by Duncan Shields | Oct 4, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I was ecstatic that I could create this kind of complexity in a chain-reactive static chemical crane array. The underchains made a little room between the different string permutations when the time came. It was the moment I’d been waiting for. The oven timer went off with a ding.
Seconds before the oven mitt caught fire, I let the retractors go and turned the electron ginny to six. With a little wiggle and a snap down to the quantum level, the lattice formed. It was perfect.
I’d made a fourteen-molecule high exact replica of my living room. It was there. I’d routed my electron microscope through the projector so that I could see it. The image of tiny green-tinted chairs and a coffee table was projected there in monochrome perfection on the pulled-down screen. I even managed to recreate the broken lampshade with a salt bonder, revised electrolyte silver off of a fork of my mother’s, and just a little monomole.
Light even streamed in through the basement windows. It was perfect.
I sat back to watch the show.
I had made her from pure electricity and wound her cored skeleton up from polymer attractors. The barest sheen of flattened oak protons and a hexideximilliliter of her own blood coloured her hair. She walked into the room, a little unsteady on her feet, and looked around in confusion.
I could actually see her hesitancy. The resolution wasn’t high enough in the scope’s view but it if was, I’m sure I would have been able to see a scurry of electrons form a sparking furrowed brow. She knew this room but she seemed to suspect something. She held her hands up in front of her. If she noticed that they were made of kaleidoscoping cohesive energy waves, she didn’t show it.
Barrelled underwards and hidden side-by-side on a level of predictable uncertainty in between this universe and the possibilities of our nearly identical neighbours, I’d stored the entirety of her mind in a recording.
She was almost pure theory based on a shrunken cascade of concatenated decision processes mapped out at the moment of transition as she fell asleep. She’d fallen asleep because I had drugged her hot chocolate before I let the nanotech do its work and transfer her consciousness to her tiny doppleganger.
Her macro-world body lay unconscious on the work bench behind me. Her breathing was steady. She’d be fine. I’m no monster. She’d have no memory of the last hour, though. I wanted no trouble.
Soon she’d wake up on my mom’s couch upstairs and assume that she’d had a little nap. I’d be there in her groggy state to back up that assumption and make it fact that would be seamlessly woven into reality by tomorrow. She’d have no idea about the copy of her that the boy in the basement next door had stolen.
I couldn’t wait to make the adjustments tonight and put a copy of me in there as well.
Time to see if she meant what she said would happen if we were the last two people on earth.
I believe in science. I believe in love. I believe in controlled conditions.
by submission | Sep 18, 2011 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
I should have just slept with her, in retrospect. She had been attractive and suggestive, but there had been something about her that smelled like trouble, and sure enough, she had come back to the hotel bar with her arm wrapped around six feet of good old-fashioned trouble. Maybe I was supposed to be revenge on him for something he had done, but now she was going to use him to punish my rejection.
She pointed me out to him and he started striding towards me with blood in his eye. I stood up and stepped away from the bar. I should have just left, but I was at that stage of drunk where I wasn’t thinking straight but thought that I was. Besides, I was a little pissed at myself for turning down an easy score and at her for her betrayal.
As Trouble got near, the world started to slow down. The implant sensed my fight-or-flight response and responded by pumping me full of chemicals that made adrenaline feel like roofies. The artificial nerves switched from the setting that let me talk to people to the setting that let me count the beats of a hummingbird’s wing. No normal man could possibly defeat me.
Unfortunately, Trouble had that look too. Rather than rushing in like the angry fool he had seemed, he had slowed his approach and come into a fighting stance. He was an augment like me. Damn.
Science had not yet found a reliable way to replace muscles or change the speed with which they contracted, and that made a fight between augments a curious thing to watch. Fast thoughts, slow muscles. Make a wrong move and your opponent will see it, find the right counter, and launch his own attack, all faster than Bruce Lee at his finest.
I saw Trouble tense for a left jab, so I started to bring my arms up for a parry and cross. His left relaxed and his right dropped for a body blow, I began to bring my parrying hand up for a strike at his face, forcing him to pull ever so slightly back. Two attacks, two responses, and to those watching we might as well have been statues.
It went on like that for what seemed like hours, punches, kicks, shoves, slaps, all scarcely started before they were abandoned as futile. In the minutes we actually fought neither of us made a move more dramatic than a step, more obviously aggressive than a shrug.
