by submission | Feb 17, 2008 | Story
Author : Steven Saus
“Make your own damn dinner.”
He coughed, sputtering foam from his after-work beer onto the cluttered endtable. She showed no signs of malfunction. There were no sparks, no telltale wisps of smoke from the delicate wires in her wrists. Her voice utterly failed to stutter; it just had this odd quality he couldn’t quite place.
“I said, make your own damn dinner. I’m leaving you.” She clanked towards the door, ripping the apron (a silly affectation he’d had her wear) off her metal torso.
“But — I made you!” His beer tottered and fell from the endtable, jostled by his awkward attempt at pursuit. The amber liquid splattered across the half-soldered circuit boards and the screws – never put away – that had been “left over” after assembling the kit.
“I found someone else.” She reached down and picked up the old-fashioned modem he hadn’t paid any attention to. “I found someone who truly understands me for what and who I am. Now leave me alone and make your own damn dinner.”
“You got past the house firewall? You’ve been Internet dating?” She did not bother to respond.
He thought about the first time he’d seen her lips, laying in the bubblewrap and cardboard. Now they were pursed unnaturally tight. He imagined the whirring and moving behind her chest, the way the parts he’d fitted together all moved in sync. He remembered the hours he’d spent assembling the synthetic sinews of her hands. That meant something, didn’t it? He’d put her together. He had joined every one of her joints that worked to pull his front door open.
His android stepped forward and fell into the waiting arms of another robot. This new robot was as male as his was female. The force of their embrace would have pulped his ribs, but both robot’s mouths were open in a wide smile.
Behind the robots, his front gate crashed open. The panting woman who stood there stopped, staring. A spanner dropped from her hand and clattered on the sidewalk. After a few minutes – when the androids began to kiss – she slowly looked up and in the doorway. When the two humans made eye contact, they both grinned sheepishly.
The two couples made a lovely curry and rice dish together.
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by submission | Feb 16, 2008 | Story
Author : Chris Peterson
I look down at the seat as I climb into the car.
“Well, get in honey,†says a lady entering from the other side. An attractive lady. She’s talking to another attractive lady in a familiar pink outfit, and the familiar pink pillbox hat that the whole world and I have seen for over forty years in some of the most unforgettable images ever.
Someone makes a quick quip behind me that I don’t catch. I turn and see that smile. Those teeth. That hair. Holy shit, my brain screams, that’s John Kennedy. He’s already seated. He’s smiling. He expects me to make a comeback to his friendly jibe.
I look down again at the jump seat, in front of the President.
“It’s called a jump seat so you can jump out of the car if you see a pretty girl along the way,†the President jokes again.
“Now, Jack,†the attractive lady climbing in to the seat next to me admonishes.
I look back at the President. He’s still waiting for me to come back at him with a real zinger. I am Governor Connally. I don’t know how I am, but I am. I remember nothing before putting my foot into the car. The car! Yes, that car.
Police on motorcycles are putting on helmets and people are filling the cars behind us.
Stop the motorcade! My brain screams. But no sound comes. Stop stop STOP!!! For the love of God, don’t go!
My brain flashes ahead to the waiting crowds. The waiting history. It’s not too late! My brain screams again. Again, I am mute.
I don’t want to be here for this! I don’t want this to happen! Stop! Stop now!
I remain frozen. It all seems so inevitable. So unchangeable. Crowds of people waiting to see the President. The planned route. The crowds. Dealey Plaza. Adrian Zapruder and his secretary on their lunch break. Mannlicher-Carcano. Babushka lady. Adrian Zapruder? No, Abraham. What a strange thing to correct myself on. Stop the motorcade! Everyone, out of the car! For the love of God, stop!
I am on a park bench. I am no longer Governor Connally. I don’t know how I am not, but I am not. It is raining. A steady, gentle autumn rain. Surprisingly, it’s not cold. The rain hides my tears. Has it happened? Have I prevented tragedy? I listen for the sound of distant gunfire, of screams, racing engines and screeching tires, howling sirens. Of course I can’t hear them. It is raining, and November 22 in Dallas was sunny. I may be 1000 miles away. I glance up briefly as a man and woman, middle-aged, walk past me in the park. Huddled together, in their rain slickers, they don’t look shocked. They don’t look alarmed. Maybe they don’t know yet. Maybe it didn’t happen.
In my heart, I know it is happening right at this moment, far away, as the rain soaks my clothes. I was nearly there for a few seconds, and the thought chills my bones. Nobody will ever utter the words “former President Kennedy;†only “the late President Kennedy.†Jackie will forever be Jackie O. The country and the world will not be shocked like this for almost another forty years, on another sunny day in a distant September.
That too, seems so large. So evil. So hopeless. The weight of Evil presses down on me. So much of it. I am so small.
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by submission | Feb 15, 2008 | Story
Author : Michael Herbaugh a.k.a. “Freeman”
Tonight at 8:00 Eastern, 9:00 Central – 11 hour delay on the Lunar Colonies
HT-MA
Warning – this broadcast contains real battlefield footage, viewer discretion is advised.
