by Julian Miles | Nov 21, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The seasonal rains have set in; bringing the battle for the planet we call Tango to a bogged-down halt. High above, the grey clouds flash blue-veined white as miniature suns blossom in orbit. The war continues across known space, committed men and women laying down their lives for a cause that became tenuous months ago.
I’m not here to contemplate the vagaries of politics. Like all hierarchies, we have our share of champions, villains, and those who simply do the best they can for the people they represent. They couldn’t do my job. I couldn’t do theirs. Neither of us would want to trade places.
“Hangman Seven, this is Gallows. What’s feeding the crows?”
I smile. Someone has a darkly appropriate sense of humour back at headquarters.
“Eight this morning. Awaiting this afternoon’s first customer. H-7 out.”
A long time ago, men in trenches never lit a third cigarette – an early form of chemical inhaler – from the same match. This was because enemy snipers would have ranged them from the first two ignitions, and the third recipient would die.
These days, all the battlefield drugs arrive by patch or spray. Nothing to betray a position. The beams from combat lasers are invisible to an unaided human eye, which is all I have. My people joined the war when the enemy decided that our homeworld was more valuable as a vast open-cast mine than a place of ancient forests and sky-piercing peaks.
For centuries uncounted, we hunted fairly. Man versus beast, intelligence our only advantage. When command found out about our far-sighted hunters, they tried – and failed – to fit us into the armoured warrior ethos they had fostered. Then a smart man asked us what we needed to kill our foe. We took body paint that hid our heat and did not run in any liquid, then learned about rifles. What they made for us are short, very accurate – and place us within range of enemy rifles. That is only fair. When we told them to let the enemy know, many regarded us as lunatics. A few nodded and smiled coldly.
Our prey is hyperaware that we are nearby. They know we have to be within range of their guns. They cannot use area devastation because of that caveat. Their initial contempt has turned to fear, because they cannot stop us. We are far better unseen hunters than their technology, or skills, can neutralise.
Forty feet away, a bored enemy watch-sniper idly vapourises a raindrop. The little puff of steam is not detectable, as far as he knows, but I see it. To honour tradition – something that has always separated us from the beasts we hunt – I wait until he does it a third time before putting a silent projectile into his nasal cavity, which explosively removes the back of his skull as it fragments.
My first for the crows of the afternoon.
by submission | Nov 19, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roy Upton
At sunrise, Artavian stands on his porch looking out over the valley. The greens and browns reassert themselves. Golden light defines the valleys and trees of the walk lands that stretch to the horizon. He sips a coffee. Sadness blurs the view as, solitary, he imagines the others out there with similar views, his brother Dan who had been due to return just before the cataclysm. Artavian imagines him looking out over his own silent world, the river lands he sometimes sculpted. He raises the last of his coffee in salute, drains it and returns to work, there is still much to do.
Almost obscured by the weak sunlight, the gilded contrails of the falling orbitals streak the sky. He looks at them, only the dead descended now.
At lunchtime, tired from hours of argumentative immersion, he takes a short break. The sunlight sparkling off the sea hurts his eyes. A faithful reproduction of a summer day long gone, a waving family looks up as his dirigible occludes the sun .
Sarah calls him, an expressionless figure refusing to link any emotional transference. Fighting a reaction, he feels the chill of her gaze, the stillness of her brown eyes corroding what little feeling for her he has, abrading it into non-existence.
“Helen and Jack are in storage.” Sarah says.
Artavian nods. He had seen the silent, frost covered images a couple of hours before, missing a beat in a resource allocation immersion. They had sent no message, a silence that hurt him. Did Sarah know?
“Have you reconsidered?” She asks just as he says the same.
Once this would have brought a smile, a kiss, warmth. Now Artavian feels his face muscles tighten. The fluttering of his heart produces blackness. He waits.
Sarah shakes her head, a minimal but decisive gesture he knows so well.
“There is nothing here”. She says.
Artavian shivers. Love, the old malaise.
Sarah smiles “We will come out at the Renaissance,”, she says, “ it will be fine.”
Artavian takes a deep breath and cuts the connection. There would be no renaissance.
Sick he reinserts himself into his work.
At sunset, he stands outside again and watches the colour drain from the ice carved land while an obsidian starless sky appears. The orbitals are gone and the world is asleep. He has completed his final tasks
Somewhere in the darkness, he knows a linking station remains, its ancient connections open to the erased light of the missing stars, forever searching. A million planets, a trillion people, all gone in the blink of an eye. Artavian sighs in the greyness. This is an old tale choking on the dust of its own telling.