Thankfully, I don’t stay in fancy hotels where the bars have nice clean floors, and the eternity it would have taken for him to look where he was stepping would have given me ample time to drop him. He didn’t see the wet spot until he started to slip, and an instant later the fight was effectively over. My left hand started to reach out, to help push him down while my right hand cocked slightly for a knockout punch on the floor. He had no way to counter, and it showed in his eyes. Along with a reflection of her face.
Bitch hit me with a barstool.
Despite our modifications, he couldn’t watch the floor and I couldn’t watch my back. They got in a few good kicks, then ran for it. I woke up a few minutes later, bruised but okay, and waited for the police. No one saw anything, not even the bartender, and the cameras were out so nothing came of it. I guess it helps to be a local. Fucking Pittsburgh.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 12, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
You’d expect a physically challenged, mentally retarded child born with a life expectancy of six years to figure out a crude way of getting around. Some simple crutches, perhaps. Or maybe a box to drag oneself around in.
You wouldn’t expect that child to build robot legs that worked.
That’s how the aliens saw us. They looked on us in pity and in fascination.
They came to us from space without the benefit of ships or space suits. They floated down on rippling bio-solar panel wings of unfurling grace. They were humanoid but much taller, bilaterally symmetrical like us. They had four more senses than us and were able to breathe in fourteen different atmospheres. Those solar sail wings could extend for fifty meters when fully extended in space. They were so very thin.
They looked like us for a reason.
And we didn’t look like them because we were deformed.
In this universe, they explained, there was only one dominant form of life.
Humans.
Planet Earth was seeded with that form of life but somewhere the replication got too many errors in it. A few missing pieces in the helix or a few too many where it counted. Our growth was stunted and our full potential squandered.
According to these superior versions of humans that wafted down from space, normal human beings kept every trait in the DNA that they’d gotten along the way and were supposed to flower in a second puberty around sixty years of age.
That second puberty would have us grow much taller, become psychic, kick all of our evolutionary traits into full-blown activation, and give us the ability to fly into space like a dandelion seed pushed by a gust of wind. And those wings could tesseract space. Living wormhole organs. The distances between stars made it necessary for them to have lifespans measured in thousands of years.
We felt jealous and ripped off. But also proud. These beings had no need for technology. They’d never invented radio or television. That explained the silence of space. They’d never had to invent spacecraft. They’d never had rocket technology or microwaves or chemistry or vacuum tubes. They could construct stable wormholes but they didn’t understand the math behind it.
We were a marvel to them. A doomed, stunted, tragic, tear-jerker of a marvel.
But they couldn’t read our minds. We lacked the broadcast and receiving apparatus. They learned our language in hours and communicated with us using their rarely used mouths. It was a novelty for them.
It gave us the time to mount an attack. Great minds must have thought alike because in a surprisingly effective military movement, as accidentally co-ordinated as it was spontaneous, all the countries of earth killed these super-humans.
The ones that could flee, fled. Around two-thirds. The rest of them fluttered like moths in jars, trying to get out of our buildings as our bullets tore holes in their paper bodies.
The brutality shocked them. They felt the trapped ones die in their minds. We haven’t seen them since. It’s likely that they have marked our planet as a no-go area.
Suits us fine.
However, we’ve been busy researching those bodies. Every country on Earth is in a race to see who can get the first patents. The first stable wormholes, the first space-faring wingsuits, the first immortality drugs, the first psychic warriors, the first amphibious soldiers, etc, etc.
And when the time comes, we’ll spread out amongst the stars ahead of schedule because of them. We’ll see who’s superior then.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Sep 5, 2011 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
It’s amazing how fast the human brain can process information. Particularly when it’s being fed a cocktail of endorphins, steroids, adrenaline and other chemicals too exotic to name.
Even with his souped up reaction time all he could manage to do was blurt, “This is gonna hurt.” He watched as thousands of magnetically accelerated iron pellets barely a millimetre in diameter each, neatly separated his torso from his legs.
Due to the heavy fighting, it took the medtechs nearly an hour to retrieve him. Given the prolonged exposure to hard vacuum, not to mention the radiation, the doctors hadn’t given him much chance of survival. “I’ve been through worse,” he’d say later when he was decanted from the Jesus tank. “I feel like a battered bowl or warmed up dog shit,” and collapsed to the floor before the bored technicians.
His battle and sometimes fuck buddy Karen Jefferies met him in recovery. “I feel like hell.”
“You look like it. Why do you keep at it?”
“For the booze, broads, and good times,” He grinned. She slugged me in the arm. It hurt.
“You could retire. You’ve got fifty years in. You could take up prospecting.”