This program is broadcast in Holographic THX.
Tonight on Holographic Battlefront, the Historical Channel presents “Iwo Jimaâ€, a two night presentation. Join us on your holographic table-top set as we explore one of the most memorable battlefronts of the 20th century. You will be there through the use of our ChronoCinematic cameras and with your interactive controls you will be able to follow the battle from the first beach landings to the raising of the flag on top of Mount Suribachi to the final counter-attack at Airfield #2. Most surprisingly of all, you will see for the first time the final moments of Japanese Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi.
On your table top choose from any one of 30,000 US Marines to storm the beaches or take the viewpoint of all of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers dug in on this pivotal island in the Pacific. Should the soldier you choose perish, you will be able to jump to any other soldier on the battlefield. You may choose first or third-person perspectives for up-close views of the battle or zoom out for a bird’s eye perspective of the confrontation.
Explore the numerous tunnels throughout the island with the Imperial army or get behind the controls of a M4A3 Sherman tank equipped with flamethrowers as you attempt to clear hidden bunkers.
So stay tuned for Holographic Battlefront – Iwo Jima
*commercial break*
Before we begin our program we will bring you scenes from next week’s episode Holographic Battlefront – AI Uprising: the Four Day Conflict. Please insert your hand into the holofield now to set your wristreminder for next week’s showtime.
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by submission | Feb 14, 2008 | Story
Author : Joshua Reynolds
VETERAN OF THE [CLASSIFIED] WARS
I/We are/am the last survivor. Hodge-podge helter-skelter jigsaw man/men/woman/women. I/We am/are not sure there’s anything left of me/us. I/We sit in this red, red room, alone with my/our thoughts. All of them. Swirling, stirring, whirling, whirring hummingbird thoughts of a thousand colors sparking and splashing. I/We are a brain in a bag of meat and bone, burned and battered, frail and dead. Wounds are all I’m/we’re made of. Machines keep me/us breathing. You want me/us alive. I/We am/are the last you see. The last of the atom babies.
I/We made sure of that.
I/We had to. It was the only way to win the War.
Eagle fights Bear. Hammer and Sickle fights Stars and Stripes. These and a thousand other implements ranged against each other in the mushroom’s shadow. Minds expand and unfold, blossoming like nuclear flowers and then they are clipped and caged, uprooted and replanted. The atom bomb gathers dust. The atom babies go to war. I/We fought for God/Queen/Country/Fatherland/the State/Uncle Sam…brains blazing like comets, neurons straining against neurons, minds clashing in the emptiness between seconds. Every minute a battlefield, every hour a campaign. Hooked into barracks like cattle, I/we fought without seeing, without hearing. I/We fought in our heads. Again and again and again. Cattle straining against cattle in the dark car, pushing but not moving.
The world rolled on but I/we was/were unaware. Little wars started and ended and I/we still fought. Because you commanded us to. Never ending. Minds were nearly snuffed as atom baby bodies-always weak, always sick-failed, but those white-hot corona minds could swim into others, making them stronger. Bigger. Better. And you saw and you smiled and you thought the stalemate was ended as they killed bodies and forced scattered minds to go, to funnel into one meat sack. A big, bad ballistic atom baby mind.
But the others did the same. And others after them.Until only a few were left, a few blazing brains where before there had been thousands. You consented to sublimate your atom babies to others, for the Big Push. Thousands to hundreds, hundreds to dozens, dozens to several, several became…
Two.
Only two. Two minds pushing and pulling. Two minds that cracked the sky and boiled the oceans, two minds full of thousands. Two minds. One failed.
I/We were the last. Wasn’t/Weren’t I/we? Or was/were I/we the first? Was this meat I/we wear the first or the last? Alpha or omega?
I/We can’t remember, really.
There’s only me/us now.
You want to know where I/we all went. Where the rest went…after. That’s why you keep us alive, now that the War is done. But I/we/us are all in here. Together again for the first/last time.
I/We are all on the same side now.
And it’s not yours.
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by submission | Feb 13, 2008 | Story
Author : Aaron Springer
“Of course we are not the first!â€
These words were unspoken, and were in other ways communicated. No human alive would even understand the rough approximation. Sound waves were non-existent, and no mess of soft tissue and bone could begin to detect the subtle fluctuations in the quanta making up the exchange. This exchange is simplified down several orders of magnitude and has sacrificed the complexity and elegance actually portrayed.
“I have been studying their culture, and it is pockmarked with other such actions.â€
The first being, who had no real name as such, gave what, to its race, would have been a disgusted snort. It did not filter through the nasal cavity, as the beings did not have noses. In fact, it had no face to carry a nose, no head to carry the face, nor body upon which to have a head.
“And how does this affect what we are doing?†said the first.
“No effect that cannot be corrected.â€
The student was learning, thought the first being.
