by submission | Aug 28, 2008 | Story
Author : Alla Hoffman
When he opened his eyes, it was a special kind of dark. The sky was a dull purple, and what light there was came from the ground beneath its stygian spread. He sat up stiffly in a sea of trash, a vast junkyard. Much of the scrap metal and rock glowed a sickly greenish color, and he didn’t want to think about why. Every part of him was aching, and the morning amnesia hadn’t fully faded. “The hell….” He stood, rubbing blearily at his eyes, and cursed when he realized his ankle couldn’t support his full weight. As he looked out across the abyssal dumping grounds, he put name to place, mainly because a dented sign creaked on a pole next to him. T. W. D. P. 13, Toxic Waste Disposal Planet 13. Recently made off-limits by the government, on grounds of contamination by hostile elements, the first time such a designation had been given to a trash planet. Then again, no one had ever created a self-maintaining, self-improving species of machines before. He’d known that was probably a bad idea, from the standpoint of personal safety.
He wondered how far they’d gotten in the 84 hours they’d been free. It had taken only 19 for them to make themselves known on the planets surface, 26 to be categorized as dangerous. It had taken the governing council another two days to find out who was responsible, but it had taken them only two hours to try and convict him. There had been talk of execution by various methods or imprisonment, but ultimately they decided on a more…unorthodox punishment. Their leniency had hinged on the fact he had created a species, not a weapon, to destroy this world. And after all, it was only a trash planet. Hardly a great loss to society. So they’d sent him to “live” with his own creations. If the radiation didn’t get him first.
He scrabbled around in the junk until he found a bent metal pole, and used it to pull himself up, stumping shakily forwards. He hadn’t yet figured out a plan for himself, but in the end it didn’t really matter. His big plan, the important one, was already inevitably in motion. The machines would begin to improve themselves, and god knew they weren’t short of materials, and soon they would construct weapons and flight. And spaceflight. And he hadn’t bothered to write hostility towards man into them, that was the beauty of it. They had only the biological imperative: survive, reproduce. Mankind would see to the hostility itself, as the robots spread and people became afraid. They would write their own end with their hostility and their fear. And their trash.
That’s what they were for, to provide the antidote to humanity. Ultimately, he hadn’t been supposed to survive either. He’d just wanted to watch. There were cliffs of wrecked ships in the distance, and he began making for them. They’d have a pretty good view. They were a good place to wait. He was glad he’d ended up here, in a way. He might not get to see the end, but he could watch the beginning. It seemed right that the next stage should start here, where humanity had started out so long ago, before it had gotten lost among the stars.
by submission | Aug 27, 2008 | Story
Author : Pavelle Wesser
When she first appeared to him in the dead of the eternal night, her tentacles undulated in bluish silver tints that reflected the twinkling lights of his ship. She slithered silently toward him while he was out performing an errand. Until he saw her, he had never questioned working in silence and alone. It was when she slid that first tentacle around his waist that he stared into the endless night and neglected his mission, turning to face her as she wrapped more tentacles around his body. Later, he could never remember how they became two beings writhing on the surface of sand so soft he could have sworn that it sifted through the pours of his skin.
It was then that her first tentacle pierced his flesh and entered his body. He stumbled back to the ship feeling ill, and threw up at some point during the eternal night. His initial malaise turned to raging desire by the time he was sent on his next errand. She appeared to him as he collected pitted rocks, her tentacles wrapping themselves around him, requiring nothing of him other than that he willingly surrender to the sensation of slime slithering over his skin. This time, when they connected, electrical currents charged through his body. They were mild at first, but escalated, causing his teeth to chatter and his hair to stand on end.
“How can you do that to me?” But she did not answer, just as she never spoke.
It was then that another of her tentacles pierced his flesh, wrapping itself around his internal organs, squeezing, squeezing, until he felt so ill that he didn’t have to wait until later in the eternal night to throw up. He would have been sick for days, had time been measured in anything other than the phases of the multiple moons that hovered overhead. He lay in his cot suffering fevers, chills and muscle cramps, wondering how she could possibly leave her tentacles inside of him. Didn’t she want them back? How could she live without them? How could he live with them?
They sent him on another mission, this time to collect the weeds that grew in the eternal night. His body shook as he donned his spacesuit, for now he was afraid. It wasn’t long before she appeared, slinking noiselessly, her tentacles extended toward him. A cold, sick chill descended.
“Look,” he said, “I think we need to call this off.”
A tentacle slid down his throat, and he realized the choice had never been his to make. He thought he might gag but as her other tentacles caressed his body, he experienced thrills of pleasure that escalated until he felt as though he were an electrical conduit through which an overload of energy was being transmitted. When she had done with him, he understood that just as the night was eternal, she herself would never end. He turned to face her.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he said.
