by submission | Oct 7, 2012 | Story |
Author : Debra Lim
When the call finally came, I just stared at the phone. The answering machine picked it up, and Dr. Wainwright’s voice echoed throughout my small room.
“I’m afraid the implants didn’t take. I’m terribly sorry to tell you that she didn’t-”
I shut off the machine and just stood there, a heavy pain settling in my chest.
The implants had been a long shot anyway, they said. She was just too old, they said. It was a miracle she’d survived this long, they said.
Feeling the warm tears slide down my face without my permission made the pain explode into anger. I threw my chair across the room and fell to the ground, tugging my legs into my chest.
I imagined her coming to me now, sensing my pain, gently nudging me. She’d always been by my side, her happiness giving me the strength to get up everyday, to beat back my depression and finally make it into the Academy. If it hadn’t been for her, I might never have left my room.
“And now she’s gone, and you weren’t even by her side at the end.”
My voice sounded distant. Everything felt far away, and I closed my eyes.
–
“Stop that!” I squealed with mock anger, rolling on the ground. Nala’s silicone tongue slapped against my face awkwardly as we wrestled. She leapt back, her eyes alight with their usual green glow.
I held up my personal datapad, re-reading the acceptance letter for the umpteenth time.
Ms. Miller, you have been accepted into the Moses School of Engineering at the…
I hugged the device to my chest, tears streaming down my face. I’d worked so hard in the last few years, and not all of it was on academics. I’d gone shopping on my own, and even walked through the park, Nala by my side. I still avoided large crowds, but I’d made it a long way from the dark cave that had been my bedroom.
I looked at Nala, her bare metal tail wagging happily. I sighed, reminding myself to replace the fabric that had worn off of it. The exposed circuitry could get damaged without the protection.
Rolling to my feet, I reached down to pat her blocky head, and it felt a little too warm.
“Hmm, maybe it’s time for your maintenance check-up?”
–
“There’s not much we can do. There are no more models like this one anymore, and this company in particular went out of business over five years ago.”
Five years in technology basically meant ancient these days.
I looked down at Nala, her floppy, too large tongue hanging out of her mouth.
“We can try an implant that would allow us to remotely access her data files. We’d then be able to transfer her to a new body. She’d still be the same pet, just in a new suit.”
Nala just continued to smile her doggy grin up at me, oblivious to our conversation.
“Alright, do it.”
“There are risks…”
“But if we do nothing, she’s gone anyway, right?”
It hurt to say it, but it was the truth. The specialist would be in at the end of the week. By then I’d be away at the Academy.
I rested my hand on her head.
“I’ll be waiting for you at the Academy, silly.”
She let out a tinny bark as I walked away.
–
I uncurled myself and stood. The tears had dried. I looked at my monitor, a picture of Nala and I at the park.
I wrapped my arms around myself and whispered.
“Thank you.”
by submission | Oct 6, 2012 | Story |
Author : Ian Florida
Metal grates against stone as my cell door shrieks open. They shout as they slam their rifle stocks into my ribs. I laugh. They pause. They think I should be afraid. They think the metal mask they’ve strapped around my head keeps them safe. I know better; I have a plan.
The leather bites into my skin as they strap me to the cart. They wheel me through the compound’s silver corridors. We enter the fluorescent halls of the medical wing. The light stings my eyes. I blink.
In that instant they jab the needle in my arm. The blue fluid flows down the tube and through my paper thin skin into my tight purple veins. I try to relax and remember the plan.
A thump shudders through the cart as we push past a door. My mind swoons but I don’t need to see to know where we are. The sterile stench of disinfectant fills my mouth. We’re in the operating room.
White masks and blue scrubs crowd around. I find the one clutching the blue sack. The world starts to dim. I don’t have the concentration to make him pull a gun or unstrap my bonds. That would be too much. Remember the plan, something simple. A single word.
“Lean.”
My need burns like the morning sun setting fire to the fog.
“LEAN.”
My vision starts to focus. They haven’t noticed yet. I glance to the side, quickly so I don’t give it away. His hand is resting on the line, cutting off the blue river’s flow. I smirk.
The surgeon drops his knife, “he’s awake” he screams with a voice that reminds me of my cell being opened. One reaches for an alarm, the man at the foot my bed raises his gun; they try to jab another needle in my arm.
“Freeze,” I whisper. They all obey.
“Cut me free,” I order. The lead surgeon takes his scalpel and slices the leather straps. I smile in thanks, but his face remains blank. He is my prisoner now.
I touch the sunlit window and smile. “Shatter.” I collapse against the empty window frame. My muscles shake. I slip to the ground and let my feet dangle from the tenth story window. I sit that way until the sun burns a ruddy red and slips behind the hills to the west.
