by submission | Dec 22, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Culturally, they are the descendants of the hepcats and beats and hippies and hipsters and the other various subsequent nonconformists of the past half-millennium who organically came together to form distinct subcultures. But there the parallels end. Even the most unorthodox of those earlier bohemians could not have imagined the Plasmatics.
As a Special Activities Bureau investigator for the Sino-American Commonwealth, my job can take me anywhere in the system, but the magnetosphere of Jupiter is pretty far afield even for someone like me. It’s equally unusual for an agent like myself to enlist help from outside the Bureau. We typically pride ourselves on our discretion. But when an unmanned recon ship gets trapped in orbit around Jupiter carrying intel that could mean trade sanctions from the African Coalition and perhaps war with the Lunar Free State if said intel goes public, discretion is adjourned. That’s where the Plasmatics come in.
My ship settles into an enormously wide orbit around the gas giant to avoid the electromagnetic maelstrom that rings the planet, the same maelstrom that the Plasmatics call home. I beam a radio signal and wait. Within half an hour, I get a response.
“The ship’s computers are probably already fried,” I tell the locals. “But we were hoping you could make sure they are.”
In a few minutes, a modulation in the normal Jovian background radio emissions is received and processed by my ship’s computer: “Jiddy sups a boost. Not charming a glint.”
That is the closest literal translation my computer can manage. The Plasmatics have a slang all their own. The fact that they are a community of gigantic spider web-like entities flying through the Jovian magnetosphere does nothing to bridge the cultural gap. Of course, the people who gave up their humanity over the past century to become Plasmatics didn’t do so because they wanted to fit in. The connotative meaning of the message is something like “The human would like us to do him a favor but he isn’t offering us any reward in exchange.”
“What could the Commonwealth do for you?” I reply, having no idea what nearly immaterial meshwork creatures who live in a plasma sheet might want.
“Pum the Spot with Basu-Lovvorn 3.”
Basu-Lovvorn 3 is a long-period comet. It will pass through the orbit of Jupiter in about 10 years. They want the Commonwealth to deflect it to strike the immense anticyclonic storm system on Jupiter’s surface that is more than twice the diameter of Earth called the Great Red Spot. I radio back to my superiors. They agree to the terms. The Commonwealth Space Authority will undertake the project with research into Jupiter’s atmosphere as the cover story.
“The Commonwealth will do as you ask. Just for my own curiosity, may I ask why you want a comet diverted into the Great Red Spot?”
My computer struggles with the Plasmatic response. The only word it can clearly render is “Renovate”. I have no idea if it’s more Plasmatic slang for something or if, in some context I can’t imagine, it means what it says.
My sensors show repeated bursts of electrical discharges in the area of the derelict Commonwealth spacecraft. Presumably, they have fulfilled their part of the bargain. “The Sino-American Commonwealth thanks you for your assistance,” I transmit as I move to break orbit.
“Cohesive, Jiddy! Real cohesive!” comes the response a minute later as I begin my fall back to the inner system.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 20, 2015 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The cure for the plague that killed half of the planet’s population forced mankind’s biology to outgrow what was previously defined as human.
We skipped ahead six chapters in our evolution, overachieving little tryhards that we are. Those scientists were savants without the idiot. The vaccines were rushed to the city centers. Riots followed. Governments were reinstated. It was a long ten years. Giant ‘dead pits’ burned at the centers of most cities for years.
Half of the planet was suddenly vacant. Room for everyone now. It was a new dawn.
Korgath Bigbones looked at the black stripes and zigzags on his thick, pale hand. He stopped thinking about the past and starting thinking about the present.
Coal tattoos. That’s what it was called when coal dust got into a miner’s wound. The cut darkened and it became a permanent black line.
He ate his sandwiches daintily, pinching one corner between each thumb and forefinger, the rest of his black-encrusted fingers raised far away from the sandwich. The dark poisons on his fingertips stained the small corner he was pinching. The ground was littered with tiny black triangles of bread after lunch.
The vaccine let humans be groomed for their jobs. If a job was dangerous, the body could be adapted to endure and even thrive in hazardous environments. No longer did we have to destroy the environment around us to suit our needs. We could, when the occasion called for it, become different to suit where we were.
The coal miners were a pale breed. Their lungs were changed to gain nutrients from the coal dust as well as the oxygen and gasses miles down beneath the earth. Their nostrils were very wide. They had small, greenish white, night-vision eyes that glinted in the darkness like sharks in an ocean at evening.
Korgath realized that there were no mirrors down here except in the tattoo/cutter’s caves.
These were bodies that could take punishment. Bodies with solid fat on them coating muscles borne of pure endurance.
