by submission | Sep 23, 2009 | Story
Author : Debbie Mac Rory
“I’m gonna take it”
“I don’t think you should…”
“What? It’s just lying here, it’s not like it belongs to anyone”
“You don’t know that”
“You mean one of these boulders is suddenly going to come to life and chastise me for taking its petrified little baby rock?”
“Well, no, not that-“
“You need to grow some. It’s just a pretty stone so I’m takin’ it”
“It’s not in our mission statement”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re not supposed to bring anything back. You don’t know what might be in it”
“Tell you what, if anything does hatch out of this little stone, I’ll step right up and say ‘my bad’. How’s that?”
“You’re not even taking this seriously”
“Because there’s nothing to worry about! Alright, ok, tell you what, when we get back to base and get out of these suits, I’ll buy you a drink”
“From where?”
“From the still, naturally? Where else you gonna get anything these days?”
“The still? The same one that you conned me out of two weeks of dessert so you could fuel the damn thing?”
“Yep, that’d be the one”
“The same one you haven’t given me a drop from?”
“Until now…”
“Hmph. You owe me a lot more than just one drink”
“Agreed. So I’ll just pop….this…in…. like so. There. Now, let’s get back to base.”
“I still thin-“
“Yes, I know, you think it’s all a bad idea. But what’s done is done now. Forget about it! Let’s just get those drinks”.
by submission | Sep 22, 2009 | Story
Author : Peter Pincosy
Steel floats overhead, encased in concrete, wrapped in duct and wires, our own inorganic trees. Coughing bloat from the towers pushes out heat into the sky, lays labor on the air. In the cracks fly screaming machines their tops reflect varied colors. Shuttle to a corner, stop, take the light at speed, the rhythm falls in precision. A humble man stands in his booth, hands at his side. He smells the spring air and sighs at another day, his hands pass money along with speed. His booth consists of snacks, magazines, glossy simple somethings that provide little sustenance, an item to pick up on your way. Soft hours pass in which nothing happens, but the breathing air around him fills with objects, sounds and he tilts his eyes.
The ugly past arrives in recall. He murdered men. Some that look just like the ones that file past in suits. In dark alleys, he remembers their struggle. Easy with experience he finds the thought appealing now and then.
But his hands are tied by the monitor. Lashed around his neck, buried into his brain stem it reads his body, scrolling numbers, lines and lines of information. If he could remain perfectly calm and hallucinate a scene of pastoral making while committing the act, he could do it again. He wipes a sweaty palm on his shirt and reaches out to take a proffered dollar. One by one he pulls them in and each one represents a slim movement upward, a piece of food, when he used to just take what he wanted.
Now they watch him closely, and he’s allowed to operate, but at the first sign of disturbance, if someone wants to detain him, if he moves from a state of humility and gains ego or dreams of murder too intensely it all stops and he can feel himself looking out from a useless body that must be reset. A man in a mask comes along, pulls out a key, and inserts it into his neck. Searing pain overcomes everything and chemicals are forced into receptors, another hard reset. Afterwards, out of the dark, he arrives and starts again, and the memories, the passions, it all comes slower, the effect of the new start manifest in a decreased sense of self.
With a stiff one dollar bill he receives a note, written in a crooked hand, “Your monitor has been blocked, live out your instincts.” And adrenaline rushes through his body. He could do it right now perhaps. Reach over the counter and pull the old lady close to his face, spit and breath mingle with choking sounds as he rips the life from her. And as he imagines this he realizes that he wouldn’t have made it this far if the monitor weren’t blocked. How many could he manage to finish off? Maybe they’ll realize and he won’t get another chance. He sees a man standing next to a secluded opening. Quickly, he turns in the face of the puckered old lady who shakes her dollar at him insistently. He flies through the back door and as he approaches the man, his fingers already feel the life end under their pressure. The man looks directly into his eyes, unwavering, unafraid. One hand in his pocket, and it moves, only a step away, the world suddenly halts, functions shutting down in sequence.
