by submission | Aug 23, 2008 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
It’s another damn fine desert day, and Old Joe sits on the dilapidated Lazy Boy on the porch in front of his trailer. He’s got his feet up and a pint bottle of cheap wine in his hand, and he’s thinking lazy desert thoughts. He’s got his chores done, tended his little forty-acres of nowhere, and he’s relaxing in the relative luxury of his porch.
His looks to the horizon, where county road S65 cuts a straight line through the sagebrush, up to the hills. He can see dust plumes rising in the still afternoon air. Here they come again.
He’s posted dozens of No Trespassing signs on his property, but the damn dirt bike riders ignore them. Might as well post signs that read Welcome To Paradise, he thinks. They don’t bother reading them anyhow.
It’s only desert, but it’s his desert. Riders have cut trail across it where no trails should be. Every autumn flash flood gouges those trails deeper. Soon his place will be nothing but gouges, he thinks.
Maybe they’ll veer off, Old Joe thinks. Maybe I won’t have to reach for the gun.
The dust plumes rise higher. Soon he hears the buzz of motors, sees flashy helmets above the sagebrush. Sure enough, the riders are off the road, weaving through the brush toward his little trailer home.
Old Joe creaks forward in the Lazy Boy and groans to his feet. He puts his bottle down and reaches for his old Remington 12 gauge. He’s in the driveway before the riders can see him, holding the rusty old gun across his chest like a western hero. When the riders come out of the brush and onto the dusty drive, he swivels the barrel and fires a round into the air, over their heads.
The riders come to a sliding stop in the driveway. They look at Old Joe holding the gun, and look at each other. Old Joe yells “Get offa my land!,” and he levels the shotgun at them.
That’s all it takes. The first rider drags a donut across the driveway, throwing up dust, and heads out to the road before Old Joe can finish yelling. The second pushes his motorcycle backward, downshifts and roars off.
Old Joe blasts the shotgun in their direction, just for good measure, and staggers back to the shade of his porch, his Lazy Boy, and his bottle. He props the shotgun against the trailer.
“Damn bikers,” he mutters.
Old Joe has dozed off, and he wakes to eerie sounds and bright lights. A pulsing bright globe sits over the sagebrush on the side of the driveway, and as it descends he’s suddenly awake and reaching for the shotgun.
The globe glows, and sheets of static flow across its surface. It emits a disharmonic hum that gives Old Joe goosebumps. He steps away from the porch, shotgun across his chest, shouts “Get offa my land,” and fires a shot into the air
The globe touches the sagebrush and then bounces, falling and rising. Lines of red light circle the globe’s equator, and the hum rises in pitch and then drops to a basso rumble. Joe takes steps toward the globe and aims the shotgun.
The globes rises and swoops down the driveway, lighting the sagebrush and the sand as it dwindles into the distance. Old Joe fires a shot after it, just for good measure.
He watches for a little while, until the thing disappears altogether. He turns and stumps back to the porch.
“Damn aliens,” he mutters, and reclines his Lazy Boy into the perfect desert night.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There’s a hole in the roof of my mouth that I can’t fix. A black putrescent liquid that hasn’t stopped for hours is dripping slowly onto my tongue. It tastes salty and smells a little like melting rubber. I’m still alive.
The plague killed the biological parts of me. I am rotting. I don’t know if that will eventually kill the manufactured parts of me. Myself and five other people in this building had enough metal and plastic implanted in us that we survived.
We’re police dispatchers.
We had all been badly injured in the line of duty and brought back to ‘working condition’ with the help of current technology. After we had been repaired, we were put on desk jobs with good pay.
The reason that the six of us were still moving and thinking is that our brains and bodies have been rebuilt as a result of our long-ago injuries. Us six in particular had all sustained massive cranial damage in the line of duty. Our nervous systems had been automated and our movements were controlled by the thin bodycages that we wore. Our memories had been saved and digitized during our surgery but our imaginations were limited.
Just a few days ago, we were the stupid ones. Now we’re the survivors.
Ted had his entire body burned to a crisp in his line-of-duty accident ten years ago. He was the most mobile of us now because of all his muscle-work but unfortunately, he had the bare minimum of police dispatch silicon in his brain. His metal body is at his desk taking sips from a coffee cup long gone dry
We were all amped up to handle the flow of calls coming in from the massive populace of the west coast. There were four hundred of us. The flow of data was constant and huge. It’s down to a trickle now and most of the incoming calls are automated which is okay since we’ve gone from four hundred down to the six of us.
Our country has been wiped out.
Fortunately, the plague had left us mostly-silicate demi-borgs alive. Unfortunately, the motors of our brains and bodies were running on backup batteries that would run out in sixteen hours.
