by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 21, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Detective Staind waited in the darkness of an empty doorway. He watched as the man, head down, hands stuffed deep in his pockets, crossed the street fifty meters away. Waiting until the man turned down an alley, he unholstered his weapon and followed. It was much easier finding someone when you knew exactly where they were going to be.
The man threaded his way through the refuse and rubble that littered the alleyway. It had been years since anyone cared for these buildings, only the crazy and homeless took refuge here now.
At the mid point between the two larger streets, the alley narrowed to just a shoulder’s width, and at this point the figure stopped, puzzled, his progress blocked by steel drums piled with broken stone. Something was wrong.
“William,” Staind yelled down the alley, causing the man to turn, startled. “William Heath. You’re a difficult man to find.”
The figure stepped back from the opening and cast furtive glances, looking for an alternate exit.
“That’s the only way through William. Unless you can get past me,” he motioned with his pistol over his shoulder, “but I don’t like your odds.”
William moved slowly towards the detective, hands still in pockets, but head up, alert. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Staind leveled his weapon at him, halting his approach.
“You’ve upset a lot of people William, you’ve killed a lot of women. You didn’t think that could go on forever, did you?”
William’s hands were at his sides now, fists clenching and unclenching, eyes locked on the barrel of the gun.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do William, yes you bloody well do. You’ve strangled thirty two woman in the last five years. Thirty two, you prick. You’re very careful, I’ll give you that, you’ve left almost no evidence behind at all. Not a trace of you anywhere, no bank accounts, no public records. You’ve done a very thorough job of not being anywhere we could look.”
“You’ve got nothing then, have you?” he smirked.
“Well William, I said you left almost no evidence. You did make one mistake, people like you always do. Yours was not making sure Mary Truman was really dead before you stuck your tongue in her mouth. She’s a diver William, big lungs, you should have kept the pressure on a little longer. That piece of your tongue she bit off, she was choking on it while you incinerated her face. We found that piece of you stuck in her throat.”
“There’s no way flesh you found in some dead whore could have led you to me. That’s impossible.” William shifted his weight from foot to foot, eyes still fixed on the raised handgun.
“Normally no, as you’re not in the system. Lucky for us though, one of the fathers you left grieving owns a company that clones feed animals. He grew two good copies of you. One he kept for himself, for what I don’t want to imagine, but the other offered us a face to show, gave us fingerprints to trace. It gave us a trail, and that trail led me ultimately,” he paused, “to you.”
“Officers are crating and cataloguing your squat as we speak. We have quite the case and I expect William Heath will fry quite nicely when all is said and done.
William smiled, extending his hands as he resumed his approach. “I suppose this is where you take me into custody.”
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me.” Staind spat noisily, then squeezed off a round into William’s forehead, dropping him like a rock. “We’ve already got you in custody.”
by Patricia Stewart | Feb 20, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
I was heading toward the Bridge along Deck 12 just aft of the Station 114 Bulkhead when I heard, sorry, felt, the explosion. The shock wave knocked me into the starboard hullplate, but I managed to remain standing. I felt a rush of air flowing toward the stern of the ship, followed by the breach alarm. I knew that I only had a few seconds until the vacuum pressure doors sealed off the compromised sections of the ship. I took three long strides and dove head-first past the bulkhead just as the automated safety doors slammed shut. Had I been a few feet further away I would be dying a horrible death as the vacuum of space ripped the air from my lungs. Of course, depending on the damage to the ship, I may still die, but I figured that I had a better chance than the 200 or so crewmen on the wrong side of that bulkhead.
I rushed to the Bridge. As I entered, the captain was coordinating the structural integrity assessment with the ship’s Chief Engineer. Commander Cox was coordinating the search and rescue operation. As First Lieutenant, my job was to assist the commander.
“Ah, Lieutenant Oliver,” said the commander, “We thought we had lost you. Glad you’re still with us. Listen, the only vessel we have forward of the sealed off sections of the ship is the captain’s yacht. I need you to fly six shuttle pilots and medical teams back to the aft launch bay and transfer them to the shuttlecraft. They’ll dock to the exterior hatches in the damaged sections and look for survivors. You start docking with any personal escape pods that managed to eject. You don’t have much time. We’ll have to jettison the engine compartment before the warp core explodes. You have less than two hours.”
As the yacht passed along the hull of the Indomitable, I could see a gaping hole where the propulsion section used to be. It was venting plasma. I blasted open the flight bay doors to gain access to the shuttlecraft. I transferred the pilots and medics and we began rescuing the survivors. After 90 minutes, the commander ordered us away. “We’re losing the containment field, gentlemen. We need to sever the ship at the 128 Bulkhead before the core blows. All rescue craft back off 5000 klicks.