I sigh as the last light flickers beyond the ramparts of my prison. The sun is dead. I give the surgeons their death as well. I stop all their hearts but one: the man with the gun. I release him so that he may release me.
I can feel his heart race as he realizes I’m no longer strapped to the table. I can feel the wind on his face as he turns to see why the window is open. I can see myself through his eyes: bleached skin that clings to limbs as thin as reeds streaked with blood and cobalt liquid. I feel his trigger finger finish the arc it started so many hours ago.
I leave his mind and return to my own, it’s better to die in the place you were born. If I can’t be on my own world, at least I can be in my own mind and free.
by submission | Oct 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
When John Allen wakes, two suns, one red, one blue, peek through the line of smoking atmosphere generators fencing the horizon. He glances at his snoring wife as he shifts his weight to the edge of the bed. With luck he can get out of the house before she awakes. She’s not a morning person.
Dressing in his work coveralls is awkward due to his lame leg and arthritic fingers. He doesn’t know what caused his leg to ache so much, particularly in the morning. The “quack” doctor who comes once a year to check up on him is no help at all. He regrets the loss of mobility, but he gets by.
During breakfast, he checks the satellite readout of the day’s weather conditions. The damn monitor is on the fritz again, but after a few bangs he gets the readings he needs; 30% humidity. High temperature, 36 degrees Celsius. Oxygen 16 kpa. Nitrogen 44 kpa. Carbon Dioxide 6kpa. 32 mph winds, NNE. It was shaping up to be a good day.
John sips instant coffee as he scans the field maps on his tabletop console, dusty despite numerous air filters. Automated alerts inform him that a Nitrogen pump and a CFC emitter have failed and there are some irrigation malfunctions in sectors six, thirteen and forty-four. He should also check on the kamut field. The grain is nearly ready for harvesting. He could rely on the automated harvest indicator system, but some of these machines are older than he is and couldn’t be trusted. John prefers the tried and true methods of identifying crop readiness with hand and eye.
He hears Marg stirring. He slugs back the last of his gritty coffee, straps on his utility belt and makes for the airlock.
Outside, the breeze makes small twirling dust tornadoes across the yard. John puts his air filter on, grabs one of his many canes and makes his slow, limping way to the barn where his eeda-win beetle munches on frizzle, the tall, thin native grass that grows everywhere on this endless plain.
When he arrived fifty years ago this place was nothing more than a cold, inhospitable sea of sandy dunes with minimal plant life and a handful of hardy insect species. Today, the atmosphere is thin and dusty, but breathable. Water, drawn from deep, ample aquifers fills ancient craters with small, algae rich lakes. He’d helped introduce over five thousand agricultural and medicinal plant cultivars and personally engineered a breed of cattle that could subsist here.
For years this moon was a much needed, though humble bread basket for the seedships heading further into space. Today, he’s the only farmer left on Thuprair-E, fifth moon of the massive gas giant now cresting the horizon. The others, including his two sons, had left for more exotic and easily terraformed planets and moons. With the latest hi-tech machinery and temperate environments, the work elsewhere was much easier. John stayed. He likes a challenge.
Little Squirt croaks when John enters the tin Quonset. The giant, metallic green beetle shuffles in its stall, eager to get out. Massive, powerful pinchers clack anxiously.
It takes longer these days, but John has rigged an ingenious method of tacking up Little Squirt in the complicated harness and getting himself settled into the two-wheeled cart which contains all the tools he’ll need for the day.
“Come on, old friend,” John urges as he twitches the reigns. “We’ve got a long day’s work ahead.”
John gets his bearings, then slowly, steadily, beetle and man trundle off across a brave new world.
by Clint Wilson | Oct 4, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
I descend deeper into the heart of semi-quadrant 26F, my maneuvasuit’s floodlights guiding me all the way. Massive gears and cogs riding on giant turbine shafts dwarf me, rotating silently on their bearings as layers of viscosium, barely a dozen molecules thick, keep everything at a cool 190 degrees or less. Yet on I monitor. Firing my vertical jets I drift into a side shaft, which will guide me through the lower ion exhaust plenum and straight into the grand hydro-valve gallery of this particular sub-engine portion of my overall keep.
Like my father and his father before, I am a proud and loyal maintainer of the machine. Pausing at a calibration platform I take a moment to measure the erosion on the nearby upper beta crankshaft’s friction journals using my helmet’s laser guided micrometer. As I suspected, the extra stress placed on the shaft’s aft third of its length, by the rerouted spring scissor and its eighty-ton ballast, installed almost a century ago by my own ancestors and their kinsmen, is finally starting to take its toll.
