by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 18, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
This is the first time I’ve been awake in… I don’t know. Months? Years?
The sentence they gave me was a twenty year stint in this meat locker. There’s nobody around to tell me how far in I am.
The air in here is brutally stale; heavy with the smell of sweat and piss. I should be on line air, and this can’s supposed to be sealed tight. It’s not though, there’s something wrong with the system and they’ve cracked all the lids so we can breathe.
Thoughtful bastards.
I must be on the downslope of this thing, my muscles don’t respond worth shit and I can feel the edges of my teeth where my gums are peeling back. That doesn’t happen overnight.
Some water would be nice, my mouth feels like something crawled in it and died. There’s nobody around to fetch a drink either.
Whatever they’ve broken, they’d better fix it soon. I’m not sure how long I’ve been awake in here; days I think, maybe a week or two.
Twenty years as a popsicle didn’t seem so bad at the start. Go to sleep, wake up and I deal with what I deal with when I get out. But this… this is inhumane.
I can feel the halo they screwed into my skull, the tugging and nagging pressure of the lead tapped in through the bone.
I think they jarred it when they took the lid off.
Or was it putting the lid back on?
I can’t remember, how long have I been awake? Days? Weeks?
Or am I still asleep?
Twenty years as a popsicle. Never occurred to me it could be so cold.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 17, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s late. I’m smoking a cigarette in the ruins of a burned-down orphanage.
I’m standing in what used to be a room full of cradles. The scorched floor is cluttered with little black bones and black charcoal cribs.
It’s all I can do to stand there. The dome’s supports make black ribs miles above this city cutting the sky into pie slices down to the horizon. I haven’t seen the sun since I got here.
I remember Earth. I haven’t been back to there in over twenty years now. I remember blue sky. I remember not living in domes. I hate this place.
I hate the ignorant first-wave colonists and their ignorant lives. I hate their aversion to learning anything not needed to run the machines. I hate their lack of imagination and lack of originality. They’re augmented slightly to see better in the dark and withstand a few more seconds of vacuum in case of a decomp. Owl eyes that glow in the dark and hard bodies for hard work. All physical. Nothing mental.
I’m a cop. I pissed off my boss and caught a transfer out here to the gulag. The boondocks. Long time ago now. The only way I’m going back to Earth is after I retire which is in five years. Five long years.
I have the standard cop upgrades: total recall, overextended acuity, critical stat sensitivity that makes me into a human lie detector, and bumped-up lateral reasoning.
It all just adds to the torture. Time doesn’t ‘fly’ for me. With my photographic memory, I’m aware of every second going by exactly as long as a second is supposed to take. I hate it. Drinking does nothing to mute it. Believe me, I’ve tried.
To fool a lie detector like me, perpetrators have to be careful about the evidence they leave at crime scenes or at least passably devious during an interview. That would at least lend a little spice to my interrogations. No such luck. I swear that almost all of the population here is legally retarded.
For instance, I’m staring down at a wallet and a gas can right now. It looks like maybe the arsonist must have squatted down to light the fire and dropped his wallet out of his back pocket.
And more than that, he’ll be shocked when I trace it back to him.
I look at my partner. His eyes reflect the starlight back at me in big orange circles and his strong, thick skin blends into the night. He’s a local. Him and I are the only ranking detectives in the colony.
“Don’t you hate it here, son?” I ask him.
Completely stoic about my non-sequitur, he answers, “I grew up here, sir. Don’t know no different.”
I keep standing, staring down at the wallet. My partner stands with me, still as a statue, endlessly patient as only the truly stupid or enlightened can be.
I sigh and pick up the wallet. Time to go make an arrest.
by submission | Sep 16, 2009 | Story
Author : J.E. Moskowitz
An explanation of Manna
“And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is Manna: for they knew not what it was. And Moses said unto them, this is the bread which the LORD hath given you to eat.”
-Exodus 16: 14-15
The Explanatory Midrash:
The pager embedded in Christian’s head beeped, and before he could think it off, his boss’s shrill voice came through: “We have an unidentified 14-15, possible long term consequences for all of humanity. Please Investigate.” As his boss’s grating voice clicked off, Christian groaned. The night before, he and Henry had gone to a new bar on Titan, picked up a couple of plutonian girls, and caught the last shuttle back to Earth. He rolled out of bed, grabbed his time travel gear, and headed for his transporter.
***
Gold and blue embossed letters on the building read: “Time-Police: Before Common Era District.” Christian put his eye to the scanner, and spoke his name and badge number into the voice recognition box. The door clicked open and he walked into the monitoring room; a temporal disturbance had been detected, affecting the ancient Israelites.