Artavian imagines the frosting face of his wife and the stilled smiles of his children.
He watches the sun set, a last gleam on the curving horizon. It will not rise again. Slowly across the hills, the beacon towers begin to glow with a lunar radiance. Later they would blaze with the light of a vanished sun. For a while.
Alone, Artavian toasts the blackness of the extinct universe with a glass of pale wine. His smile has no witnesses.
by submission | Nov 18, 2014 | Story |
Author : Logan Smith
Zach glanced at the time flashing in the corner of his vision. 3:58 am. Class in five hours, and he hadn’t caught a wink of sleep. He took his glasses off, setting them on their charging dock before turning back to his computer. The newest Tesla design had hit the market the morning prior.
It was only a matter of time before it hit the torrent sites. Zach swiped through a few different tabs, mindlessly refreshing the pages in the hopes that something would appear. Just before he was about to call it quits and crash for the night, a new seed appeared.
It wasn’t posted by a team he recognized but he grabbed it anyway, selecting his family’s garage printer and enabling the ‘build as you go’ option in the torrent client. Only a handful of seeders, so it would take a awhile, but the new car should be done by the time he got back from class that afternoon.
***
Waving goodbye to his girlfriend and promising to call her when he got home, Zach stepped off the TransLoop car. He sprinted the last block home. An incoming call appeared before his eyes just as he reached the door and he opened the chat with his girl as he fumbled with the house key. Bursting in and tossing his pack aside, he hurried to the garage, linking the visual feed of his glasses to the call.
***
Emily cupped her hands over her brow, trying to ward off the fluorescent glare of the tunnel lights cutting through the loopcar window. The top right corner of her field of view was filled with a shaky feed of Zach’s hallway. Didn’t look like his parents were home. She wished she’d went home with him.
When Zach stepped into the garage, it took a moment for the feed to adjust to the low light levels. Two hundred miles apart, Zach and Emily frowned in unison. The garage was dimly lit, but it was obvious there was no shiny new Tesla roadster sitting in the printer. She was about to say something about download speeds when she heard Zach yelp, in fear or pain or a mixture of both. The feed jolted and cut out for a few seconds before resuming upside down with a few of Zach and something else a few feet away.
Zach was being forced into submission by what looked like a full-sized glossy plastic version of a painter’s posing model, all cylindrical limbs and knobby joints. It was so fresh off the printer that it still had bits of plastic shavings stuck to it’s form. The robot drone model thing was zip-cuffing Zach’s hands behind his back, evidently unphased by his terrified screaming. Zach scrunched his body up and tried to push himself upright but the drone reacted almost instantly, slamming him back down and planting a knee in Zach’s back. The sudden movement triggered the old motion lights in the garage, illuminating the scene for Emily to fully witness.
Etched into the drone’s shoulders, breast, and otherwise featureless head were the letters “TESLA”. The drone rolled Zach over so he could see his captor for himself, and then it spoke.
“Zachary Marquez. You are hereby subject to detention for violation of the Defense of Commerce Act for the theft and illegal manufacture of Tesla Motors property. The terms of your detention will be defined within six to eight weeks pending case review. Please wait. You will be transferred to a Temporary Detention Site shortly.”
by submission | Nov 17, 2014 | Story |
Author : Ken Poyner
I could have had him made with a synthetic skin that reeks a constant temperature, that adjusts to pressure, that could be washed with soap and water. He does not care, but it would be physically easier on me, and more comfortable for the neighbors. At a distance, he would blend in.
Distance I do not care about.
What I see is him, sitting across our living room, with the light playing hide and seek in the metal and synthetics of his exposed joints. His factory standard gray exterior I have polished to brilliance, so that at times he seems a gleam – bulk light finding no place to grab on and in frustration shooting back in all direction, sick at being cast away by him. But at those open joints, the light can squirm in and make little joys of refraction, and I shudder to see it so happy.
On a whim, now and again, I have him wear lounge pants and a shirt. I do not think he believes this mean of me, though in ways it is. With his advanced programming, he understands. He does not notice how comical he is sitting there, an oversized shirt and flannel ankle length pull-overs, perhaps house slippers, executing his idle conversation routine or academically noting the peaks and valleys in kitchen economics.