If left unattended for another year, give or take a few weeks, the bearing surfaces of the crankshaft’s rear section will eventually overheat and start to pollute the sub-machine’s viscosium lubrication system. The resulting extra friction caused by microscopic metallic debris will most certainly end with catastrophic failure to at least the local sub-structure. And nobody wants to have to deal with that type of engineering nightmare. Luckily for the people on the surface I was born into this job. I know what needs to be done.
Without hesitation I transmit my findings via comlink to semi-quadrant headquarters, requesting a platoon-crew containing at least six senior apprentices, a gantry crane, and some two hundred hours of access to any one of the local B-class machine shops and their stores.
Within minutes the work orders have been logged into the motherboard of the main quadrant, my eager young engineers deployed in their fully charged maneuvasuits, heading quickly in my direction, and to top it off I have been granted carte blanche at machine shop sub-terra 39X, an old personal favorite. Hector knows how I like my parts manufactured, practical and without the frills. I always tell him, “It doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to work.”
It’ll take us less than a month to build a replacement upper beta crankshaft, so we can then lift the old eroding one from its journals and re-bearing the entire lower valley at our leisure.
And once we’re done, will we disassemble and discard our strategically placed temporary unit? Of course not, we will daisy chain them together via a constant velocity coupler and allow them to work as one. If there was one thing my father always taught me, it was, “Overbuild son. We’ve got endless resources coming down from the surface people. Why not use them?”
And he was right. The folks up there will never stop providing us with what we need to keep the machine running. It is their first priority above anything else.
I myself have never been to the surface, and as a loyal maintainer of the machine I know I never will. And that’s just fine by me. I will continue to micro-measure every gap, to spec every tolerance, to replace every corroded power terminal, to hone and re-sleeve every worn cylinder, until the end of my days. My place in life is well laid out before me. And like my father and his father before, I have a job to do.
by Julian Miles | Oct 3, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
George stood on the fused glass at the edge of the crater. It had taken him a while to climb out of the hole, but at least it allowed the forces arrayed against him to reassemble. He watched them advance, flicking his eyes between reality and nihil, fascinated that living organisms produced a shadow in that non-place.
A thought came to him. With thought came actuality and he flickered to all perceptions except his own, a curious moment when he just ceased to be before standing there again. In the command and control centre thirty miles away, consternation erupted as Major-General McChase keeled over, dead before his body started to fall.
George felt elation. Another thing learned. He could nullify the nihil shadow of an organism and the organism itself died instantly. With a rush of curiousity, he flickered a thousand times, nullifying the nihil shadows of things ranging from plankton to trees to whales. On his return to his standing place, he could sense the absences he had created. So he had proven shadows and echoes in nonexistence. But could it be nonexistence if he was there to see things?
His fascinated theoretical conjuring was interrupted by a massively amplified voice.
“Professor George Andrakoplis. This is acting commander Lamont. Surrender yourself for detention!”
Plainly as incapable of understanding as his predecessor. Maybe the next one? He flickered.
“Ack!”
The amplified noise of fatal surprise echoed. So his absences were infinitesimal in time consumption? Probably zero in real terms. He chuckled. ‘Real terms’. Now there was a phrase he couldn’t use anymore.
He paused his mental dissertation to gauge the approaching forces. He extended his newly acquired sense of hadronic potential over them and laughed to himself as he did so. Of course none of them had a large hadron collider with a gap just big enough for him to fit into, to separate him from the nihil with racing neutrons, to turn him into a four dimensional entity again before the proton stream inflicted another unpredictability upon him. Most likely it would actually end him, instead of inflicting a further freakish transformation.
He raised a hand to his forehead as an epiphany struck him. His sudden movement caused the entire advancing army to grind to a halt and dive for cover.
Could it be dark matter? He hadn’t been gifted with the ability to cease to be, he had been given access to the cloth upon which the tapestry of existence hung. Like any embroidery, he should be able to discover how to unpick bits of it.
He looked up as contrails laced the sky. How apt. Lacework. He cocked his head as cries of consternation echoed from the ranks arrayed before him. The missiles were not of their sending. It looked like an opportunist nation was using the situation to try to deal with him and their opposition in one holocaust.
Well, he had a theory. What better time to practice than with something that should allow him to shift the perceptions of those before him? He flickered, disappeared, flickered and generally reinforced the fear of the unknown amongst those watching him. Minutes later he reappeared and stayed. The nuclear armageddon rained down in a series of solid impacts and detonator sized blasts, but not a mushroom cloud rose nor did a Geiger counter twitch.
He smiled, spread his arms and shouted: “Now can you get past your terror so we can talk like rational beings?”