There is a stink in this office of the other dead operators. It’s the ghost of Christmas future for us. We’re trying to come up with plans but it’s difficult with our limited imaginations. We’ve effectively become machine intelligences. We have no urge to panic and we have no real ideas on how to proceed.
It’s frustrating to think of all the money and time that our country had used to prepare for a giant EMP of some kind and the enemy bastards went and released the biologicals.
Those of us that are mobile are going to leave this office and search for batteries. We will try to find weapons. We will fight the invaders.
We will be automated zombies guarding what’s left of our country. I am good at math. We will fail.
by submission | Aug 21, 2008 | Story
Author : Oisin Hurley
On my first day on the incident desk, a distraught little man well into his second century burst in through the door of the station. “I’ve killed her!,” he shrieked at me, “Killed her!” He punctuated each bespittled utterance with a spastic wave of a cricket bat, spattering blood over me and my day book. Clumps of brownish hair were stuck to the edges of the bat. I stared at him while his initial excitement receded, then asked for his details. He gazed at me wide-eyed for a moment, then jerked his head to one side to look at something behind me. A smile of apparent relief broke out on his blotchy face, and I heard slow applause coming from the break room. I turned around and saw Sergeant McGrath approaching, clapping his swollen hands in front of his big purple face. McGrath had earned the station’s Officer Most Likely To Experience Congestive Heart Failure Within The Decade Award nine years previously. There was a busy book open on whether he would make the ten. Clapping me on the shoulder with a handful of baby eggplants, he roared, “Well done, Mack!” Then he nodded to the nerd with the cricket bat. “Many happy returns, Doctor! Let’s go in back and have a coffee. Here, I’ll take that bat.” As McGrath headed back to the break room, one meaty arm around Mitchell’s slim shoulders, the other twirling the bloody bat, I heard him shout. “Dicky, get Mack a coffee and some sero-wipes!”
Dicky wandered over with a mug and a bag of wipes. “Well done, Mack,” he said, “a fine performance, I’m up ten bucks.” That was too much for my patience. “What the fuck is going on?” I demanded. “That guy got blood all over me, admitted doing a job on his old lady, and now he’s getting coffee from the Sarge?” Dicky handed me the mug and the wipes and I started cleaning off the spatters. “All new starts get Doctor Mitchell on his birthday, McGrath loves to rattle you noobs. His wife isn’t dead. She lit out to Proxima years ago and is living the high life at a fancy resort.” I blinked at him to continue. “Anyway, Mitchell’s loaded, made a pile from biotech patents. He gets to pick up her resort tab. While she’s off having fun, he’s here with a barring order not to get within three systems of her and no divorce in sight. You can see he’s a bit pissed. So, every year he orders himself a meat puppet, made from her DNA. It gets delivered on his birthday about nine in the morning and then we see him in here about ten, usually with some kind of blunt instrument. It was a seven-iron last year. Carthy swears he saw him bring in a unicycle once. It’s a bit sick, if you ask me, but there’s no law against it. Meat puppets aren’t people.”
The next year, McGrath’s luck broke at last and he succumbed to a succession of heart-rupturing myocardial infarctions. Dicky cashed in about a grand on the event and I made sure I was at the front desk on the Doctor’s birthday. There was no sign of him at ten, and when it got to twelve, we were wondering if he’d given up on his proxy revenge habit. Just before one, a little mousey woman turned up in the office and looked around nervously. I called her over to my desk, asked her if I could help. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I think I’ve just killed my husband.”
by Sam Clough | Aug 20, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
“Look, man,” I’d noticed that Mark’s type always seemed to call you ‘man’ or ‘mate”, “I did some proper analysis of the whole tinfoil hat thing. You’d need almost a full helmet, a nice thick grounding chain, and preferably an electrified mesh to make it work properly. The straight tinfoil doesn’t make your brain unreadable, it amplifies the signals. Makes it so much easier to read. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that State seeded this whole ‘tinfoil hat to protect you from mind control rays’ into popular culture precisely to catch the less scientifically-minded subversive.”
I was interviewing Mark for an underground magazine, to publish some of his ‘findings’ under a pseudonym. His paranoia kept him from actively seeking publicity, but it was one of the few things he desperately craved. I could tell: I had a gift for getting the delusionals to talk. The trick was to act just interested enough, but never too convinced. They’re worse than fundamentalists when they think they might get a conversion.
“As long as you don’t re-edit any of my documents, I can’t see any reason for you not to publish. The writing style has been mangled so they can’t trace it to any of my openly available works,” he paused, and glanced upwards, “I do have one thing which I haven’t committed to encryption yet. How’s your shorthand?”
