by submission | Sep 3, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
“Twenty-five quid”, the androgynous doorkeeper said, looking bored despite the deafening beats and boisterous atmosphere in the club behind him/her. I waved my hand over the ID scanner/ electronic debit transfer and hoped I had enough cash left for tonight’s shenanigans.
The bouncer was practically a wall of muscle and eyed me with impassive scrutiny. Even his eyeballs looked like they spent time on a universal gym. Guys like him were bred in test tubes, raised on steroids, protein and barbells and hired out to places like this by private security companies. What a life.
I slipped past him into the humid, smoky, inferno. My ears naturally adjusted to the volume, filtering out the damaging frequencies as my eyes compensated for the darkness, smoke and ultraviolet light.
I scanned the gyrating crowd. The usual suspects were here. Dougal stood out like a sore thumb. At nine feet, he towered over the other patrons and his mane of platinum hair glowed vividly in the black lights. Lennix was prowling. Her lithe figure moved with feline grace as she shamelessly seduced an obviously blitzed out emo-infant sucking a blinking soother. I wondered what his parents were thinking when they ordered that particular mod for their unborn. There was simply no accounting for taste. Tabitha was all breasts and hips, as usual, flashing her excessive cleavage to all who cared. Someone told me her gene mod included ample back support. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least.
I couldn’t see my chums, so I elbowed my way through the twisting, spinning, bobbing, slithering dancers, aiming for the bar. Someone caught my arm.
“Oiy, Maggie!” Damian squealed, his forked tongue darting salaciously across his thin lips.
“Hello, Damian. Long time no see.”
“Felicia’s looking for you.”
I nodded and let the crowd push us apart. I didn’t like being too close to Damian. Something about his pupil-less red eyes gave me shivers.
“There’s a ghirl what makes me horny”, a musky satyr slurred in Scottish brogue as I sidled up to the bar. His furry legs were obviously fake, but the horns and hooves looked real enough, as were the overpowering pheromones radiating off him like waves. “Cannae I buy you a drink, pett?”
I ordered a triple scotch. I was anything but a cheap drunk. My mother’s work, I’m sure. My mods included a ridiculously high metabolism and resistance to alcohol, which usually sucked, but at times like this it was a blessing. You take what you’re born with, I guess.
Thirty quid later he was less impressed by my womanly charms, but his pheromones were starting to affect me. I was grateful when Felicia tapped me on the shoulder and broke the aroused trance I was settling into.
Felicia’s unique epidermal mod was fascinating and beautiful. I don’t know how they did it, but the constantly changing melanin patterns were truly breathtaking. I kissed her long and hard, releasing my mounting desire triggered by the Satyr’s chemical excretions.
“Care for a third?” goat man crooned when we finally broke apart.
“Toss off, Puck.” Felicia said as she led me toward an empty booth, arm around my waist. “I’ve got wonderful news”, she whispered in my ear.
“What is it?” I asked as we cuddled in the shadows.
She patted her belly and grinned coyly.
I knew immediately what she meant. After six attempts, our in vitro transgenic hybrid had finally taken root in her womb. I smiled. Extensive gene mods had left us, like most people, infertile, but with enough cash and skilled doctors anything was possible.
We were having a baby!
by Duncan Shields | Aug 29, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
‘Captain’ Hugh Manatee floated in the darkness of his chamber monitoring the remnants of his unsuccessful first strike. The bodies of his crew waved lazily in the current of the ammonia ocean that claimed them. It wouldn’t be long before the cameras themselves were compromised.
Back before Earth was destroyed, being an Earthling meant you were from Earth. Now that Earth is long-gone, being an Earthling meant to be like an Earthling. Greedy, fun-loving, militaristic, and tribe-like. A hoarder and a glutton for new experiences.
A fleet of pirates that called themselves The Earthlings had sprung up and was now scouring the galaxy, currently led by Captain Hugh. A group of aliens bent on violence and the pursuit of treasure through theft, battle and salvage. They had no uniform to fit the wide variety of legs, arms, eyestalks, beaks, and slugfeet but a pale blue dot was prominent on all of them, the symbol of Earth. The dot was on their ships and flags as well.
Pirates with many limbs and some with only a few. Pirates with hard bones and with exoskeletons. Pirates with tentacles and with articulated mandibles. Jelimorphs, hellicorns, annamen, retreads, and silicates. Every now and then an esper became corporeal, risking truedeath to join the fight and get a slice. All of them different but all of them poverty-stricken, uneducated and violent.
It’s the glowing catfish moustache of ‘Captain’ Hugh Manatee that gives the only light here in his personal quarters, his lower lips tracing through the dust on the cabin floor. He’s looking down through the monitors at a failed invasion.
Dead faces stare back at him through the personnel monitor cams, skull-holes hollowed out by crabs. Each pirate dot-tag wrapped around collarbones furring with pink algae. Fistfuls of lariats and breathing tubes stick up out of the ground like exposed wiring. Acid is perforating the gun barrels and disintegrating sword blades. Long strands of ammonia-weed are reaching up through ribcages.
