by submission | Sep 7, 2008 | Story
Author : Lokon
Richard was forty, paunchy and balding when he came home early and found Susan on the bed they shared. The thing on her and in her was a vibrating mass of warm rubberized orgasm; moving in and out of-across her, her eyes and ears were hidden behind the goggles flashing the holos of what Richard assumed to be one of her Romance novels. She neither saw him nor heard him, and Richard had a manic moment where he imagined she wouldn’t have cared either way. The discarded box it had arrived in professed it as ‘the best sex on the market’ Richard fingered the wedding band she had placed on his finger. His flesh bulged around the too tight metal. He left quietly.
Richard started taking pills. The blue pill made him hard on demand led to the brown pill to keep him going to the red pill to make him more aware of her and better. The pills brought want of the augments. They put little circuits in his head to help him remember dates and recite Shakespeare and Donne on command. At first they were to please her, and then they were just for him. The augments led to uploading, back ups, and gene therapy.
Susan aged and Richard grew to be more then he had been, muscles beginning to regrow and hair migrating from his back to the top of his head. “Darling” Susan said on her 90th birthday “Die with me. We were not meant for more then we were given. Promise me that you will be human with me in the end.” Richard was 96 and looked 28, but said “Yes” as he promised to join the dying who were not to be wooed by the seductive murmurings of technologic immortality.
Richard was getting used to his new legs and eyes when he found Susan there. Susan was locked in a box in her best Sunday clothes, earth forming all around her wooden walls with a tombstone like a sundae’s cherry on top. Next to it was Richard’s marker, now only signifying the shell he’d discarded just before Susan had closed her eyes for good. “I am sorry dearest, I didn’t want to if I didn’t have to.”
by submission | Sep 6, 2008 | Story
Author : Nik Gregory
The mess hall bustled around Harris; it was like a flock of vultures who had just found an overturned meat truck. Possession yields not only extended onto property but onto food too, woe betide anyone who gets the last muffin.
“All I’m saying is there’s something therapeutic about blowing up an asteroid,” stated Harris, feeling his point needed no justification.
“Spreading atomic waste throughout the entire cosmos is not what I call a therapeutic activity,” retorted Mila. She came from one of the nameless countries affected by the mass crawl into nuclear arms – it wasn’t nameless, just no one knew how to pronounce it except for Mila.
“Honey, we take the green pills for the bio’s, yellow ones for the chems, blue ones for the millisieverts and the red ones for the gammas,” said Hank; he sat scratching his sun burnt nose with the end of his spoon. “So I call bull on that.”
She conceded defeat and flickered a smile of someone half her age, “Well on that, we just got twenty moles and five scarabs in a courier this morning.”
“Twenty moles?” asked Hank.
“Yeah.”
“Shit, what do they expect us to blow up with that?”
Harris hit his head against the table, “We’re supposed to mine them, after all we are miners.”
“But how else are we supposed to split an asteroid down the fault lines? You can’t stick a prybar between two faults of nickel and push when they’re a million metric tonnes.” Hank pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket and tapped it on the table. “So Mila, what are you doing this evening?”
“I have a date with Guy Mitchells,” came her answer with an extra coy smile on the side.
“Oh, sorry,” said Harris in a mocking tone. “Are all the Walkers taken now?”
“I sure as fuck ain’t,” muttered Hank before sticking the cigar in his mouth.
“No, just they come from a small genetic pool.” She gestured toward Ed and Ted, a pair of non-related identical twins – their genetic line had stayed separate for over two millennia yet they ended up with identical fashion, beards and even the same scar gouged over their right eye.
“Okay that’s a valid point.”
“Hell yeah it is, we Walkers ain’t exactly a pretty bunch,” stated Hank to a puff of smoke, his stubbly chin seemingly more prominent through the haze.
“That’s why I picked a land lover.” She looked down the line to see Guy approach, his shoulders slenderer than hers and every other Walker.
He leant over, kissed her gently on the cheek and grabbed her muffin, “Thanks babe!”
Harris muttered, “Noob,” along with Hank.
“Oh, ‘hon’, one sec,” started Mila. She right hooked Guy, sending him toppling to the coarse regolith based concrete as she swiped back her muffin.
