by submission | May 10, 2011 | Story
Author : Aradhana Choudhuri
“John, I’m done. I’m getting rid of all of them.”
“Go for it. You don’t need to ask me.”
“Do you want something? There’s lots of vid, from when mom was little.”
“Where would I put it? Just…just flush it, ok?”
“Tomorrow. Federal Data Bureau will certify the wipe. Then I can sell the things. Do you want a part of the cash?”
“Nah, you keep it.”
“There’s a lot of them.”
“Wait a mo…” the vid-screen goes blank as John puts her on hold. So she counts the drives, in her head.
The oldest ones, each as big as her palm, black and utilitarian, are already on the truck. Then there are the cutsie-wootsie ladybugs and ballerinas and an entire array’s worth of koala bears from the thirties, barely a hundred TeraBytes each. They did get smaller for a while, till the superparamagnetic threshold was breached. The newest drive in the house is twenty years old, a striped orange cube the size of a small child.
The screen clears and John is back. “We’re doing ok, sis. Jill says you should buy yourself something.”
“That’s really nice of you two.”
“You’ve been paying Mom’s Datatax for years…” something in the background distracts John. “Mo…” He puts her on hold again.
She remembers sitting on the floor, playing with her bright blue rolling pin and ladle and a small sticky wad of dough, and her mother saying how Quantum Storage was just a year or so away. Then it was how Quantum ran into problems, but SpaceFold Memsisters would solve the data crisis. Give it a couple of years.
Her mother had stopped talking by the time she was in her teens. The pile of drives continued to grow, from the study into the spare bedroom and then into the hall.
The kitchen was half-full by the time mom retired. It took another two years for Social Services to send somebody around.
They all sat around the table, and the lady from Social took her mother’s hand, gently, and told her that hoarding pension payments – it took seven months of pension, by then, to buy a 400ExaByte drive – was not ok and there was more data generated every second than there was storage for it manufactured in a year, and did she really think she could save it all?
When her mother died, someone suggested getting it all into a government Anthro-study, but Nonessential Data doesn’t qualify. Some grad student, maybe from Socio-Analytics…But she doesn’t know any students. And renting a room at a Data Warehouse makes the taxrate go up not down, even if it means that she gets the kitchen back.
This time it’s Jill’s face on the screen when it clears.
“Sweetie,” says Jill, “I’m so glad you’re doing this. You need space. You need to make room for your own life.”
“It’s not that…I just can’t afford it anymore.” She hates explaining. Her sister-in-law always gets that pity-faux-therapist look on her face.
“Of course dear,” says Jill. “Tell us how it goes, ok?”
“Sure.”
“Bye sweetie!” The vid-screen goes dark. Only the sensors above the panel, visible-spectrum and infrared and audio and chem-sig, record the fleeting expressions on her face, the slight wince, the microtaste of salt in the air. Nonessential. 6:00 AM sharp on Tuesday, all phones in the 5686 area-code purge their memories. There’s a huge fine if they don’t.
by Roi R. Czechvala | May 9, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
Virginia “Jen” Taylor was a good soldier. She had the quiet good looks of the girl next door. She had the spirit typical of an Indiana farm girl. She could be sweet and feminine; she could mix it up with the boys. She could carry water. She was a good soldier.
I met her at Bragg. She kicked my bunk waking me from a sound sleep. “Drop your cock and grab your socks. Get a move on soldier.”
I watched her walking to the latrine, carrying her toilet bag and a towel, clad only in panties and a sports bra. I swear she must have been psychic. As if somehow sensing my admiration of her retreating backside, she spun around and barked, “Are you a staring at my ass?”
Before I could react she had closed the gap between us and I was on the floor trying to swallow my balls that she had kicked into my throat. “You still have a nice ass,” I managed to croak. She didn’t turn; she just raised her arm and flipped me off.
She wasn’t one to hold a grudge though. “Hey Newbie,” she yelled above the lifters screaming turbines, “You’re with me.”
It was just a training exercise, but it was still scary as hell. We dropped into an LZ that was hot, and I mean HOT. Plasma blasts were flying everywhere; trees fell as grenades slammed into them. The plasma was dialled down. It wouldn’t kill you; just burn your nuts off.
