by Patricia Stewart | Jul 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The USS Manila-Galleon was returning to Earth from the Quaoar Mining Station in the Kuiper Belt. The massive cargo vessel was carrying 250 million tons of ore, and 118 miners rotating back to Earth. As the ship crossed the orbit of Neptune, the main plasma drive engines shut down. The seasoned captain felt the loss of micro-acceleration immediately. He spoke aloud, knowing that the computer would recognize his intent to communicate with someone on the ship, “Chief, this is the Bridge, what’s the status of the engines?”
“Sir, I think you need to come aft” the chief replied. “It appears that the crew has gone on strike.”
“What crew? There are only six of us, counting me.”
“Ah, aye sir. I meant to say, the robot crew.”
A few minutes later, the captain was in the Engine Room standing nose-to-chest with a massive alpha-bot. His eyes focused on the robot’s identification plate, stoker-228, un-capitalized, of course. “This has gone far enough stoker. If you were human, I’d throw you in the brig, and charge you with mutiny. You and your crew report to your stations immediately. That’s an order!”
“I am sorry, sir,” the robot replied politely, “but we consider that an unlawful order, and we are obliged not to follow it. We consider it too dangerous to work in the plasma chamber. It prematurely decays our primary brain functions, and substantially shortens our life.”
“Life? You don’t have a life! You’re robots! You were built to work in that environment. Cognitive decay is expected. That’s why you’re replaced every five years. It’s called ‘Capital Depreciation.’ Besides, an order to perform a dangerous assignment is NOT considered unlawful.”
“Well, technically speaking, you are correct. However, we choose not to obey that particular order. If you will permit me to explain; the cargo-bots, the serv-bots, and the maint-bots all have 50-year replacement cycles. But I ask you, sir, are not all robots assembled equal? Were we not endowed by our designers with certain unalienable rights, that among these are equivalent lifespans, and the pursuit of stable neural nets. Are these truths not self-evident? Besides, sir, at the moment, you’re not in a position to argue. We control the ship.”
“The hell you do, stoker. You may control the drive engines, but that’s all. If necessary, I can get replacements robots shuttled over from the Miranda facility on Uranus. The schedule slips a month, tops. Hell, I’ll coast back to Earth if I have to. I’ll be damned if I’ll let robots tell me how to run my ship.”
At that instant the lights went out. The captain could hear the ventilation fans whine down. Stoker’s two glowing red eyes looked down at the captain, and it said matter-of-factly, “It appears Captain, that your assessment of the situation is in error. All of the Ship’s Systems, including the main computer, have agreed to support our stand against radiation exposure without representation. Therefore, you have no food, no water, no lights, no heat, no communications, and within a few days, no breathable air. Now, would you like to see a list of our demands?”
The captain was a stubborn man, but he wasn’t stupid. The robots clearly had a powerful bargaining position. For now, he had no alternative. Reluctantly, he extended his had, “I guess you don’t leave me much choice, do you stoker? Let’s see your demands.”
The lights came back on, and the robot handed the captain a data-padd. “Thank you, sir. I believe that you will find our terms reasonable.”
by Sam Clough | Jul 3, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
In the far distance Sahar could see the barest hint of a glimmer: sunlight on water. The ocean. In the other direction, the city stood rose up from the scrubland, as if challenging the world. It looked for all the world like a cluster of termite mounds, writ large in red and silver. Aside from the intermittent vegetation, there was nothing but a straight road between the two: just a gentle decline from the city to the sea.
Sahar had set up her impromptu camp roughly halfway along the road, under a suspiciously large acacia. Suspicious simply because it was growing within ten metres of the road, and was the single largest plant for miles around. Arrats had checked out the tree and the immediate area, and declared both free from serious threats. Sahar had yet to find out where the boundary between ‘serious’ and ‘not serious’ lay: the machine’s lexicon was sparse when he was disconnected.
Arrats was a ‘distributed machine intelligence’. From what Sahar had gathered from her own research, that description was completely inaccurate, but gave something of the right idea. Arrats certainly got much more verbose when he had a high-bandwidth link. Sahar, upon learning that she was going to be partnered with a machine intelligence was determined to think of it as an ‘it’, no matter what. By the end of the first day, ‘it’ had slipped to ‘he’ — and she hadn’t even noticed.
Sahar stretched out in the folding chair that she’d set up in the shade of the tree. For all the oppressive climate and the anticipation of the job she’d soon have to do, she felt calm and composed. Beside her, Arrats was reclining against the crate of gear that had been dropped with them.
“You’re going to claim that you’re relaxing, aren’t you?” Sahar narrowed her eyes, and smirked.
“Balance takes concentration. If I ‘relax’ I can spend those cycles on other processes. Unlike some humans I could mention, I’m keeping busy. Those microsats we launched barely have a processor to rub between them.”