Another tentacle wrapped itself around his heart. Cold and icy, it squeezed the living breath out of him. Feeling the dying pump of his most sacred organ, he wheezed out his final words:
“Is this what you’ve wanted from me all along?”
She didn’t answer, just as she never had. And as her tentacle writhed and twisted about his heart, he thought of a home he’d never known, of a love that had never been true, and a spaceship that would soon depart, leaving him alone to die in the eternal night.
by submission | Aug 26, 2008 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
Lisa called me that afternoon. I was standing in the rain in front of the In-Situ Laboratory, watching deer run beneath the elevated walkway.
“I just wanted to say,” she said. “Sam… I’m sorry about Saturday.” Her voice was quiet. She sounded tired.
“I was going to call you to say I was sorry,” I said.
“You don’t have to apologize,” she said, “I do.” This was where Lisa, had I said the same, would have asked me what, exactly, I had to apologize for. I could hear the low slowness of her voice, and asking would have been heartless.
“I know you need someone to listen, sometimes. I didn’t do a good job of that,” I said. “When you tell me these things I want to do something, but I don’t know how to help you.”
“I didn’t know how to ask for help,” she said. “I don’t know what you could do to help me.” I stood in the rain and watched the deer, my cell phone to my head. A doe stood on the sloping ground, next to the walkway, watching me. Her hide was wet and her eyes were huge. Her nostrils flared. She took a tentative step toward the walkway, watching me.
“I just got back from the hospital,” Lisa said. “I was there three days.”
“Oh Lisa, I’m so sorry. What…?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Did you take pills?” The doe’s forelegs jerked, trembling, and she bolted under the walkway, beneath me. I could smell the rain-soaked sogginess of her hide. I pulled out my cigarettes, and then put them away without trying to light one. I could see the hood of the first of the Security vans as it pulled in behind the lab. Those bastards.
“My son took me in,” Lisa said. “I was in ICU.”
“Lisa,” I said.
“And I got out today. I’m just sitting here, and the kids will come home soon, and I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’m afraid to be here by myself, and I’m afraid to see anyone. I’m afraid to talk to anyone and I’m afraid to not have anyone to talk to.” It was raining harder, and more deer were running beneath the walkway, jumping across the retaining wall beyond the slope. I could hear the clatter of their hooves across the patio that lay sheltered beneath the overhanging floors of the In-Situ Laboratory. The rain ran down my forehead, into my eyes. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Lisa said.
If I loved her I would have run to her. I would have run to my car, wound down through the ways of the University, clutching my wet, fatal briefcase to my chest. I would have kept my phone to my ear, my voice to her heart. I would have left my job, and my little mournful life and the end of it all, and drove to her. I would have run to her.
I would have given her the thing she really desired. I picked my briefcase up from the walkway, held it under my arm.
“Honey…” I said.
“You’re at work,” she said. “I should let you go.”
“Well…” I began. “I love you,” I lied. “Keep your head up. I’ll call you tonight,” I said, but I never did.
Instead I dropped my briefcase from the walkway, heard the tinkle of breaking glass, and watched as the deer on the patio of the In-Situ Laboratory began to drop dead.
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 25, 2008 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Marshal’s great grandfather had taken up the guitar as a older man, and played it as though he simply always had done so. He had passed this love onto his son, Marshal’s grandfather, before the Departure. Marshal’s family had always been tradesman, and his grandfather used his degrees in micro-fabrication to get on the ship, and his skill at coaxing sounds from his stringed instrument to secure not only a wife, but a place in the social scene on Discovery when she set off into the stars.
Marshal’s grandfather had one child on the voyage, a daughter, and she grew up always at her father’s side, basking in the warmth of his music. She took up chemistry, and divided her time between misusing chemicals in defiance of the ships authority, and caressing deep rhythm and blues from the guitar her father had left her.
When Marshal was born, it was clear his mother’s chemical abuse had affected him, but she didn’t survive his birth to make amends.
Marshal grew in the care of the crew to be a stoic but directionless young man. He dabbled in chemistry, in microbiology, and settled on psiono-sonics as a field of study. He found he had a heightened sensitivity in communications, and was tasked with reaching out across the void of space to the other star ships en route to new star systems.
In time, the voices grew harder and harder to find through the darkness, and communications duty became an eternity of projecting into nothingness, deafened by the silence returned.
When the star drive began to fail, Marshal felt it before anyone. He tried to describe to the Captain how the engine was losing its rhythm, how he worried it would stop beating.