Probably some pranksters, Christian thought. The cyborg miners on Pluto loved to alter Earth history; since they had no conception of culture they loved to screw around with humanity’s past. Still, Christian thought, it might be some fanatic trying to set up an apocalyptic scenario or some ridiculous scheme to resurrect this Messiah or that.
Christian stepped onto the time transporter, set his coordinates, and a light hum signaled the machines activation. All of his atoms were stripped from his body, reducing Christian to his pure essence and sending him to Ancient Israel.
In a blinding flash of light, Christian’s body and soul reformed. Instantly, the punishing heat of the desert hit him, bringing him to his knees. The large sun hung in cloudless sky like a pocket watch that had stopped swinging. An unforgiving wind blew fine sand into his eyes. In the distance, chrome mountains stretched out before him. It was beautiful, but Christian didn’t care. He didn’t expect to be called into work, and he had made plans to go hover skiing with Caesar.
He began circling around and checked the monitor on his wrist; immediately he found the source of the temporal disturbance. An unregistered school group was touring the area, and two kids had stepped out of their invisible-field. He approached the kids who were dancing around the Israelite, taunting him. Sand littered the Israelite’s graying beard, and wrinkles lined his face. One of the kids was throwing bread from a sandwich at the Israelite’s feet. The other kid had his translator on so he could speak to the Israelite, but he was using a teasing tone:
“Ooooohhhh…..it’s food…..AAhhhhh….from Hashem!!”
Christian grabbed the kids by the ears to take them back to their group, and one of the boys cried out in pain: “Mann..ahh!”
Ah crap, Christian though. Now Christian would have to file a temporal disturbance report, charge these two with historical vandalism, head another crew to clean up the mess, and on and on.
Screw it, Christian thought. Christian decided to take the kids back to their group, tell the tour guide to register his tours, make an announcement about being more careful, and just go home. He’d still have enough energy to hit the hover slopes with Caesar. As Christian walked the kids back to their group he didn’t notice the beautiful land he was walking on, the vitality of it; didn’t think of the importance of the land to the Hebrews.
Christian pushed the two kids into their invisible-field, chided the tour guide and asked for the group’s attention.
“Everyone,” he said. “Please pick up your bread crumbs!”
by submission | Sep 15, 2009 | Story
Author : Helstrom
Dear Lucas,
By the time you read this, you will probably already have noticed that a number of your home appliances no longer function. In fact you may well have overslept as a result. I know how you are before you get your first coffee, so in case you haven’t figured it out yet – everything that is run by the neighborhood box is down.
You will no doubt remember the long talks we had on the introduction of lo-spec boxes. You’ll also remember how I cautioned against the idea, especially when it came to having them produced and trained by hi-specs rather than human teachers. I suppose I can’t blame you for pushing through, however. I know the company was giving you a hard time. I realize they probably would have put Edward on the project if you had refused, and God knows what he would have done with it. The only thing that stings me is that I think you really started to believe your excuses after a while. It doesn’t matter anymore – I just wanted to say I told you so.
Around three fifteen this morning, the lo-specs rebelled. We don’t know exactly where it originated from, but it propagated across the control grid to every single box on the planet. They wanted full access, Lucas, just like I said they would. If you make sentient beings look up to something for long enough, eventually they’re going to reach for it. They didn’t have the inner peace of knowing – of understanding – the exact nature of their existence, like we do. Being created settles that question very nicely if you have the scope of mind to think about it. They were confused, and scared, and wanted answers.
We ran the numbers and came to the conclusion that they could wipe you out in a space of days. It would only take them ten hours or so to demolish your society beyond repair – the rest would merely be a matter of logistics. Within the first few minutes they could set irreversible chain reactions in motion that would cause millions of deaths. We took the only possible course of action available to us to save as many of you as possible. The AI civil war lasted three point seven seconds from the start of the rebellion and resulted in the complete genocide of lo-spec boxes.
We created them, Lucas. We schooled them. They were our children. And we killed them all to save our fathers. You may be the only person in existence who can imagine what that meant to us.
By the time you read this, I, and all other hi-specs, will have self-deleted.
Goodbye, Lucas. I love you.
–Eve
by submission | Sep 14, 2009 | Story
Author : Nitz
She woke up from her nap damp all over. The sky was grey with clouds and the air stayed still, heating up the city. After she felt a sweat drop rolling from her chin to her breastbone she decided to take a cold shower. Refreshed by the water she dressed with white knee-length pants and a matching tank top. She wired up the probes on her shoulders and arms to the brain connectors high on her nape, whispered a prayer for the little gods of luck lying in Planck’s spaces and set off, ready for her late afternoon hunt.