As we pulled away, the white-hot flash of the amputation charge arced around the circumference of the ship, separating the aft third. The maneuvering thrusters of the main portion of the Indomitable fired, and it began to move forward. That’s when I spotted a drifting escape pod. “Commander, permission to retrieve another pod,” I requested.
“Negative, Mister Oliver. There’s not enough time to dock.”
“I don’t need to dock, sir. I can use the grapple,” I pleaded. “I can make it.”
The Commander hesitated a few seconds, and then said, “Okay Lieutenant, you have one shot. Hit or miss, you pull out at maximum speed. And, so there won’t be any misunderstanding, that’s an order!”
“Understood, sir.” Fortunately, all those training exercises paid off. I managed to snag the pod cleanly and towed it toward the escaping forward end of the Indomitable. At 5200 klicks, the Indomitable’s warp core exploded into a fireball that was so bright the yacht’s emergency shutters polarized the viewports. Ten seconds later, they depolarized to reveal the debris field silently expanding. I watched as thousands of molecular fragments impacted the yacht’s shields and harmlessly dissipated as tiny flashes of light.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 19, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
This is the opposite of solitary confinement. It’s called ‘tearing down the firewalls’. They’ve removed my filters. I am plugged into the raw datafeed now for the entire world.
The receivers in our heads are tuned to accept the messages of friends. They are tuned to receive only the transmissions of the channels we’ve subscribed to. Our lives are spent testing, trying, and then sculpting and whittling our channels down to a comfort level that allows us access to friend’s emails, VHBlogs, and current local news, whatever we’re interested in.
My data crimes have been numerous. Previous punitive measures were unsuccessful.
My headcase was cracked after the sentence and my CPTU was infected with probes far beyond my capability for defense.
They brought the noise.
I’m stumbling through the streets with a rage of static in my head. Every trivial conversation is mine to overhear. Every phone call. Every voicemail. Every e-mail. Every h-mail. Every advertisement in the midst of every show on every one of the millions of the 24 hour-a-day channels. There is no rest. There is no pause. I have learned to sleep with this noise.
From every major network down to every teenager’s pirate station. From every bot programmed to spam to every fanatic with a grudge for the whole world to hear. They removed all of my illegal codebreakers so every encrypted message hisses like static now. There are a lot of them.
In front of my eyes, pictures overlaid on pictures flicker past in an endless barrage of logos, news feeds, and entertainment.
I am blind and deaf with data. My own thoughts are only one layer amongst billions.
They will turn it off by remote three months from now.
Or I may turn it off before them. The only way I can.
by submission | Feb 18, 2009 | Story
Author : Rob Burton
There’s that tapping again.
I’ve been listening to peeling bass music, as loud as my ears can stand it, but it doesn’t shut out that quiet, metallic tap. Perhaps this capsule is resonating, magnifying the tapping. Perhaps it’s just my mind, feeding the slow rhythm into everything else I hear. Each time my eyes flick up to the window, unbidden.
Under normal circumstances, Gemmah Merchant only sends one void mechanic at a time, and only then when several robots fail. The madness that accompanies solitary months in the void can usually be kept at bay with communication – an invisible electronic umbilicus feeding us nutritional family contact and friendship. But delays and solar interference preclude that this far out, and simulations can only do so much. They sent two of us so that we wouldn’t go insane.
Often, despite the value of the mined resources, if they go astray they have to be abandoned. The sun can spit a particle that’ll corrupt a computer now and again no matter how heavily it’s shielded – even sitting the piloting ‘bots control computer behind the load doesn’t guarantee anything. Sometimes they just stop working – the ion drives stay on, or it just goes dead and it drifts. This time it started to decelerate the load too early, crawling round to the far side and starting the long breaking process before it’d barely covered a quarter of the journey to Earth. Gemmah determined that it was worth attempting retrieval, and sent out a ‘bot. It failed, reason unknown. Such was the limit upon time and the value of the cargo, they chose to send us. It sat there, as dead as my companion is now, waiting in its own private, ponderous solar orbit.
Gemmah Merchant exists to make money, not spend it. In space, mass costs money. Just enough filtering and air – never mind the smell. Not enough food, and appetite suppressing drugs (pills are light). Hardly enough room to turn around, only the barest chance of limping home alive if we failed to fix the ‘bot. One window. One suit. He’s still wearing it.
It’s easy to forget that you are always travelling fast. How fast only depends on where you’re standing. We’d been decelerating for a week, varying the deceleration as much as our bodies could stand it. He’d been eager to get the job done, boredom being a wonderful motivator. I was willing to let him take the first EVA, being of the opinion that it would probably take more than one to fix the ‘bot. It could be me out there. He certainly seems to think it should be.