Mila’s attention drifted to the two guys and she said clemently, “What, it was the last one!”
by Sam Clough | Sep 5, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
“Elass, check your drones. I think they’re goofing off.”
“Thanks, Laurie. They’re on target now.”
The fleet was deep in the ‘gravel’ region of the asteroid belt. Elass was dragging in the larger chunks for processing, Laurie was filtering the gravel, looking for chunks of dirty ice and pure metals. Red was sitting ten clicks out, on overwatch. When the fleet had set up shop, they’d deployed a small field-generator to hold the proceeds of their rockmunching. It was maybe two-thirds full of chunks of ice and mineral-rich rocks.
Red was bored. Whilst the miners were at least actively involved in their task, all Red had to do was watch the stash and look for intruders. The company stipulated that there had to be at least one combat craft with every mining op, after the spate of Free Rhean attacks had taken out maybe half the fleet. That was two years before Red had signed up: ‘overwatch’ had sounded so exciting at the time. He’d escorted dozens of mining operations now, mostly with Elass and Laurie, but sometimes with other pairs.
“Ejecting slag, watch yourselves.” Laurie transmitted.
With a little puff of dust, a chunk of compacted wasterock fired out from the midsection of Laurie’s vessel, the ‘Grave Robber’. The projectile held coherence for twenty kilometres or so, then slowly disintegrated into dust. There were a half-dozen plumes of finely-divided dust diffusing ‘above’ the plane of the belt.
Red watched the projectile as it broke up.
The dust moved oddly. Like something was pushing through it.
Stealth!
With motions born of long practice in virtuals, Red started actively pinging the area and accelerated towards the dust-cloud and the covert ops pilot that had just made such a silly mistake. His sensors were betraying him, the dust interfering with the absolute ranging. Half a dozen half-contacts were lurking in the dust plumes. Red warmed up the missile launcher, and powered onwards.
Elass cursed as one of his drones stopped responding. Cheap links occasionally meant that they went dead in space, and needed to be jumpstarted. Hopefully, that’s all it was – sometimes, their proximity sensors just refused to work, and they ended up smeared all over the outside of a rock. Lousy good-for-nothing corporation refused to pay for decent equipment, then acted all surprised when you came back with half your complement acting up. His rambling train of thought was interrupted by the beeping of the ‘communication request’ alert above his head. It was the hauler – the box-with-engines that dragged the ice and rock back to a an orbital refinery.
He keyed the local area radio.
“…’sup?” The voice coming through the radio was unfamiliar, not the usual hauler pilot.
“Not much. You’re early, though. Squeeze your auth key to me and I’ll unlock the field.”
“Who do you think I am?”
“The hauler.”
“Moron.” The not-hauler approached the the storage field. The entire front of the bulky craft folded. It smoothly enveloped the storage field like a snake choking down an egg. Laurie hit the all-fleet-alert. Elass panicked, and pushed every thruster he had to max. They flared, and burnt out. Communications from Elass were a garbled mess of swear of words before Laurie broke the line.
The thief twisted his ship into an escape vector. A dozen missiles streaked from launchers mounted onto his outer hull. They automatically locked in on the hapless miners.
Red grimaced, and muttered to himself.
“I’m so fired for this.”
by submission | Sep 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Rayne Adams
I stole a lightspeed cruiser today. Went flying.
Found Ancient Egypt.
You learn in school that time and space are the same interchangeable abstract, but no one really believes it. You walk three steps, you move forward in space and in time, but if you walk backward, you don’t go back in time. Do you? I didn’t think so.
I had to get as far away as possible—I’d stolen a very expensive, very advanced piece of machinery. I set the lightspeed engine to 2400, more than five hundred lightyears higher than is considered safe. I followed protocol—closed the airlock, strapped myself in, and inhaled the gas that would keep me in a stasis state during my trip. No one has ever traveled lightspeed while they were conscious.
I don’t know if the gas in that particular cruiser was bad, or if I just hadn’t taken it the right way, but I woke up long before I should have, nowhere near the end of my journey.
I wasn’t in space. At least, not any space I’d ever seen before. Space is black, so black it’s sickening to look at after awhile. But this was color, swirling lights and blinding color. Sounds too, which don’t belong in space. The cruiser was gone, and I seemed to be as well. I couldn’t move my arms or turn my head, I was just consciousness floating somewhere in this vast, fluctuating whirlpool.