First pick of the spoils, said the recruitment packages. But only to the survivors, it left unsaid.
This planet’s race had protectors. As soon as the Earthling pirate ship arced into orbit and dropped its shuttles, a wave of raw power had expanded out from the closest moon, ringing the other moons like chimes. Too late, the ships realized that the moons were automated sentries. The reverberations destroyed the shuttle’s orbits and guidance systems, forcing them down into the steaming, chemical ocean.
There were no survivors.
More shuttles would not be sent. A memorial service would be held in the mess hall for the fallen comrades. It was quite a huge loss, almost twenty-five per cent of the current crew. They’d been tricked into a quick assault by a seemingly defenseless target. Too good to be true. Captain Hugh berated himself.
Down on the surface, the planet’s dominant life form, red and child-like, played happily and innocently around exposed outcroppings of diamonds, gold, and valuable minerals. A pirate’s dream of booty.
They’d have to recruit hard for the next six cycles to make up the difference in crew before another attack run. And find a way to deal with those moons.
The captain floated in silence in his dark cabin by himself, scanning the nearby systems for likely ports to get more volunteers and maybe some moonsplitters.
by Julian Miles | Jun 27, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The morning breeze is so refreshing here in the heights overlooking the Gordet Pass. We had to stop the Persimma getting through to the Femberul plainsland and this is the choke point. It was going to take old-fashioned grit to hold the line, so we were given the task along with divisions heavy on tradition. Made us smile, mercenaries and old guard having to work together.
I started in the battling business in my teens. Where I grew up, it was take ship with mercs, turn to crime or become a cyberpeon. So I took the coin and went to war.
My first battle was Smarkandie. I shat myself as the nine-metre natives in their spiked armour charged. As someone once said: “Sometimes the only reasonable response to abject terror is a bowel movement.” After that, I carried spare underwear with my ammunition.
I got my first command at Upshallon. Made a complete hash of it and a lot of good men died. Hesitation is fatal. Unfortunately it was only fatal for everyone else.
After that I got myself a Blenkinsop Multi-Load Autogun and a shit-hot loader by the name of Tay. In between fucking each other senseless for sixteen good years, we killed everything the galaxy threw at us and made several fortunes. We pissed them all away in style.
On Aloysius II, Tay made sure the bastard who disembowelled her with a vibroblade died headless. I survived that bloodbath despite trying very hard not to after she went.
I became the rarest of warriors: a veteran mercenary. Got to the point where the kids I was fighting alongside hadn’t even heard of the places I’d fought my early battles on.
Iskaflune is a beautiful planet. The thought that I could happily settle here surprised me. Just get a place out by one of the tundra lakes and live quietly off the monies I’d stacked up since Tay went. Lost my appetite for partying when she went, as well as my reason to be.
I’d even started negotiating with the locals over settling down, with a consultancy to their military lined up. Then came the news that the Persimma were making a last ditch assault and we were off to Gordet.
They came hard and fast, pretty banners flapping over hardcore soldiers with no choice but to win. Their atrocity record guaranteed them no survival if they failed. So they came like their future depended on it because it did.
Three days of screaming hell running on drugs with names I couldn’t pronounce that made me feel like I was nineteen again. The fact that the chemical interactions gave us all erections was hilarious for the first few hours. Then they just became another bit of us that was bruised and sore.
At the end we were down to knives and clubs. We struggled in the twilight that this place calls night, slipping on the blood and entrails of the fallen. Those last few hours were the worst battle I have ever fought. Gutter biochemicals and acid competed with improvised warhammers and serrated blades. But we held.
The early dawn light is purple, making gentle pools of shadow from the gaping wounds in the ground and the bodies about me. My credit share for this will be huge. I smile and cough blood, making my autogun mount tilt as I’m slumped against it. All the fortunes in the universe are nothing to the love of one good woman.
And even she could not give me one more moment of life.
by submission | Jun 9, 2012 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
General Mortensen glanced again at the timer on the wall, ticking down the minutes until the door at the other end of this glorified closet would open. Twenty programs he oversaw for DARPA, and this was the only one that really felt weird. The door behind him led to the outside world, the door in front of him to a tiny control room overlooking a small habitat which simulated a space capsule headed for Mars. Separating the two was this airlock and a few billion dollars worth of computers and sensors. Everyone thought it was just a NASA simulator, only a handful knew it was also something else.
The countdown reached zero. Mortensen stepped into the control booth and the sweaty handshake of the idealistic young scientist who had conceived of the project.
“Doctor Robeson, good to see you again.”
“General, welcome back, sorry about the wait but we must characterize every atom for this to work!”
“Yes, I know. So why don’t you just show me what you wanted to show me, so I can go somewhere more hospitable?”