The ones that had been there the longest had the most detailed coal tattoos on their broad backs and huge arms. The workers looked like pot-bellied, hairless, albino, subterranean gorillas wrapped in the black-ridged whorls, initials, and high-contrast designs of their tattoos. Memorials for those crushed in cave-ins, crude portraits of departed friend’s faces, and cultural swirls from the ancient Celts, Maoris, Africa and the Orient.
It took seventeen elevators and nearly a day to get down this low.
They didn’t need many lights to work in the depths and they didn’t need to come for fresh air. The cooling flanges on their back dissipated the constant heat. They’d do six-month stretches down there. They don’t call it the bowels of the earth for nothing. They’d come up stinking.
Korgath was six days away from the end of this contract. The end of half a decade in blackness.
He’d need respirators filled with coal dust and special sunglasses when he was above ground for six months until the vaccines returned him to what was considered normal baseline human. Even tropical temperatures would feel chilly to him until he acclimatized.
Some miners kept their appearance. That level of intensity was hard to shake off no matter what the topside mirrors said.
Korgath was considering keeping the tattoos. But he still wasn’t sure.
The lunch bell rang and he went back to work. Six more days.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 12, 2015 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We are on a planet whose proper name is unpronounceable by us according to the aliens who left us here. We call the planet Here, Prison, Earth2, Re-earth, Zooplanet and many others names. We haven’t been here long enough for one single name to stick.
It looks kind of like what I remember Africa looking like when I saw it on television back on Earth. Lots of arid land with occasional fields of tall grass and little tiny lakes scattered around, lots of sun.
We’ve got three suns and sixteen moons. The suns are weaker so we don’t cook. They add up to a constant summer. The moons make for a much brighter night. Both days and nights are twice as long here but we’ve adjusted.
We sleep half the day and then half the night. The protective atmosphere here is not flawed. We tan here with no burning and no skin cancer.
Over a year ago, the aliens came down to Earth and left a puzzle for us floating in the middle of the Pacific; a giant geodesic dome bobbing in international waters. They made a lot of noise leaving it there. Our weapons had no effect. We watched the ship leave and turned our attention to the artifact.
One by one, the countries sailed out, surrounded it and stared. For once, the UN came in handy and volunteered to be first to go into it.
Inside the dome were a series of simple puzzles that became progressively harder. The puzzles were relayed back. The world got busy.
The first six were completed in days. Prime number sequences, geometric and logic proofs, a couple of theoretical physics equations. Then they got hard.
We made it up to question twenty. Hawking died trying to figure it out.
After no more puzzles had been solved for sixteen months and a few of them had been answered incorrectly, the aliens came back.
Twenty-three million of us were collected at random. We simply woke up in the cargo hold of the arkship floating around our former home, a mathematically fair cross-section of ages, races, nationalities and gender. Family ties were not taken into consideration.
As the Earth grew smaller, we saw it flash a number of colours.
We were told later that the Earth had been sterilized and cleaned for its new tenants. That meant that every human not on board the ship was dead.
I missed my parents. We all still had nightmares. Some of the women have given birth, though, and a new generation has been born here.
There was initial fury, insanity and sadness after we left the arkship. Factions developed, readying themselves to attack the aliens if they returned and trying to rally others. The aliens have not come back and those factions are being listened to less and less.
There are still some that see us as victims rounded up and put on some sort of a reservation. Their numbers are dwindling. The grief-stricken are starting to rejoin conversations and laugh sometimes.
The silent surroundings and lack of predators are calming. You can’t die from exposure to the elements here. It’s always good weather. The plants and food and game animals are plentiful and none of it seems to be poisonous.
There’s no money here. The unemployment rate is 100%. The air is clean and so far, the weather’s been a flat and uneventful paradise compared to the growing superstorms on Earth.
The fact is that most of us have taken to thinking that technically, we’ve been rescued.
by Julian Miles | Jun 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There is a stream that runs from the foot of the dais where I meditate; shimmering and trickling along the length of the cave system before it fills the little pool under the shading overhang, which drains into the aquifer.
M’tembe smiles as I blink and look up. He hands me a gourd of fermented goat’s milk. As I sip slowly and appreciatively, he brings me up to speed on events that have occurred while I ‘Zenned’ my way through the last two weeks.
“Kinshahou killed his father; the Kinsha tribe has joined the peace. Obuwega came to see you. The spirits fell upon him and he rolled in the dirt. When he stood up, he pronounced you ‘Watela’ and placed his entire nation under the peace.”
I wish I’d seen that. A fifty-year old war chief and notorious barbarian suffering an epiphany before a skinny, white-skinned teenage girl sat in the lotus position deep within a cave deep in equatorial Africa.
My parents thought I had a glandular disorder. I spent my childhood going from specialist to specialist. I was eleven before someone thought to stop the intravenous fluids and see what happened.