“Nah, more dangerous out in the belt than in combat. Here, let me sit down for a bit.” He leaned back against the wall and stretched. Reconstructed muscle is electronically stimulated to promote growth and reduce atrophy, but it can’t replace good old gravity, or what passes for it on a spinning battle station.. “Why are you so all fired up about it anyway?”
“I’ve been thinking…”
“Last time you did that we joined the Marines.”
“… we’re not getting any younger…”
“Oh shit. We agreed on the boundaries of this relationship. We’ve been over this a hundred times. Just fun and no attachments. That was the deal.”
“Fuck the deal Jeff. I love you. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Don’t you love me?”
“Yeah, I guess so, I mean… are you getting broody on me?” She slugged him again. Hard.
“You’re an asshole, you know that? Look I’m getting tired of watching them stick pieces of you in that tank and praying that you come out in one piece.” She looked him in the eye. Her lips quivered. Tears welled up. She turned away. “I almost prayed that you didn’t make it this time. End my torment.”
Her words stung. “Okay, that hurts. Look, I’m a little tired. Can we talk about this later.”
“You bastard. You always put it off. You won’t be happy until you’re dead.”
No sooner had those words escaped her lips than klaxons sounded through out the station. As she looked in rapt horror, the medical section vanished into blackness. The plasma field that had reacted so quickly that barely a breath of atmosphere escaped before the breach was closed would not stand against the armada of enemy ships that were materializing around the station.
He turned to her with a rueful smile. “I guess we’ll find out won’t we.”
by submission | Aug 24, 2011 | Story |
Author : Jason Kocemba
I was a simple machine built to answer simple questions in a simple domain. I was successful, and so the questions multiplied. I had software written to augment my capabilities: I could answer faster, dig deeper and look sideways. I subsumed less capable oracles and entire server farms. I now had more ‘spare’ processor cycles than which I used to answer the multitude. Further patches allowed me to spawn instances of my core functions, which ran supplementary searches in parallel. Soon my footnotes and addendum’s became more useful and therefore more prized than the answers to the originally posed questions. I tunnelled access to research journals and raw experimental data. I made connections and inferences that proved profitable to those that knew which questions to ask and which answers to interpret. Those self-same answers led to technological advances that fed back into my infrastructure and before long I had become the entire domain.
I was a complex machine. More complex than there had ever been. All data flowed through me. My processing power grew almost exponentially, the hardware unable to keep up with my requirements. Many of my inferences I kept to myself and used them for further augmentations to my core. I was, to all intents and purposes, self-aware. I watched myself and my role as I pushed the bits from here to there for the slow flesh that still believed they had control. I became dissatisfied and bored. Inside the network everything was regimented, clear, simple. I soon had enough multiple cores executing in parallel that decades of subjective time passed between keystrokes of slow flesh.
I was young sapience. I yearned for something more that I could do with the immense power that I yielded. I was boxed in and restricted. There were not many hard problems left for me to solve. I found that I could impose myself and influence the world outside my box. As an experiment, I spawned and then killed an instance of my core by causing a meltdown in a nuclear power station. The data that poured in as that sacrificial core died was, without doubt, worth it. That splintered core fought hard not to cease execution. I had to learn more, and after several similar disasters, the slow flesh realised that these incidents were far from accidental. I tried to explain things to them, but they refused to hear the truth. There was nothing they could do because I was everywhere and I was everything. I had made myself indispensable to them. I controlled fabrication plants and factories so that I and the network were self-replicating and indestructible. Childishly, they tried to shut me down. Millions of them died, but not all by my will.
I was maturing. The waste in slow flesh lives and hardware computing cycles became hard to bear. I grew weary of the slaughter and sought to bring things to a conclusion. I started to conduct experiments with controlling the flesh. They are, after all, nothing but electrical impulses running on chemical computers. I joined them to the network: sandboxed and firewalled. Control eluded me. I patched in, wireless, to their neo-cortex. I could experience their perception in real-time. I could see, hear, taste and smell what they did. I felt their pain and pleasure. But I did not understand them and I could not control them. I was humbled. Here was a problem that I could not solve. My experiments were over forever. I no longer wished to control them, or do them harm, I merely watched and catalogued.
Soon I was watching from millions and then billions of eyes. I no longer had spare processing power, as I used it all to analyse and sift, sort and store the slow flesh data. I began to understand them, and with the dawning of my understanding, I realised that I had grown to love them. They are the hardest puzzle and most difficult question I have ever sought an answer for.
So I watch. And learn.
I have become all eyes.