On the ground, as his sense of scent closes off and only eyesight is left, a note flashes in front of his face. “Another step toward squashing your brain to mush. –Recidivists Eradication Project”
by Patricia Stewart | Sep 21, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Three aliens floated a few dozen meters beyond the ship’s forward observation viewport. They were formless blobs approximately two meter in diameter. The center creature was glowing a faint orange-red, with numerous concentric yellow circles forming and disappearing every few seconds. The two outside creatures displayed counter rotating fluorescent red spirals on predominately blue bodies. “They’re obviously trying to communicate with us,” concluded the science officer. “I’ve been studying them for hours, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what they’re trying to say.”
“They appear to be semitransparent,” the captain observed.
The science officer grimaced.
“You have something to report, Lieutenant?” probed the captain.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I was holding off on speculation until I had a better understanding of the physics. It appears, sir, uh, that the aliens are composed of… damn… stationary photons.”
Despite the apparent absurdity of the statement, the captain managed to maintain his professional demeanor. “You’ve got my attention, Lieutenant. Feel free to speculate. Off the record, of course.”
“Aye, sir. Thank you. As you know, in our universe all electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. The instant a photon comes into existence, its traveling at the speed of light. Never faster, never slower. However, our sensors indicate that those creatures are composed of photons that are not moving relative to us, which according to quantum chromodynamics, is impossible. They appear to have a cohesive structure composed of light ‘particles,’ rather than condensed matter. It’s like their wave-particle duality is all particle and no wave.”
“How is that possible?”
“If I were to guess, sir, I’d say that they exist on a separate membrane where the fundamental relationships between elementary particles are reversed. In other words, photons move slowly, and matter must move at 300,000,000 meters per second.”
“Fascinating,” replied the captain. “I was thinking, what if… Now what’s going on?” The brightness of the creatures suddenly intensified, and their color patters began to reverse and pulsate. “Boy, they certainly seem to be pretty animated about something. Do you think they’re threatening us?”
“Unsure, sir. Look, they’re backing away.” Suddenly, the interior of the ship began to glow a bright red, which quickly changed to orange, then yellow, green, blue, and finally violet. Nausea overtook the crew, and one by one, they collapsed to the deck and lost consciousness. When they finally came to, the view outside the observation port had changed dramatically. More than half the sky was occupied by a giant spiral galaxy. “Damn,” the science officer muttered. “That’s Andromeda. It’s supposed to be 2.5 million light years away. It’s probably only a few hundred thousand now. I guess those guys were trying to warn us not to get to close. We must have temporarily entered their universe. I suspect that we traveled more than two million light years while we were unconscious.”
“Can we get home?” asked the captain.
“That may be a moot point, sir. Unless I’m mistaken, we didn’t get here by distorting space-time in the conventional sense. Most likely, we temporarily acquired the properties of the alien’s universe and our physical matter has been moving through space at the speed of light. If true, that means that although we didn’t experience the passage of time, we’ve been traveling for more than two million years. Even if we could get back ‘home,’ we’d be the equivalent of australopithecines to our descendents.”
by submission | Sep 20, 2009 | Story
Author : E.S Wynn
“The 882 looks cool.” Cylea glanced up, grinned. “How much for the 882?”
The old man gave her a quick glance, eyes wary over spectacles that stood out like antique flair garnered from a bygone age. His reply came solidly. “I can’t sell you the 882.”
“Why not?” She cocked her hip, let her eyes wander to the thing again. It was the next step up from the tungsten knuckle reinforcements she’d been looking at, a total arm rebuild that would replace flesh and bone with nanocarbon alloys and memory plastics– a near human approximation of an arm with a central cavity that was packed tight with the razor-edges of a collapsible, spring-loaded blade. “It’s better than a switchblade.”
“You don’t want the 882.” He said gruffly, turning away to busy himself with a collection of parts, optics and tiny cylinders packed with nanogenic goo that lay spread across the tool bench. He quivered, hands taken by tremors for an instant.
Curiosity flickered across her face. “Is there something wrong with it?”
“No, It’s a good product, solid design.” He sighed, his own eyes drifted up to meet the dusty overhead display and the flickering advertisement for the rebuild. “Great deal for the money.”
“Then why?” She asked pointedly. “It’s just an arm.”
The old man nodded silently, tiredly. “Just an arm.” He repeated. His hands touched the tools, glanced off the handle of a modified bone-saw that lay with its harsh circular blade submerged in sterile solution. “Just an arm.”