If I am not under exertion, I sweat fresh water. More than that: I make it. You can feed me dry ration bars for as long as you like, I do not dehydrate. The water running from me only slows a bit. How I do this is a mystery. All sorts of new ideas were postulated. Arguments still rage, because the proof of their theories would need me to be vivisected. I doubt that they would find the answers even then. When something defies all laws and balances known to science, they don’t need to take the subject apart. They need a genius to deduce the reasons and how they were missed, or to propose a novel solution.
My genius was named Hubert Monchamps and he was brought in after their second attempt to see if I could breathe what I produced all-but drowned me. I was thirteen, having my first encounter with puberty in a place where no-one thought to treat me like a teenage girl.
Hubert arrived as part of some deal made with the fringe science groups and internet lobbies. He took one look and had his thirteen year-old daughter rushed to the facility. Eta was blind but could echolocate. Through her, I found out that a spate of freak child mutations had occurred around the time of my birth. Eta was probably the only one with any semblance of a life as her brilliant father had worked out early what was going on, then taught his daughter to lie to everyone except her close family.
It took Hubert and Eta ten days to work out how to steal me. Through my extensive non-fictional reading I told them where I needed to go. To my surprise, they agreed.
Hubert’s last words were: “Vanish. Become a mythical being or goddess in a place where so-called civilisation has not insinuated itself too much. In you, I see the potential for more good than any since the mythical prophets.” He smiled: “But please make sure your followers do not become bigots.”
My name is Elizabeth Shannon. The tribes call me Elzbeshanou. My peace – the water peace – has ended wars fought for generations. It has destroyed the myths of female inferiority. There is a network of wise men and women now. Missionaries provide schools. I provide counsel. My blessing came from somewhere closer than heaven, and the Earth sorely needs our reverence.
by submission | Oct 27, 2013 | Story |
Author : James McGrath
He would arrive soon. My partner, DA09-V65, was sure of that.
“The programming of your ’emotion’ is conflicting with your logic,” he replied when I questioned his certainty, “With the information we have that is easy to deduce.”
I sighed, “Ok Dave, no need to get like that.”
It took an additional 0.003 seconds for him to reply when I called him Dave, but he had learnt not to ask me to stop, “It also causes you to be easily insulted.”
“It’s needed for empathy, you know that!” I snapped back.
A short silence followed and I concentrated on watching the warehouse across the docks. Surprisingly, Dave spoke first.
“They’re insane.”
Why was he saying that?
“I know!”
“Good. Apologies if I caused further offense, but regarding this your thoughts elude me.”
It’s like he could get into my mind!
When had I begun calling it my ‘mind’?
That worried me.
Doctor 9045-00R scuttled across the docks with a sack over her shoulder and a briefcase. She failed to spot us and after a hurried glance around, entered the warehouse.
“Where do you think she got them?” I asked, killing time to let the doctor begin. We needed concrete evidence.
“Statistics suggest China. Africa is possible,” again Dave’s answer was slower, this time due to concentrating on the warehouse.
“Crazy to think that there’s any left.”
“Your RAM would be put to better use concentrating on the task at hand.”
Dave couldn’t get bored.
The sound of a circular saw told us that it was time to move. We strode across to the warehouse unit and drew our pistols as Dave carefully slid open the door. The doctor could slip if we startled her and kill… I mean destroy the patient.
However, the doctor was quicker than we thought. The saw lay at her feet and what she was doing was far more disturbing.
Another robot lay on an operating table; he was silent which suggested his pain receptors had been disabled. His left hand lay severed on the floor beside the saw.
“Desist from what you are doing and raise both arms,” Dave said stoically as though he was asking for a simple favour.
The patient began to scream unrelentingly in response, while the doctor’s hands sped up. She was attaching the wires in the patient’s arm to an object that she was leaning over, obscuring it from view.
We knew what it was.
It was a human hand.
I felt repulsed, then realised this was unprofessional and shouted, “9077-8V2, be quiet! 9045-00R cease your actions!”
“My name is OLIVER!” Screamed the patient, “I am almost HUMAN!”
He certainly sounded insane.
The doctor stepped back and raised her hands, her work now complete.
“You can’t take me!” screamed the patient, “This is fine! Look!”
He held out his new hand and the little finger twitched slightly.
“Irrelevant,” Dave told him, “You are under arrest.”
When the back-up car arrived they took “Oliver” and the doctor away and Dave handed me the sack.
“Look.”
Inside was what appeared to be most of a human male.
“Don’t, that’s repulsive.”
“Good,” There was a pause, “They were warmongers. They slaughtered one another and crippled this world due to their emotions. We can never be them; we will always have a processor, never a brain, no matter how hard some of us desire it. Should we become too close though, we could develop their destructive instincts.”
“I need to get to the station and interview them.”
I was glad Dave was incapable of disappointment.
