iron let loose from beyond the Kuiper Belt before it slammed into this small planet in its insignificant solar system of the Orion-Cygnus Arm, a minor spiral arm of our home galaxy.
NASA calculated the size, density, speed, and impact angle of 45 degrees. Once this sausage-shaped hunk of left-over debris burst through the keyhole at 10,000 miles per hour into Earth’s dense atmosphere, it was game over just as it had been sixty-five million years ago for the dinosaurs when a smaller asteroid plummeted through the keyhole to impact off the Yucatán Peninsula.
Unseen by NASA’s skywatchers for near-Earth objects, Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia saw it first. Ohio State confirmed it and plotted orbit, trajectory, calculated the lat and long coordinates, and time of impact—south of Belle Island in the Detroit River. The odds were like hitting a bullet with a bullet. Radio astronomers in Dr. Amy Mainzer’s Center for Near-Earth Objects Studies named it “Asteroid Gremory” after a Japanese manga cartoon. Gremory was the sexualized demon who symbolized greed and lust and who ate the heart of Akuma-kun, the boy prodigy who appeared only once every 10,000 years.
Gremory could not be deflected by crashing a satellite into it as its DART program had been designed for. Months or years, not days or hours, were required to effect increments of directional change in the orbit. Blowing it up with intercontinental missiles armed with nuclear warheads, a juvenile Hollywood notion, was not even a last resort because fragmenting the asteroid created force multipliers as massive chunks fell to Earth. The average person wasn’t capable of comprehending fifty billion billion Joules of energy unleashed in a nanosecond.
Big enough to be seen without a telescope, the massive rock would arc over the smallest of the Great Lakes, change colors as it passed through the visible spectra of light to resemble a two-dimensional, purple rock.
Erik turned to Alan. “Going home to get my goodbyes in.”
by submission | May 3, 2024 | Story |
Author: Dan Leicht
Jade slumped into the Captain’s chair as she watched her crew on the navigation hub. Their route beeped on the screen in front of her. The four-person crew were relying on her to swoop in for a rescue if needed.
Jade crunched down on a kale chip as she tried her best not to drift to sleep while watching the monotonous screen.
*****
Jade woke to an alert from the captain. A green dusting of kale coated her chest. She checked the screen and only noticed one dot, not four. Where had the others gone?
She checked her notes to see the alert.
Captain Moore: Swoop! Swoop! Latch onto our location. They’re approaching fast!
Jade swiped the screen away with her hand and brought up the ship’s controls.
*****
Scans picked up a lifeform below the ship.
Was it her captain?
No, but it was a crewmate. The ship’s engineer. Kasey.
*****
Jade sat across from her, waiting to hear what happened to the rest of the crew as Kasey avoided eye-contact and shoved handfuls of kale chips into her mouth. Something felt off about Kasey. She looked… Older?
“Where are the others?” asked Jade.
“The others?” Kasey furrowed her brow. “There are no others.”
“There are no… What do you mean? Where is Captain Moore? What about nutritionist Benny? Our weapons expert Sam?”
“May I ask what your name is?”
“My name? What are you talking about? It’s me Jade. I’m the ship’s navigation officer. Surely you haven’t forgotten about me. You’ve all only been gone for,” she checked her watch, “three hours.”
“Outside the atmosphere is different,” said Kasey. “I remember you now. You said we were down there for three hours?” Jade nodded. “I figured. Thirty years we were down there.”
“Thirty years? You don’t look sixty.”
“Time kept looping. It kept looping and we kept getting trapped. Whenever we entered the cave, pop… We’d appear back where we started. The comms wouldn’t work, not until we broke through the loop and finally entered the cave. Benny had to,” she paused for a moment as if to catch her breath, “Benny had to die. After making it to the cave over and over, we finally deciphered the hieroglyphs outside and learned of the ritual. What we didn’t know was that he’d come back, but not as Benny. He came back a beast.
“We ran as fast as we could. Captain Moore should’ve had you on standby, I’d mentioned it to her so often than she told me to shut up. She sent you a message. Did you get it? Sam fired countless rounds. I looked back for a moment, and he stood his ground. Fighting until the bitter end. I kept running. Eventually, I lost the beast. Then you found me.”
“So, the others didn’t make it?” Jade couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. She also couldn’t believe Kasey made it out alive. “We need to mount a rescue mission.”
“It’s too late for the others.”
“You didn’t see Sam go down, right? He might still be out there.”
“He went down.” Kasey shoved her hand into her pocket and pulled out shell casings.
“What’s this?” asked Jade.
“I collected trinkets from each one.” Kasey pulled out the Captain’s glasses and placed them beside the casings. “What did I get from Benny? Oh, that’s right.” She reached into a pants pocket and pulled out Benny’s lighter.
“What do you have to offer?”
“What’s going on? You’re scaring me.”
“Benny wasn’t the one sacrificed.”
Jade watched in horror as Kasey’s teeth transformed into sharp fangs.
by submission | May 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: Lindsay Thorimbert
She was perfect, even if she was so often indignant, given to suspicions and conspiracies. I couldn’t resist her, but I didn’t believe what she said. Not at first.
We met in a chat room, less than a year before the internet finally died. She said it was already gone, whether or not I could see it, that the traffic was all bots. She asked me byzantine riddles, made me repeat tongue twisters and demanded I set my camera at different angles, all to prove I wasn’t AI-generated. I was dazzled by her dark eyes. She remained skeptical as I grew infatuated.