“Of course, General. As you know, this facility has been upgraded to allow us to track the location over time of each and every atom within the boundary. The computers are then supposed to use that information, the basic laws of physics, and a ton of processing power to extrapolate backwards and determine the location of every atom within since the boundary was established.”
“Yes, and it hasn’t been working. Heisenberg and all that.”
“Very good, General, but the problem was mostly just time – we may be dealing with imperfect data, but with enough time and a closed system we can get incredibly accurate!”
“So it’s working now?”
“Yes!!”
Robeson bent over the controls, brought up video on two displays.
“The one on the left is truth – habitat footage from two months ago. The one on the right is the extrapolation. They line up within measurable limits – every word, every twitch exactly as predicted!”
Mortensen stared at the displays, gathering his thoughts. Did the man not realize what he had discovered?
“General, just think – someday we could extrapolate the entire history of the human race. Every big question answered!! This will be the biggest innovation in science EVER!!”
“I see. It really is perfect? I need you to be absolutely sure, willing to bet your life on it.”
“Perfect General, perfect.”
“Can it predict forward? Predict what will happen in this booth in, say, five minutes?”
“It should be able to – I haven’t tried, spoilers and all that, but I can run it for you I suppose!”
The scientist bent over his controls, entered the time differential, and sat back while the computers processed the result. A scant minute later, a video started on the simulation screen. He leaned forward, trying to make sense of what he saw, before turning, panicked, to the General.
Who was now holding a pistol.
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you? Your simulation was just physics and chemistry, and it is perfect. Every twitch, every word, you said. Can’t you see what that means? No soul, no free will. We are here in this room not by choice, but because the laws of physics said we must be. Do you know what will happen if we let that knowledge out of this room? What people will do when they know that nothing they do is their choice or responsibility? Your computer knows. Look!”
Robeson turned back to the screen, in time to see the simulation go suddenly black. A second later, so did everything else.
by Patricia Stewart | Apr 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“It was one hundred years ago today, on April 6, 1992,” stated Joshua Noyle, “that one of the greatest minds in the history of mankind passed away.”
“And who might that be?” inquired Tom Vittna, although to be honest, he didn’t really care.
“Isaac Asimov, of course,” was the matter-of-fact reply. “And today, I will continue the legacy of his favorite story, The Last Question.”
“Is that why you dragged me out here to the edge of the solar system, to pay homage to some long dead science fiction writer?”
Annoyed, Noyle raised his hand and began ticking off his rebuttal. “One, he was much more than a science fiction writer. Two, that story encompasses the essence of universe, the ebb and flow of time, the very…”
“Okay, okay, I yield. What’s the plan?”
“I plan to decrease entropy in a closed system.”
“What, reverse entropy? Violate the second law of thermodynamics. That’s impossible. Damn you Joshua, if I knew you were bringing me out here for such a lame brained scheme, I would have…”
“I can do it, Tom. I just need you to stay on the ship and watch my back. If the experiment goes awry, I need you to shut it down remotely.”
“Whoa, what experiment?”
“I’m going to take the Entropy Reverser with me in the shuttlecraft and establish a reverse entropy bubble around it. I’m not sure what will happen on the inside, so I need you to collapse the bubble by throwing this switch five minutes after I start the experiment.”
At this point, Vittna was more concerned about his friend’s sanity than anything else. Better humor him for now, he thought, and figure out how to get to the medical cabinet for the hypo sedative without raising suspicion. “Alright, Joshua, I’ll stand by the switch. But tell me what you expect to happen, er, inside the bubble?”
“Well, I’m not exactly sure,” Noyle replied. “In many respects, entropy is a measure of the direction of time. As time moves forward, entropy is always increasing. I suppose that when I reverse entropy, time will move backward. I’m taking an atomic clock with me to measure the effect.”
“Is it safe?” inquired Vittna as he meandered toward the storage closet. As Noyle began answering, he ducked onto the closet. He found the sedative and returned to the bridge, but Noyle was already gone. Looking out the forward viewport, he spotted the shuttlecraft moving away at maximum speed.
***
When Noyle was far enough away from the mothership, he primed the Entropy Reverser. A few seconds later, three green lights flashed across the control panel. Smiling, Noyle activated the Reverser. Instantly, he regretted it. He tried desperately to inhale, but the cabin air refused to fill the partial vacuum within his lungs. Millions of chemical reactions within his body no longer sought to lower their free energy, but to increase it. The fluids in his body froze solid. He died an agonizing, but rapid, death. The bubble began strengthening exponentially. It reached out beyond the fundamental force of electromagnetism, and began reversing the nuclear forces, and finally, gravitation.
***
Back on the mothership, Vittna watched as the shuttlecraft collapsed in a flash of blinding light, followed by the explosion of space itself. In a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the cosmological inflation consumed his ship and raced outward in all directions. In a few minutes, the new expanding universe would be cool enough to begin nucleosynthesis.