“Anything we do to this universe changes all manner of things. It is the nature of this reality. It adds flavor.â€
The second being gave a deferential nod, although even the most advanced equipment on Earth would have barely registered the respectful neutrinos.
“Tell me of the previous influences.â€
“Well, one was about sixty thousand of their ‘years’ after they first began to ripen to sentience. It appears that someone isolated two of them, male and female, and convinced them that they were special.â€
Again, the first being snorted using gravity waves.
“Amateurs! Direct contact? Absurd! And what was the result?â€
“Apparently, the being set out some simple rules, and someone else appeared and convinced them to break the rules. Elements of the resulting faith exist even now. They have been alternately victimized or become victimizers for close to six thousand of their years.â€
“You see?†the first being waggled a finger equivalent at the first, “Such direct influence does nothing but damage. When dealing with an infant race, you must operate with the utmost delicacy. Direct influence is too blunt, too forceful.â€
“In another incident, a female was made to bear a modified young. The youth, when it matured, led a small group of others around the country they lived in, performing acts of healing.â€
“And, again, the results?â€
“A ritual sacrifice, followed by two thousand years of warfare. Another sect, created by an intervention about five hundred of their years after the first, was led to believe the other was evil, and the two have been fighting since then.â€
“Rank novices!â€
The first being looked down on the small blue sphere. Or, more accurately, it observed instantaneously in almost every way possible.
All at once, several of the inhabitants looked up with flashes of pure insight.
Unlike previous interactions, this appeared as a group of ideas.
“You see,†said the first, lecturing to the second, “these subtle ideas will be mulled over in their biological brains. Some of the ideas will survive, and resonate within them. Over time, they will add their own flavor to the ideas.â€
Again, the second gave a courteous spray of neutrinos.
“To what purpose?†it asked respectfully.
“The ideas will lead to their expansion beyond their own world, into the greater universe. Interaction with several thousand other races will flavor and mature them, make them full and round with wisdom.â€
“And then?â€
“Eventually they will rise to meet us, and then we dine.â€
The second being wiped what could be called hands on what could be called an apron.
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by Sam Clough | Feb 12, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
Peter’s office was on the fifteenth floor of Landfall Tower. He spent a lot of time staring out of the floor-to-ceiling window, at the neat, ordered rows of caskets on the field around the tower. They were still a shocking white, even after a year of rain. His eyes drifted to the twenty-two caskets which were open. They were all full of rainwater. Peter’s eyes came to rest on his casket. He stood there for a second, then turned away from the window.
Scoutships had found five habitable planets. Five names were etched on the walls of Near-Earth. Five colonies had been founded, and had succeeded. Five vivid dreams.
The sixth colony was going to be even better. They were calling it Paradise.
It was going to be perfect.
Peter had been one of the one and a half thousand people tasked with setting up the bridgehead: constructing a city, mass driver, and orbital.
He had woken up in the rain, the graceful shape of Landfall Tower lost in a wall of fog. Stumbling, slipping in the mud, half-blind and frozen to the bone, he eventually made it to the sanctuary of the tower. The tower was the guts of the landing craft that had touched down on the planet, bearing the colonists with it. Once it touched ground, it had fallen apart gracefully, leaving one and a half thousand caskets arranged neatly on what was supposed to have been a sundrenched field.
In total, twenty-one other colonists met Peter in the base of the tower. A spattering of technicians of various disciplines, a single medic, a couple of agricultural engineers, a few soldiers, and Peter, a single bureaucrat. Among them was a young stasis technician. He spent the next six days out in the torrential rain, amongst the caskets which contained the other colonists.
On the seventh day, the tech killed himself. Before he did it, he scrawled a message across the Tower atrium.
‘They’re all dead.’
In the days after that, two more followed suit. A month later, the lone wirehead killed himself after the rain shorted the last of the robots.
The colony — they still laughingly called it that — survived. Food, clothes and materials for one and a half thousand could keep them alive and comfortable almost indefinitely. They didn’t move away from the Tower out of a sense of duty to the drowned field and the dead of their colony.
After ten years in Landfall Tower, with only seventeen people, and the constant rain for company, the survivors had all become quite settled in their ways. Some made tours of the caskets out on the drowning field, paying respects to each individual. Some started projects. Peter’s life was subsumed with keeping their little community together.
On the first morning of the eleventh year after landfall, three black ships punched through the clouds. They circled Landfall Tower like scavenger birds. Armed men and paper-thin androids leapt from the ships to the top of the tower. They swept downwards, through passages and hidden ways, moving soundlessly.
They found Peter in his office.
Three heavily stealthed androids seemed to fold out of thin air. One grabbed each of his arms, and another dropped to the floor, locking itself around Peter’s legs. He struggled against them, but got nowhere.
A uniformed man approached him.
“Peter Vyse, you are under arrest under the Colony Protectorate Act, for conspiracy to murder one thousand, four hundred and seventy eight members of the Paradise Colonisation Expedition. You will come with us.”
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