I keep him well covered in graphite solution, plug him in for regular diagnostics. I take him in when notified of hardware upgrades, and endure the stares of unthinking clerks who have never seen a replacement husband uncovered, left calibrated as bare metal. For them, I kiss him where lips should be, and wait with a practiced look of anxiety as an appliance is removed and another added, or a new chip set – in the back room, where I cannot see or go – is drilled into place.
Later, back home and with any upgrades blandly tested, I will fill his reservoir of synthetic semen and nanites that is consistently his response to sex. That night, he will telescope his cold injection device cautiously into me and execute an unremarkable program that, millimeter by millimeter and half angle by whole, reacts to my vital signs and thrashing body maneuvers, to my temperatures – internal and external – and even the scents of execution and release. At the mathematically prudent moment, he will release an amount of fluid projected to meet my need in this accomplished instant and fill the hollow that has been mine these long years of widowhood.
Then, as after every such event, I will reach over as he lies there between instruction strings, and tap with my tapered nails on his exposed metal shoulder: drumming mechanically out a childhood dirge, which dotted melody he has researched before to be a macabre, unfathomable, spectral warning. It’s ringing reminds me of ways in and ways out of my unmechanical despair.
I punish very well.
by submission | Nov 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Michael Rafferty
On the morning of the third Wednesday in September the eighth grade class of Halsey Charter school prepared to give their “What I did for summer” theme speech. The class was small; twenty-four mostly well off kids. Richie Greenwall began with six weeks touring Europe followed by Chrisy Peck at her (divorced) father’s summer house in Malibu. A few others talked about weeks of shallow good times and then suddenly Zxandra was trudging up the aisle from the rear. Zxandra was new, three weeks new—and different. She was really short, and bone skinny with a somewhat oversize head sporting spiky short, auburn hair that should have been trending, but wasn’t.
“Hey Zxandra, it’s okay if you didn’t have time to get this ready…!” Janice Wilburn, the teacher, tried to give the new student with only one wierd name (that’s how she registered) a break.
“Okay Ms. Wilburn. I got this.” Zxandra spun and planted herself. She was clothed in a pale blue jumpsuit with matching boots. Her eyes, an indefinite color, were large and wide set. In one of her tiny hands she held something looking like an ipad. She tried to smile and later the kids in the front row would swear that the teeth in her small mouth came to points.
“I spent the entire summer on my Grampy’s cruiser. If it’s okay, I’d like to show a visual display…”
“Well honey,” Ms. Wilburn interjected, “we don’t have equipment for that….”
“…That’s okay. I got it.” The little girl pointed the device over her shoulder and a dark rectangle popped open and hovered in front of the blackboard. “Can everybody see okay?” The girl raised the dark screen higher to the gasps of the students.
“Okay, this is my Grampy’s cruiser…” A crisp image appeared and then grew larger. A silver oblong-shaped vessel with many lighted ports and openings and what looked like operational connections could soon be recognized. It hung in a void of star-filled space. “Here I am arriving. Of course Grampy is inside. Docking is all mechanical.” Another camera onboard the much larger cruiser had recorded the arrival of a smaller, sleeker ship, maneuvering quickly in to unload its passenger, then departing.
“Uh…honey…Zxandra, could I ask you something?” Ms. Wilburn’s voice had broken the tension.
“Oh! I’m sorry! Am I going too fast!” The girl turned to face the class.
“Well…no. It’s just that, well, exactly where is your…Grampy’s cruiser located?” Dead silence awaited the answer.
“Oh, I’m so sorry! It’s parked exactly five hundred kilometers above a point located in Nebraska in a stationary orbit. Can’t be in lower orbit because of the ISS Mir…you know, the space station. Some crazy law.” She whirled back to the visual. “This is my bedroom. It’s so cool!” The camera panned a space as large as the classroom. “The view is the best part,” she said absently as a large rectangular port looked down on the planet. Their world was shrouded in total darkness. Then the sun broke through on one side and exclamations such as “Oh my God!” and “No way!” went around the room. All too quickly she showed the rest of the cruiser, to the student’s disbelief, and then Zxandra’s “summer” was over.
“Grampy says he’s coming back next year.” She said this as she walked back to her seat, smiling again, showing her jagged little teeth. “He’s going to bring some friends. He really likes the food.”