The lifter was barely on the ground when she turned to me and yelled, “Do you want to live forever?” She grabbed me by the strap of my LBE and yanked me out the door. With one hand she hauled me through the dense brush, with the other she kept up withering covering fire.
She flung me down behind the bole of a gigantic tree and returned deadly fire in earnest, taking out the robotic sharpshooters with apparent ease. Once the shooting had stopped and the call for “All Clear” had been given, she looked down at me huddled at the base of the tree. “Pussy,” she said, and strode off.
Over the days and weeks, we became friends. We trained together, we ate together, we…well we were friends. Then we got the orders. Combat drop. Allied territory. Venus. Very bad.
We were radar null in geosynch above our LZ. Jen’s eyes were glowing. The excitement in her was palpable. When I felt the lifter drop from the carrier, I thought I was going to shit myself. Jen seemed on the verge of explosion. The grin on her face looked carved in stone. The lifters rear door opened and the ramp dropped. Jen was on her feet in an instant.
“Do you want to live forever,” She bellowed above the howling wind. Before I could stop her she was out the hatch. I ran to the ramp and watched in horror as her flailing body disappeared from view.
“No, I don’t want to live forever,” I yelled, “But I’m going to wait until we land to get out.”
Virginia “Jen” Taylor was a good soldier. She had the quiet good looks of the girl next door. She had the spirit typical of an Indiana farm girl. She could be sweet and feminine; she could mix it up with the boys. She could carry water. She was a good soldier.
She just wasn’t too bright.
by submission | May 8, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
I sure don’t mean to say that the pods they sent us here in aren’t nice. There is a chance that they might be too nice, though. I’d be the first to admit that’s a strange problem to have, but we have it. I’m not trying to say that I’m better than anyone else here, nobody would believe that. I’m just saying that having ants in my pants, like all my teachers used to say, gets me out of my pod everyday. Nobody else has so much as taken a peak out of their pod, not even after a month.
I don’t know what’s going on in anyone else’s pods. I’m sure they’ve got all the great stuff that I have in mine. Plenty of them have partners or families in there, too. At first I thought that maybe I was too bold, that maybe none of the women would let their men out after they saw how I was carrying on. That had to be my ego talking; I’ve never been mistaken for a model. More often, I get mistaken for a tall boy.
Still, I’ve been doing my part to get our potential community functioning. I started all the plants from the garden pod. That didn’t work out as expected. The soil here is very fertile but also very strange. Everything I’ve planted is already huge. There’s the strange part, too. All the pumpkins bounce away from me when I try to pick them up. I wasn’t even going to pick any of them, just hold them up to test their weight. They didn’t know that, I guess. Also, the corn emits suspicious whispers whenever I walk by. It’s not the wind, I’d know the difference. I’m just concerned because the creeping phlox is creeping close to a few of the pods and I’m worried that will just give whoever is inside another excuse to stay in.
My main goals for now are taking away excuses for staying in. Mostly I’ve been doing this by applying paint to things. I make sure to only use the most inviting colors and interesting designs (interesting to me, at least). I’ve got a giant mural that says “Welcome Out!” in the most magical colors. The light of our new home interacts with our pigments in a way that makes them look extra magical. I had to build up to the big mural. It took a while to get comfortable with ladders and scaffolding and all that. I think the extra know-how on my part really shows. It’s not that I consider “You Are Special Avenue” a bunch of junk, just an immature work. Besides, all that repetition, it must say you are special a hundred times down that stretch of road, really sharpened my skills (the later specials are considerably more special than the earlier specials).
But yeah, I’m hoping somebody, anybody, comes out of their pod. I’ve always been kind of a loner but I’ve been realizing lately that I’m most likely growing out of that phase. It would probably be good to have some other opinions out here, too. I’m not entirely sure that all of my ideas are good ones. When you have as many ideas as I do, they can’t all be winners. Just to provide one example, I’ve been really second guessing sending out the robots to find me flowers. One of them brought back what strongly resembles a piece of an alien spaceship. Oh well, that’s how things are right now, out here. Feel free to join me, Insiders.
by submission | May 7, 2011 | Story
Author : Marlan Smith
Tark stared at the diagram. It was a golden square, clearly valuable, more valuable than the machine it came off of. He honestly didn’t think he would ever have found salvage this far outside of the galactic rim.
“What are they?” asked Pim. He was looking over Tark’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” said Tark. “Do you think we should call HQ?”