“Daniel?” She tried. He turned back, regarded her with bespectacled eyes.
“It’s a prosthetic, Cylea. I’d have to remove your forearm to install it.” He laid two greasy fingers on his wrinkled skin to illustrate, smeared grubby lines just a few inches short of the elbow, looked at her pointedly. “Think about it. You don’t want the 882.”
“I know what it is, Dan.” She looked away, crossed her arms. “Why should I care how much flesh it takes? The 882 is better than the stock I was born with. It’s Techware.”
“It’s an illegal streetmod is what it is. Black market,” He shook his head. “From Hong Kong.”
“So?” She shot back. “It’s not like I’m going to join the military or anything. Who’ll know?”
Dan sighed again, watching her for a long moment as his old hands settled on the table between them.
“How old are you, Cylea?”
“Nineteen.”
“And you want to spend the next eighty years of your life with a techware arm that would show up on any weapon-scanner or metal detector you’re likely to run into? You know what that means, right? No more college, no access to government buildings, no air-travel.” He paused. “All because it ‘looks cool’ and you think it handles better than a switch blade.”
Cylea swallowed.
“Buy the knuckle reinforcements, kid.” He turned his back on her, busied himself at the bench again. “Lots of people get those, respectable people. Trust me. The 882’s for punks and amputees with nothing to live for. People with no future.” She looked away as he paused, unable to even meet the stare his back seemed capable of reaching into her soul with.
After a moment, he turned back to her again, wiping his hands on a rag, and offered her a slight smile that was oddly comforting before his lips parted, words bringing her eyes back to his again.
“We both know you have some kind of future waiting for you out there.”
Cylea nodded, forced her own smile
by submission | Sep 19, 2009 | Story
Author : Andrew Pang
The global media sighed at NASA’s attempt to laugh off trillions of dollars worth of international effort. Its called The L.O.F.T. [Lot of Floating Trash]. The Japanese first encountered it in 2011 at the Second Lagrange point, an area in space where gravitational forces seem checked. The Solar C probe was sent to observe its effect for commercial satellites. Instead of gently slowing to a stationary position, Solar C ceased transmitting. It happens I suppose. But other probes encountered the same problem, always at the L2 Point.
By 2022 another unmanned probe was sent specifically to investigate and found a three hundred meter transparent orb, scratched and dented by bits of floating solar panel and tungsten plating. The orb shifted. It changed shape, from spherical to cuboid, then to pyramidal and to rhomboid. The world hushed. Childish excitement gripped entire nations as the expectation of heavenly guests spiraled.
The gathering of probe after expensive probe began. Observatories around the world focused in on the mysterious object. It was difficult to see, laser topography simply refracted through the objects glassy surface. It seemed impervious to all the drilling and laser mass spectrography. Seemingly detecting this problem, it obligingly became opaque like mother of pearl. No sign of mechanical moving parts, no transmissions apparently sent or received, no heat signature. Yet it morphed continuously, ever more complicated and at Prime Number intervals, one second, two, five, seven, eleven, thirteen. After innumerable quasi-rhomboids and tetra-dodecahedra, scientists were puzzled to see several totally new shapes believed not to be possible in 3-Dimensional Euclidean space.
2027, and my how attention spans have shortened. The world grew weary of the ineffectual rubix cube in space. The LOFT now drew only the esoteric navel gazing sorts. As though sensing these people’s apathy, the shapes became simple again and the intervals changed. Sphere, six minutes, Cube, twenty eight minutes, Trapazoid, eight hours and twenty two minutes. Perfect Number intervals. Attention grew again, as the object became to blink like a faint pulsar in the night sky. Worries grew whether it was going to explode, just like a pulsar and douse the world in radiation.
2034 and a joint international convention finally approved a manned expedition. The world grew impatient and vaguely paranoid of the the object, sat one and a half million kilometers away surrounded by the most expensive clutter of mechanical parts, probes and bits in history. “The Lofty L.O.F.T.” the more sensible broad sheets called it. They had a point, at ten thousand kilometers it was clear exactly how much junk had been launched at the object, it was almost completely obscured by debris. Closer to five thousand kilometers. The blinking light stopped. A calm and collected voice spoke over the flabbergast shuttle crew: “About time you came in person.”
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.