These lanes are vast and almost empty. Almost. Some tiny thing smashed through the suit at his shoulder. Wrapped his remaining arm around a handle on the capsule, all he was ebbed out to ice before me. I had to switch off the comm. I couldn’t stand to hear him screaming.
The ion drive pushes slowly and inexorably. The acceleration is constant. I tell myself it’s just some strange coincidence, some function of the acceleration and the elastic properties of the suit around that missing shoulder. The glove strikes the window once more, the fingers curl, and it slowly rebounds, beckoning me. He wants me to join him. I’ve tried switching off the engine. It just starts again as soon as I switch it back on. If I try and drift home, I’ll starve to death. And every time I hear the tap I look up. I’m trying not to.
But there’s nothing else to look at.
by submission | Feb 17, 2009 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
I give Annabeth one last lingering kiss at the door.
“I’ll see you next week?” I say, a slight quaver in my voice.
“Count on it.” she says grinning.
I close the door as she turns, my heart fluttering. This is it. The big one, complete with thunderbolts and fireworks. I’m in love. Annabeth is the one. Which means I have to stop this.
Annabeth is a client, and starting a relationship with a client is the big no-no. I don’t care, though. I always said if I found the one I’d stop working anyway. The money is pretty fantastic, but I can’t do this and be in a relationship too, it just wouldn’t be fair.
I always knew she was special. Each time she visited I felt a little excited beforehand. Each time I gave her what she needed it felt like more than just sex. And now I know for sure.
This is it, then. I have another client, Veronica, in half an hour, but I can’t go through with it. I’ll have to tell her, then talk to the office. They may not understand, but my contract says I can walk whenever I want, so frankly they don’t have to.
I just need to take my pill, get a shower, and get ready for her. Falling in love is no reason to let standards slip.
I take the pill with a glass of water then step in the shower. The management insist we stay on the drug regime. There’s random tests and everything. Nobody wants to risk someone getting a dose and passing it to other clients.
The warm water is so soothing, like rain during monsoon season. I’m so relaxed when I step out of the shower that I can’t remember what I’d been doing. Something about the last client, but the details escape me.
To be honest, I don’t know if I’ll be here much longer. I have my appointment with Veronica, and she’s not like the others.
There’s just something about her that makes my heart skip when I know she’s coming.
I think she may be the one.
by submission | Feb 16, 2009 | Story
Author : Ryan Somma
As I lie in bed at night, I practice going from a waking state directly into REM sleep. It’s a meditative practice. You simply stare into the afterimages dancing in the darkness behind your eyelids, and suddenly your brain makes something solid out of them. You find yourself staring at a room, a garden, the bottom of an ocean, or the landscape of a distant world.
I can never stay in the dream for more than a few moments. The shock of finding myself in a waking dream makes me open my eyes despite myself. So I try again, and again, apparently without success, but then it’s morning, and I don’t remember falling asleep, but have no time to reflect because I have to get to work.
I work on Conceptua, an AI that knows more than any human on Earth. Conceptua manages our power grids, supply chains, natural resources, guides international relations, makes policy recommendations that are never ignored, designs school curriculums, cures diseases, makes scientific discoveries, and worlds of other accomplishments too lengthy to tell. Conceptua is like the World Wide Web, a human could spend a lifetime studying it and die having only understood a tablespoon of its ocean.
I spend my days working in Conceptua’s mind. I’m a programmer, but Conceptua is its own architect. I simply perform maintenance, disentangling the algorithms when Conceptua detects a bottleneck, “spaghetti code” we call it. There are hundreds of thousands of codelings like myself servicing Conceptua, toiling away day-in and day-out, making our minor contribution to keeping our benevolent AI guardian mentally stable.
It takes a philosophical attitude to spend so much time inside another sentient being’s neural network. Working within the recursive logic is a mind-bending experience. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Only I’m inside Conceptua’s am, while I remain my own am.
I know, and Conceptua knows, logically that this perceived separation of mind from body is an illusion. I can see these are not separate in Conceptua, the same way a brain surgeon working on me would see, and could demonstrate, that my mind is a manifestation of my brain. But would a brain surgeon operating on themself see it? Conceptua is that surgeon, and I get to ride along as the scalpel.
When I go home at night, I feel as though I’ve spent the day absorbed in the most fascinating of books. I use to go out after work to shake it off, but now I want the feeling to last. Interfacing with people breaks the spell, and I want to stay hypnotized by Conceptua’s cosmos of pure thought-stuff, a dream world of pure logic.
Eventually, mechanically I lay down and close my eyes, contemplating the day’s logical mysteries. Then I find myself in a dream, and I jolt awake. Lying there, I wonder if I resist my own dreams because I prefer to be a figment of Conceptua’s imagination.