“Are you kidding?” said Pim. “We have explicit orders not to get involved in alien civilizations. Lets just keep the salvage and go.”
“But these ones are so weird looking.”
Pim sighed and floated to the far side of the bridge. He hovered for a while at the controls, touching this and that display. A meter wide square appeared suspended in the middle of the room. A representation of the golden artifact glowed in the center.
“Okay, look,” said Pim. “We’ll make a cypher okay?”
“A cypher?” asked Tark. “Why don’t we just try to contact them?”
Pim glared at him. “Look, you’re lucky I’m willing to allow this.”
“Okay okay, fine,” said Tark. “Let me program the message then.”
“Do you even know what to say?”
“Yeah there’s an audio transmission from the planet.”
“Fine,” said Pim, tapping the controls with a slender finger. “Then afterwards can we just go?”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll go.”
Tark held the square in his digits while the rest of the probe was crushed, cubed and reduced to its elements. In another chamber, a figure stood, ambiguous behind the glass. Pim tapped at the controls and turned to Tark.
“You’re sure they look like that?”
“Yeah,” said Tark. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know,” said Pim. “Just seems kind of odd. You don’t see many life forms so thin. And golden? Really? Do they carry some sort of isotope in their skin?”
Tark shrugged. “I guess. They’re clearly spacefaring, so they must have holographic technology. If they looked any different than what’s on the plaque, they would have just shown us in three dimensions.”
“So they’re flat? That’s ludicrous.”
“Look,” said Tark. “Trust me. When they meet the cypher, they won’t even be able to tell it apart from their own. It will blend right in, talk to a few of them. We’ll watch the whole thing cloaked, then we leave.”
Pim sighed again. “I swear, if HQ fires us for this, I am never forgiving you.”
“Trust me.”
The cypher was a thin creature, golden skinned and asymmetrical. It walked on the flimsy balls of its feet out the door and into the delivery pod. Pim watched it go with some skepticism.
“I don’t know… are the arms supposed to be lopsided like that?”
Tark held up his three fingers in a dismissive gesture. “Would you just trust me for once?”
They watched through the cypher’s eyes. They watched as the pod landed and the door opened into a lush, green forest.
Phyllis Guntmeyer had been walking her pomeranian when Spunky began to bark. A man stepped from behind a nearby tree–no, not a man. It was a cardboard cutout of a man, frozen in a waving pose. It was golden, naked and flat as paper. And it moved!
“HELLO FINE SIR!” it said. “I WOULD LIKE FOR TO VISIT A NEARBY TOWNSHIP!”
Its mouth was an animated gash in a line-drawing face, a living paper puppet, eight feet tall and impossibly thin. Its bent raised arm waved and twisted like a shaken saw blade.
Phyllis screamed, clutched her chest and fell to the ground.
Pim turned to Tark, his three eyes glaring. “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?”
by Duncan Shields | May 6, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The humans have been gone for decades but we try to keep the traditions alive.
All of us review humanity’s output. We see the movies. We watch the comedies. We review fashion shows. We witness the elections.
We fashion ourselves to look like they did.
We live in their abandoned houses in the suburbs and their apartment buildings in the cities. We live in pairs and we make newer versions of ourselves, better versions of ourselves, when we have gained enough points. If the models that we make are successful in the world, we are allowed to make more of them.
Currently I am helping to make a child. My partner designed the optical nerves and I have come up with a slightly more efficient design for its cognitive array than any I have ever seen or researched. It will be three more months before we have assembled it to a point where we can turn it on and let it start learning.
I was a tailor’s model when the humans died. I do not have much intelligence but I am happy with my mind now. I have requested upgrades and they come through in a fair schedule. My partner started smarter than me. She also gets the requested upgrades thanks to her hard work. She will always be smarter than me because of that unless she slips up and is unsuccessful. I do not want that to happen but at the same time I do. I cannot understand that.
The parts of me that are solar powered are fully charged from the week of sun we’ve had. I’ll still need a turn at my partner’s geothermal post later.
We do regular backups of our memories for the main banks. I am allowed to read them after the two upgrades. I am always shocked by my previous primitive minds.
Soon, our child will be learning to move and think. We will have to build it longer legs when it wants to go further. We will need larger cognitive array cages as its memory capacity fills.
It is a glorious time. I do not miss the humans.