She said she longed for an outdoor life though she spent every moment online. She gave me an address for after, and I wrote her when the servers finally went dark. She never answered. I travelled to Andalusia but found only crumbling whitewash at the address she gave.
I was angry at first, the idea she had strung me along, only to vanish. I grew obsessed, read book after book about the fall of the internet until I found one describing the hallmarks of deepfake video chat. A weariness crept into me as I read. The unusual cadence of her speech, her expressive eyes which I found so endearing, they were all listed.
by submission | May 1, 2024 | Story |
Author: Elizabeth Hoyle
“There don’t need to be multiple universes for me to fall in love with you over and over again,” Michael said, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “One lifetime must be enough, though there is no such thing as too much time with you. I’ve seen you as a daughter, sister, friend, cousin, business owner, artist, thinker, lover, fighter, worrier, scaredy-cat and so many other things that a person can be. I’ve seen you in all stages of sickness, recovery, health, and in every mood imaginable. Every iteration has made me fall more and more in love with you.”
Alice remained quiet at his words, as he knew she would. Her eyes widened as he took a deep breath. They both knew what was coming next. They’d done this so many times.
“I love you. Please be mine forever.”
Everything dissolved around them before she could answer. The chestnut tree they were standing under, the winking of the emerging fireflies, the pinkishly orange clouds that ringed the horizon as the sun set all vanished. The sterile metal tables and the bright white walls of the observation room appeared.
He fought to calm his thundering heart as they waited for one of the study’s volunteers to come and detach the sensors from their bodies. His neck ached from not turning to look at her. He’d been warned twice not to do so until the sensors were off. His natural emotional reaction at seeing her made the sensors go crazy and muddled their session’s end results. They couldn’t afford to be dismissed from the study. Thankfully the volunteer was quick, arriving and detaching the sensors to the immersive VR as well as to the medical equipment in record time. The doctor came in as the volunteer left.
“These numbers are astounding! Thanks to you, we’re getting a better understanding of the chemical components of love, which will enrich the products Pharmaceuticals For You makes. Thank you for helping to make sure that our products are full of feeling and full of you.” He didn’t take his eyes off the tablet with their results.
“Wait, please!” Michael said as the doctor turned to leave. “When we will get paid? This is our fourteenth immersion session and we haven’t been paid since our fifth.”
“I’m the doctor in charge of this study, not human resources. Take your questions to them.” The doctor’s lab coat swished as he walked out.
“We’ll get there, love. It’s going to be alright,” Alice said, her voice creaky with lack of use.
“Our appointment is in two weeks. We’ve got to get the money or they might make us wait even longer.”
“We will get the money and it will work this time.” Her voice was full of confidence that he knew she didn’t always feel. He turned to look at her; her eyes were tired but hopeful. “I can’t wait to see you be a dad.”
“And I can’t wait to know it worked and we’re on the way to becoming parents.” He stepped closer and took her hand. “Are you alright?”
All of this had been so hard for both of them, but even more so for her: their failed first round of IVF and participating in this study to get the money they’d never have made otherwise to finance their upcoming next attempt. Tears streaked down her cheeks but she smiled and nodded.
“I love you. I never get tired of proposing to you, even if it is for this weird experiment.”
“I love you, too, no matter what. In every iteration.”
by submission | Apr 30, 2024 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
How hard could moving be? All I needed to do was mount the antigrav plates at the corners of my unit, then hook the place up to my hex bike and haul it off to its new location. Simple, right?
Except Hygeia III seems to delight in making sure that nothing’s ever that easy. First off, it turned out that my ship-fabricated mini-dwelling had settled into the ground, meaning several hours with a spade to loosen it up again. Great way to tear a muscle, given the gravity here, but somehow I managed. At least I’d got an early start.
Then the damn plates didn’t fire up! I’d done what everybody does, and rented them from the Central Trading Post, but nobody had bothered to mention that they needed charging before use. Wonderful. Another two hours sitting around, plugged in to the local utility net (which strictly speaking I had no right to access, since I’d registered my departure for today, but whatever).
I spent the time contemplating my move. Preparations for the arrival of the next wave of colonists had included designating this part of Southern Settlement a ‘family zone’, which meant that however ready to mingle, as a single I was no longer welcome. Stable job at the shuttleport notwithstanding, I might be a bad influence on the kids, apparently. Admin had directed me to shift over to a brand new sector, where the lots were set aside for the unmarried. After I’d got past the initial annoyance, it didn’t sound too bad; it might even be fun to be around like-minded solos.
Once my one-up/one-down cube was finally levitating, clouds were beginning to gather; it looked like one of the planet’s legendary thunderstorms was brewing. Hygeia’s atmosphere isn’t quite Earth-like, and electrical discharges tend to the spectacular; getting caught outside would be a bad idea.
I used magnetic clamps to connect hawsers to the unit’s corners, and attached them to the back of my six-wheeler. The overpowered beast then declined to start. Of course. Another 20 minutes with the toolkit fixed the wiring problem, and I was (finally) ready to roll!
Fortunately, afternoon shift change was still a while off. I pulled my hovering trailer across town through deserted streets, keeping a wary eye on the sky. Finding my space was easy; there was a gap in a row of mini-dwellings that had already been installed by people evidently more organised than I was. I nudged my home gently over the waiting baseplate (which might or might not sink later), and killed the antigrav. Then I ran around linking it up to the utility net.
The wind was picking up by the time I finished, a sure sign the storm was well on the way. But I’d made it, and would be snug in my own nest before it arrived. Tomorrow, new people, and new challenges. I smiled, and headed indoors.