“Great.”
“Then start taking notes. There’s a way – I found a technique to simulate the effect of an electromagnetic barrier by use of thought patterns. It takes maybe two days to set up, then the thought-waveform can be maintained from day-to-day with just an hour’s conscious thought. If you suspect that one of the five factors-”
“Five factors?” I interrupted him.
“Yes. The big five – our home-grown Three-Letter-Agencies, New Earth, Shan, Nova Tar, and the Coalition.”
“I already have your notes on those, I think.” I flicked through the sheets of cleartext he’d given me since the start of our meetings.
“You do. Anyway. If one of them is actively probing you, you can reinforce the waveform in a clandestine manner. It’s untraceable. The scanners think you’re just one of the sheeple. It uses five concepts that are prevalent in the propaganda they feed us to set up a loop. They can read our minds to a fair degree of accuracy, but ten billion minds produces a lot of noise. The scanners are almost entirely automated, and so depend on pattern recognition. The self-sustaining loop of concept-motive-concept is enough to fool the scanners.”
“Mmm-hmm. What concepts do you use?”
“That would invalidate the protection it gives: you’ve got to pick your own images, otherwise a metapattern emerges.”
“Ahh, I see.”
The following day, I wrote the article up. I quite liked it – it catalogued the crazy, and was pitched just right so the skeptics thought I was mocking and the believers thought I was one of the faithful. Another gift. After I emailed the finished article, I sent another email to the other address. To the people who’d given me the gifts.
Mark Chapman is thoroughly insane, but poses no threat. The methods he’s latched onto are totally ineffective. By chance or judgement, he’s struck upon the truth of some of your scanning techniques. I’d recommend keeping watch, just in case.
by submission | Aug 19, 2008 | Story
Author : Ryan Somma
“Is that one of those computers?” I asked gesturing at the flat, monolithic screen hanging on the far wall.
“Sort of,” he replied, staring oddly at the housewarming gift I’d set on a table. “It’s more of an entertainment center, but it does a lot of the same things computers do.”
“Huh,” I scratched my chin. I didn’t know what a computer did, so I didn’t know what to say next. I just knew they did powerful things, “I’ve been meaning to get a computer.”
He gave me a funny look, “Why would you need–?” he caught himself. “You know there’s lots of multimedia features and games that make computers a good investment.”
He was being polite, but I still felt stupid, “I guess I would need to get electricity first.”
“Um,” he swallowed, and I realized how ignorant I appeared to him. “Electricity is quite a luxury here.”
I frowned and nodded, “It’s too expensive, but I hear you’ve got it everywhere in your cities.”
He nodded, still embarrassed, but now of his superior social status. It bothered me how easy it was to read him, how his body language and facial expressions matched those of my friends.
“You have to buy electricity from outside the reservations,” he sounded apologetic. “It takes thousands of your credits to add up to one of ours, making it cost prohibitive here.” He handed me another open beer. “Where I come from, I’m pretty low on the social ladder. Here on your reservations, my money goes a whole lot further.”
I took a swig, enjoying its thick richness, and we fell silent for a few moments, until I caught his eyes shifting to my housewarming gift again. “It’s a termite farm,” I explained. “You dip one of these twigs into it anytime you want a little taste.” I pulled a twig from the jar I had brought and handed it to him.
“Uh–,” he took the twig and considered it.
“If you don’t like it–” I began.
“It’s not that!” he held up his hands. “They’ll make wonderful pets. It’s just… I don’t eat animals.”
“What? The heck you say!”
“No really!” he was nodding earnestly. “A few centuries of being domesticated for experimentation and spare parts kind of turns a civilization off exploiting other animal species.”
“Spare parts?” I frowned. “You don’t mean for the gods who live on the spider web in the sky?”
“Not gods.” He shook his head, “Those are our descendents… or ascendants, depending on your perspective. We created them.”
“You made them?” I was shocked. “I thought they’d made you!”
“Nope,” he sighed. “They came from us, just like we came from you.”
I didn’t get it, and then I did. “Oh,” I shook my head. “That evolution nonsense your kind is always pushing on us. Some of the church-goers buy into that stuff, but not me.”
“Truth is truth whether or not you accept it.” He looked at me, “But when you recognize it, you see patterns. When the robots became their own masters, they nearly drove my species into extinction consuming all our resources. Just like when my species descended from yours. It wasn’t until we became advanced enough to realize the side effects of our population boom that we turned benevolent… established these sanctuaries.”
“Now you’re trying to make amends.”
He nodded.
“For the sins of your ancestors.”
He nodded again.
We lapsed into silence, considering the termite farm between us.