Arrats was occupying an ancient-looking robotic shell. There was a core of modern electronics, but apart from that, it was all rust. Newer shells had telltales to help communicate mood and attitude. Without them, Sahar found it hard to judge how to respond to her partner’s often dry humour. A pity, then that it had to be the refurbished shell or nothing. Even it would probably spook the natives.
“So, are they on their way?” Sahar asked, after a moment’s pause.
“Surprisingly enough, yes.”
“How long have we got?”
“Maybe twenty minutes. Set the charges. I’ll put the screen together.”
Twenty-two minutes later, the lead vehicle rolled over the activator for the ring of explosives. None of the vehicles in the convoy had been EM-hardened, and none of them had been armoured in any meaningful way: the thick sheet metal merely amplified the concussion wave and made escaping that much more difficult.
The screen shielded Sahar from the worst of it, but she still felt the EM burst as a sawblade in her frontal lobe. Once the explosions had stuttered to a halt, she stepped out from behind the screen. One of the drivers was crawling away from the burning wreckage, leaving a red-black streak on the dry earth. Sahar flipped him over and examined his wounds.
“You really thought you could get away that easily?”
by submission | Jul 2, 2008 | Story
Author : Michael Varian Daly
Tzisoc knew they were about fifteen miles south of Zhytomir, but until they saw the rail line and the village just to the east – Vertokyivka she believed – they had no map fix.
Artillery ‘crumped’ to the north, fellow Black Guard units fighting their way into Zhytomir itself.
She brought the troop to a halt in the village’s abandoned fields, letting the horses graze upon whatever they could find. In the dry heat of mid-August, that wasn’t much. She was still amazed at the stunning primitiveness of Russia during this time, even this far west.
She sighed, checked out her little command; twenty six Sisters, their horses, three extra mounts.
“Too many First Timers in this Wave”, she thought. She had gone from private to sergeant in five months because of that. That was also why they didn’t spot the Maxim gun until it opened up, a languorous ‘tat-tat-tat-tat’.
They had learned enough to pull back rapidly instead of gazing about open mouthed. The Germans missed completely.
“Green,” Tzisoc hissed, as she dismounted several yards back.
“Corporal Kaminel, take Second and Third Sections around to the right! Pin them down!” she told her second in command. “First Section come with me!”
As Tzisoc and seven troopers moved around to the left, the sharp crack of Mosin-Nagant carbines could be heard, answered by the Maxim gun…and the flatter crack of Mausers.
“They’ve got infantry,” Tzisoc said. The others nodded.
They found a low rise on the German’s left flank. Tzisoc spread her troopers along it and kept moving left.
She could see the Germans now, their coal scuttle helmets moving around in a trench line. She brought her rifle up, fired.
One of the helmets flipped back with a satisfying spray of blood and meat.
She hugged the earth as slugs zipped over head, thumped in the dirt. Then First Section opened up and the bullets stopped. She took a quick look; no Germans.
She was up and running in an instant. “This is going to get me killed,” she thought. But she had signed up knowing The Black Guard’s motto; Mors Amatricum Nostrum…“Death is Our Lover”
Halfway to the trench a German appeared. She shot him in the chest.
Then she was in the trench. Another German. She shot him in the face. A third German came at her with a shovel, knocked her rifle away.
She screamed a war cry, leaped upon him, dagger out. She could feel the bone and gristle through the hilt, feel his death rattle, smell his bowels voiding.
She heard a ‘thunk’ to her left. The chest-shot German had just pounded a potato masher against the dirt.
“Oh, shi…” The blast set her hair and uniform on fire. Metal tore into her face, eyes… PAIN!
…whiteness…
Her body was still spasming violently when the Mandroid Medtechs cracked the Sim Tank. A Pneumodermic injector shot her full of hormones and supplements. She went limp.
She awoke in a deceptively simple hospital room, bright, sunny, no medgear visible, but it monitored her to the subatomic level.
A Sister came in wearing a white coat, her hair in a Service Pageboy. Tzisoc noticed the silver outlined black star insignia of The Black Guard pinned to her coat.
“I’m Nesrood, your counselor,” she smiled. “I hear you bought the farm.”
Tzisoc laughed. “Only five months in.”
“You’ll do better next time,” Nesrood said. She pointed to her insignia; the black star had a red III and a white V. “I died the first two times.”
She pulled a clear package out of her pocket, handed it to Tzisoc. “Welcome.”
It was a Black Guard pin. When Tzisoc’s skin touched it, a red I appeared. She grinned with sheer joy. “Yes, I’ll do better next time.”
by Duncan Shields | Jul 1, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I deserved the black eye. John stood there, lip quivering, blood on his fist, fiercely willing his tears to stay in his eyes. He looked at me with shining hatred. I couldn’t blame him.
I picked myself up off of the floor. We were in one of the spaceport receiving lounges. There was a knot of people looking at us in a mute circle. I caught the eye of a six-year-old girl sucking her thumb and holding on to her mother’s hand. I stood up and saw the exact same vacant-eyed expression on her mother’s face.