I became aware that whatever was around me was growing very warm. This didn’t concern me—after they entered the academy, all Spacers had their epidermis upgraded to be able to withstand great heat and pressure. It was still very uncomfortable, but at least that meant my body was back.
When I swam into consciousness, I was lying on my back in something soft and pleasantly warm, not scalding. There were people standing over me, staring down and talking, arguing. Their words jumbled together as the translator in my brain wavered between several different languages. They weren’t speaking a tongue it recognized, so it had to spend a few moments cross-referencing.
It didn’t take too long.
“—Fell from the sky! How could she not be of the gods?”
“She doesn’t look like one of us.”
“Is she even alive? Gods do not die.”
“I’m not dead,” I said, sitting up, my mouth flawlessly forming the words of this strange new language.
The three people standing over me jumped back, frightened, until one of the men offered me a hand up. I was completely naked (my clothes hadn’t survived the heat) but one of my rescuers was a woman, and her loose white robe only covered one breast, so I decided not to worry too much.
“Where am I?” I asked, though I didn’t really need the answer. The white sand, wide, blue river, and clean, breathable air was enough evidence in itself.
“Welcome to the land of Kemat, great Isis.” One of the men said it, and they all bowed their heads.
“Thanks, I—.” I cleared my throat. “What did you just call me?”
“Isis,” the woman said, eyes still cast to the sand. “Goddess of the Nile. Every year you shed tears for your dead husband and the river floods.”
“I’m not a goddess,” I said, but they weren’t listening.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 3, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The test drill had gone horribly wrong.
The bipedal meat structure wasn’t breathing. Emergency!
There were specific instructions tattooed on the outside of the biological’s skin for repair procedures.
The yellow and black rectangles and hazard symbols on the shaved skull meant that no one except accredited programmed hardcases could operate on him there.
There was no time. The sensors in my fingertips read the sound vibrations coming from the cage of bone where most of his internals were kept warm and functional in their liquid bags.
No sound was coming out. According to manuals I’d read in these flight plan procedures, biologicals had to be brought back online within minutes or the shutdown would be permanent.
There were pictograms of the major organs tattooed on the outside of the body of the bio. Procedures with lightning bolts were stained there with dotted lines pointing to places to apply trodes and places to avoid stressing.
There were a lot of markings all over the body. It was complicated. I could feel my processor heating up.
It was hard to believe that beings so fragile had accomplished so much before the takeover. It was even harder still to think that we still needed their ability to deal with worst-case scenarios and lateral idea production.
I re-routed half of my battery power into the ship and funneled it to my fingertips.
The biological in my grasp danced at the end of my fingertips like a string puppet being shaken by an angry god. I stopped the charge. The meat was smoking a little bit.
Did I use too much energy?
I heard the biological’s main liquid oxygen pump and bellows start up for six beats before settling into arrhythmia again.
I looked at the tattoos. There were no shock hazard warnings around where I had my hands. The outer skin of was still intact. The seconds ticked away. I charged it again.
Again it stiffened and twitched like a kite in a high wind. I dropped the charge to zero and listened. Silence. I listened closer.
I was focused entirely on it when it screamed and drew in breath again. I jumped back from it in alarm, my pads clanking on the metal of the deck.
It quickly rolled over and convulsed. Protein supplements spilled out of its main airway and food passage. Slowly, it got up to a sitting position. Its breathing and pump rate slowed.
It looked down at the sensor-shaped burn marks dotting its main torso and then up into my lenses. I could not read the expression there.
“How long was I out?” it asked me.
“Three minutes seventeen seconds. The insulator was worn through when you grabbed the controls. It shall be repaired. You need to get back to your containment pod and rest.” I replied through my speaker, resonating the air to create disruptions that the biological could pick up with the receivers on either side of its main sensor array.
“Yes.” Said the bio, and went off to bed. He’d be put back in deep sleep and woken up for another emergency or another drill when needed.
I set about re-insulating the control interface for the ship. I felt guilty and embarrassed that my slip up had nearly caused the death of my biological backup.