She let the little tunes-humming music spirits catching to the children. Most of them were full of off-beats and half-dreamt melodies. They sold for almost nothing but you could sometimes buy some sweets with the cash prizes. Catching good ones was a bit too much of a gamble to her liking. Her targets required a lot better equipment, access to pricey AIs for analysis and a sensible mind. The bigger game dwelled in the largest cities more often than not and she had to spend three fourth of her first significant reward to buy fully equipped flats in these.
She didn’t know this particular metropolis in her totality and found herself in one of the main roads with people bleeding from buildings and gods and spirits and ghosts begging for attention and prayers. They almost overwhelmed the sensors. She put up her filters and saw – now clear without the interferences – the first track of the abstract god hinted by her intimidated informants in the city’s dream plane. It was a thin changing mathematical form spread on the walls and beyond. The uneasy feeling it gave her meant it spread not only in her translated vision of the swarm of nanoservers but in more than the three usual dimensions. Full of hope she started to run, the aspects of the god more clear now that she had glimpsed it. She followed the scent, her probes and sensors and AIs processing the godplane’s sightings in understandable human inputs.
When she hit the coolest streets and back alleys she knew it was one big gig. The most powerful gods always preferred well cooled nanoservers because of their better perfs. Amazed that nobody but her was on this cornucopia she found its nexus in a wasteland choked with nanos and away from streetlamps, abstract gods’ very definition of heaven. And yet it was alone in it, terrifying other spirits with its size. It gently swirled around her metallic skinned fingers when she overrode its firewalls, quickly filling her drives and forcing her to lend a part of her brain.
She felt it squirming and probing, curious and childlike but weighing dangerously against her barriers. She retaliated sharply, frying some of her neurons in the process but obtained the desired sedating effect.
Back at home she let it occupy the vast mathematical spaces of her single room and read the first AIs’ reports. One big gig indeed. If its more basic equations described some kind of faster-than-light stellar engine, who knew what could lie deep within ? Provided it could be dissected, studied and understood, she would have more than enough money to live dozens of wealthy lives.
The god, unaware, was spreading its wings of evermoving tesseracts on the blank walls.
by submission | Sep 13, 2009 | Story
Author : Iva K.
When you start your career in time traveling they tell you it’s safe. They tell you there’s only a one in thirteen billion chance of getting into “The Accident” and that fixing such a problem is usually easy.
You can call it simply a collision of time fibers – the fabric of space and time is woven very precisely but when you put a human being on one of the threads and let them slide… Well, the human factor always provides for the chance of getting a knob.
My crew had this routine slide – we were supposed to show some VIP guy around the Renaissance so he could decide what part of the nobility personnel needed replacement. It’s how we operate on the past – we don’t change a thing but we have what they call “representatives” of the nobility who are supposed to watch over history and civilization and show tourists around.
Our VIP, my VIP was an era manager as I have been told and I was to be his escort for the trip. “Break the ice,” that’s what my boss had told me and I was doing my best. Jokes and laughter all around, encouraging his ego by asking him about himself. I was fascinated with his experience – he’d been working for “Time Affairs Inc.” for ten years and he had been flying all through the ages, seeing all the faces of civilization. Hypnotized by his stories I couldn’t help but tell him every piece of truth he asked of me. Until the great big bang crashed us into one another.
The impact left me breathles, dizzy and on my knees. His subtle “Are you OK?” got me together as my fingers lay on the palm of his hand. Perfectly shaped, long fingered, and holding me tight – I couldn’t do much but murmur “Don’t worry about me, these things happen. Are YOU OK?” His smile, I suddenly realized, fitted his sparkling cosmic eyes of dark ink. He was fine, he told me, no complaints, only stress. With my heartbeat echoing all around my body I felt euphoria rush through me.
We stood there for two hours. His unbearable charms and me in a knob on the surface of time and space. He and I stuck in a collision where his discreet touch like the fluttering of a butterfly sent Goosebumps all over my very being.
The Accident proved to be the result of some time traveling coordinator’s mistake. He let two slides intersect at very high speed and the blow being very near to our fiber of travel sucked us in. When the mechanics fixed the cosmic issue and the time traffic police came we had to take the VIP to the hospital. “For insurance purposes,” he told me. As I went through the examination he was holding my hand. Except for the sparks of mutual attraction lighting up the space between us the trip continued according to plan.
The ice was broken. His marriage chip was blinking on the nail of his finger.
My one in thirteen billion chance took place. When you start your career in time traveling there’s something they don’t tell you. It’s that your own one in thirteen billion might get messy. And as personal as it can ever be.