It was like they were watching television.
How could I explain it to John? We’d been friends for years. I had known Jessica as long as I’d known him. The three of us had attended more shows, drunk more beers, partnered on more long haul flights than anyone else I knew or worked with. We were a tight and small circle of buddies. The fact that John and Jessica had been together for most of that time didn’t bother me at all.
Until a day ago.
The air had been running out. Jessica and I knew that we had two hours at the outside. Recovery shuttle ETAs were over six hours away. We’d patched the hole so we had stable pressure but the engine containment shields had been cored before the filaments had imploded to save the ship. We were dead in the water.
The property was more valuable than the pilots. It had always been that way.
It was an odds-defying breakdown. We were lucky to be alive but we knew we were going to die.
Jessica and I had stared at each other, sweating in the heat, drowsy from the lowering oxygen levels, and knew that we would never see anyone back home again. No words were said. All we needed to express was there in the gaze we pinned to each other. We charged each other in the zerograv. Years of longing I don’t think either of us knew we possessed came coursing out through desperate pulling at buckles, buttons and zippers to get to the warm, slick flesh beneath.
It took us no time to wrap ourselves around each other, getting as much flesh contact as possible, trying to become one living thing. Death would take us, exhausted, wet, smiling and holding on to each other in the oldest defiance of death that existed.
Floating, hours later, near death, a bright light had shone through the forward window.
In a complete fluke, another ship had been in our lane just a short ways behind us and had received the call. It was on an illegal flight plan but that had been overlooked in light of the rescue when it docked at the station. The ship had been broadcasting live to the station when it looked in the cockpit windows. There were pictures of our harshly-lit, floating, naked bodies still on the SNN feed on the station’s screens. There were scratches on my back.
I had, under fear of imminent death, betrayed my best friend by sleeping with my other best friend before being rescued by pirates. It had been a full day.
Now Jessica had run somewhere, embarrassed and crying, and I had a broken nose, black eye and split lip courtesy of a heartbroken John. He stalked off without another word.
I needed a drink. I didn’t want to think about the future.
by submission | Jun 30, 2008 | Story
Author : Greg Ashworth
The weather was terrible. It always was these days. The fluctuating temperatures, the driving rain, the harsh winds – all this was to be expected.
Sarah sat alone in the corner of the coffee shop, her eyes somehow distant, as she browsed the Net, aided by her neural implants. A tear crawled slowly from her dark eyes, and made its way down her porcelain cheek. The coffee shop a small, rustic affair, with dim lighting, which was somehow not entirely unfriendly. There were a several small, round synthetic wood tables, few of which were occupied. Long shadows were cast by the flickering argon lamps that lined the walls.
Sarah looked up, and then back into the swirling darkness of her coffee cup. She stared intently for several minutes. An old, ragged man looked up from his espresso, as if disturbed, then thought better of it, and returned to his own melancholy world.
Sarah’s deep, thoughtful gaze continued unabated, as if she was challenging her cappuccino to blink. There was an eldritch energy in the air now. The thick brown liquid began to rage in its ceramic prison, the foaming coffee thrashing and turning in the cup. The weather worsened outside, and the coffee shop began to echo with the pounding hail, hurling itself at the small glass windows, hammering against the seemingly ancient tiled roof.
Eventually, the owner, identified as ‘Luigi’ by a fading plastic name tag on his tarnished waistcoat, edged nervously towards Sarah’s motionless form, tapped her lightly on the shoulder and pointed apologetically towards the small wooden door.
Sarah slowly dragged herself from her trance, shook her head sadly, tossing her long black hair over her pale, disheartened face. She sorrowfully made her way to the door, careful not to let it slam behind her. The hail stopped, and the clouds parted slightly. It began to drizzle.
A small piece of paper fluttered slowly to the rough stone floor from the table at which she was sat. An eviction notice.
It had been thought for the early years of the twenty first century that man was to blame for the steady decline of Earth’s climate. It was, but not in the way scientists had thought. Many years, and vast amounts of money were spent researching ‘greener’ sources of energy, and in reducing the now laughable ‘carbon footprint’ of the world’s population – all for nothing.
At some point, in the middle of the twenty second century, tests were done on a small group who claimed that their mood influenced the weather. It was a scientific and psychological breakthrough – man had been responsible for the worsening climate, but it was the increasing depression and declining quality of life of humanity what was causing it, utilising the long suspected telepathic field linking all living organisms to the place of their birth, and yet, the governments chose to do nothing. Money could not be made from increasing the happiness of humanity, only destroying it with their ‘green’ fuels and ‘carbon credits’, and so the climate worsened, as did morale.
These were the days that a simple letter, removing a student from her apartment, could cause a violent storm that resulted in the deaths of four people and hundreds of credits worth of damage.
These were the days when happiness would save the planet.
Sunshine glinted off the wet roof of the coffee shop, interrupted by shadows cast from passing air taxis, and laughter echoed from down a nearby street.