He’d been thrown off the bridge, and confined to his quarters.
When the star drive went out, the captain locked himself in his own cabin, refusing to acknowledge it was true.
Marshal had spent very little time in his own cabin, having not grown up there, and finding it unsettling to be in the room this mother he had never known had once called home. He could never connect himself to the space, but now, confined there as he was, he found himself idly picking through her things, discovering the woman who had made him and then left him here alone.
He flipped through frames of images, some single and still, some sequenced and moving. He heard laughter, saw a smile he recognized sometimes from the mirror, and felt a rhythm that resonated somewhere inside.
When he found her guitar, it fit his hands like well worn gloves, filled a hole he hadn’t realized existed. His fingers found the chords to a song he’d never heard. A to C sharp, to G sustained, back to A. Words drifted into his head with impossible clarity, “If you can just get your mind together, then come on across to me.” Across the ship each psionicly projected note from Marshal’s guitar turned every surface capable of vibrating into a point of amplification. Everyone stopped, and listened. “We’ll hold hands and then we’ll watch the sunrise,” people spilled into the hallways, “from the bottom of the sea.”
Marshal felt long closed doors open in his mind as he reached out into the depths of space. He felt the wave come back a hundred strong, and the Discovery reeled as unseen voices chimed in “But First, are you experienced?” In his cabin, the Captain closed his eyes, tears streaming down his face. They may be lost, but they were no longer alone.
by submission | Aug 24, 2008 | Story
Author : Paul Starkey
Villam’s first campaign began at 29:15; within minutes he was a veteran.
A third of his squad died within seconds of disembarking, victims of the Cirrillian psionic artillery, the heavy bombardment shattering their synapses and boiling their brains within their skulls like potatoes in a pot.
Sniper fire was the next danger, the Cirrillian marksmen were using hyper-reality bullets. Marsom was Villam’s best friend, they’d enlisted together …now, as he was hit, the unremitting truths that all men hide, even from themselves, overwhelmed him, crushing his spirit as surely as pressure would have crushed his body, and before Villam could stop him he’d blown his brains out with his sidearm.
Only half of them reached the Cirrillian trenches. Villam had turned his ankle trying stop Marsom, and so was lagging behind the rest of the squad. This saved his life.
Fazerthorn trees exist on every world, not that you’d ever know it. They bloom in another reality, invisible to all but sophisticated scanners. The realities are separate, and never the twain should meet…except Cirrillian scientists had discovered a way to compact the two together. Suddenly the clear ground the troopers raced through became a heaving forest.
Despite the thump and wail of battle around him, all Villam could hear were screams as fazerthorns materialised inside his comrades. The lucky ones died instantly, from organ failure or just plain shock. The strong ones lasted longer, thorns ripping through their skin, tearing eyeballs, slicing arteries and rupturing blood vessels.
Sergeant Coog was the toughest S.O.B in the unit, so Villam wasn’t surprised when he charged onwards, despite the blood haemorrhaging out around the branch that had erupted from his back. In the end though he’d taken too much damage, he fell mere metres from the Cirrillians.
Villam’s luck was twofold. Not only had he avoided the fazerthorns, but their appearance obscured him from the Cirrillian troopers who would have gunned him down otherwise. Now, belly to the dusty floor, he shuffled around the tangle of fazerthorns and corpses, until he drew level with the trench.
There were dozens of them, foul green creatures who lacked a head, a single eye stalk protruding from their necks. They were naked, six brains pulsating beneath the skin along their spines, reproduction tentacles drooping between their legs like elongated udders.
Villam crept closer. He didn’t want to, they truly were vile, but he needed to be nearer to throw the J-Bomb into their midst. He unclipped it from his belt, a fat disc of weightless metal, yet more powerful than anything the enemy had.
Too late a Cirrillian saw him, a whine of alarm echoing from its shoulder gills. He’d already thrown the J-Bomb though, clamping his hands over his head as it detonated.
He’d been conditioned to deal with the effects of the J-Bomb, but still the overlapping cacophony of musical tunes, of advertising taglines, and the whirlwind of special offer announcements almost drove him mad….The effect of the Jingle Bomb on the Cirrillians was more pronounced. To a creature they dropped their weapons and clambered out of the trench, fighting each other to gain a few moments’ advantage in getting to the Department Ship before all the bargains were gone.
Advertising was a harsh game, with more and more species rebelling again the psychic onslaught of the sales companies. The Cirrillians, like so many others, shielded their planet from orbital advertising assaults, so the only way to campaign was to go trench to trench, street to street, door to door. Villam returned to the ship alone, a veteran salesman after just one campaign.
