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 | Jun 29, 2008 | Story
Author : J.R.D. Skinner
“So, are ya?” He’s maybe twelve, wearing blue shorts and a Mexico City Raptors t-shirt, a leg up on the wrought iron patio fence. My lobster is getting cold.
“What?” I ask.
I realize he’s holding up a thin rectangle the size of a credit card, alternating his squints to get the thing’s picture to match my face.
“CEO Benjamin “Crush ‘Em” Hinton?”
I remember signing off on licensing my likeness to FlatMedia last May, but I hadn’t seen the cards in the wild.
I ignore him.
That might have been the end of it, but a serving girl swings by my table.
“Your bill, Mr. Hin – Ben.” She says, smiling uncomfortably.
That’s what I get for flirting with the wait staff.
“It IS you! Could ya sign my card?”
He thrusts a red stylus and the card at me. I accept, mostly just interested in checking out the cheap display on the back. There’s a rundown of my resume; schooling, management experience, time spent on corporate boards.
I tap on New Youth Limited. Not much my rookie year, but the second I was apparently one of “The Resurrection Seven”, a voting bloc that saved N.Y.L. by moving from chemical processes to genetic engineering. I remember the vote, but I don’t remember anyone using the snazzy nickname.
Sliding through the listings, I notice some of them have been marked up in a child’s block script, often with arrows pointing to individual entries, notes like: “Bob may have had seniority, but not the votes!”
“Anywhere?” I ask.
“Sure!” He says with a sloppy grin.
I tap the pen icon.
“Is it true that you punched Director Jules Wilson?”
“Heh, yeah. I mean, Wilson always came in drunk, but he fucked up my presentation. When he started pawing at Kathy Reed I was just looking for an excuse.”
I look up, wondering if I’ve said too much for a kid his age, but he seems to be eating it up with moon eyes.
“You ever gonna work somewhere huge like Kalstock again?” He asks, face imploring. I scribble and hand him back his card.
“Maybe.”
His saucer eyes begin to droop.
“Hey,” I quickly add, “I mean, there’s talk that Kalstock may revisit their policy and have me back for another term, but its hush hush.”
He brightens. I imagine him lording the harmless secret over his friends for a week.
“Tedward says you got lucky with the Talibi Merger because CEO Norma Donald was kicked by Talibi’s oversight expert system. I think he’s a craphead. You’re so smart you must have done something.”
I smile, recalling my best maneuvers.
“I bought shares in a number of Talibi subsidiaries using various fake names. I put out a lot of crosstalk showing a lack of stockholder confidence. The system got nervous. I paid good money to insert low numbers into that week’s financial reports, and the system went to red alert. Things would have been fixed as soon as they saw the next round of numbers, but I used the whistleblower hotline to point out a lie on Norma’s resume involving her university rowing team. With so much bad happening so suddenly the computer thought the world was ending and booted Norma, the only one who understood Kalstock’s real intentions.”
The kid’s smiling the whole time I’m talking, but as I finish he turns and waves to someone. It’s then I see the New Youth product watermark on the back of his neck.
“Mr. Hinton – Carl Nochek, special agent of the Securities and Exchange Commission. You’re under arrest.”
by submission | May 18, 2008 | Story
Author : Jacinta A. Meyers
So here I am, a third-class passenger bound for the floating island of a techno-civ, armed with various skins and plotting infiltration and assassination.
Ah, sounds like vacation.
Well, except for the intended target, that is. How do you disarm a human trigger? I mean, I’ve done my fair share of seduction and all, but this is a kid we’re talking about here; his twelfth birthday’s not for another four and a half months. My employers want him dead before then. Even I admit it’s a weird mission. And it wouldn’t even be so bad if I didn’t know that he’s a fair, kind-hearted kid. But what can ya do? Desperate times, desperate measures.
The skin I wear today is white, former Western European. By the time I reach their palace, oh in about seven week’s time, I’ll be wearing one of their skins. They don’t like foreigners where I’m headed. But they do let refugees in. We do their dirty work. We are an expendable commodity and we know our place. So today, I am a lowly immigrant looking for a bottom-rung job. Start at the bottom and work up, that’s how it goes. I’ll tell ’em my story if they ask, “Homeland under water, no place to go, no family, need work.” Boo hoo, they hear it a million times a day, won’t look twice at me. I’ll be just another face on the wharves. Just another grubby girl there to work the night lines in their factories or clean up their hazardous chemical waste.
Or there to kill their Emperor’s heir.
You know, one of the nice things about what I do is travel. I can just see the island up ahead, growing bigger as we get close. They had to float the whole dang thing when the sea level rose. My employers are still trying to figure out how they did it, and whether it’s still tethered to the bottom somehow. I hear that they carry their pureblood women around on platforms covered with jewels, and that the penalty for touching one is mutilation beyond recognition. Sounds neat to me. Maybe I’ll steal one of those skins while I’m there. See what it’s like to be doted on and protected for once.
Oh, and the kid. Can’t forget about him. Emperor’s got a dozen nuclear missiles rigged to go off if anything happens to his son, all pointed at the League of First-World Nations. If you ask me, it’s a terrible idea. I mean, what if the kid falls out of bed one night? Well. Maybe they sleep on the floor. . . Weird culture, after all. And anyway, it won’t matter anymore.
Because that’s what I’m here for.
by submission | May 12, 2008 | Story
Author : Dee Harding
Samsara has worn his locks for 15 years, shining and strong. He has adapted to them by sleeping sideways and letting them learn to clean themselves. Each tangled cluster of keratine farms its own rot, the rain, and the detritus of everyday life. Stray protein quietly becoming fuel for a million miniscule workers, all sculpting their environment in long sheathes and spirals. When the city smog is bad all that can be seen of Samsara beyond his mask are the crawling oil-slick dreadlocks, unbound. Throughout his culture’s history, hair has been alive with the symbolism of wind, water and fire. It has not taken so very long for those abstracts to become material, but his mane remains ritual before anything else.
Anything but the divide. Those that take the twisting path serve the economy’s invisible hand. Although the knotted braids are an efficient manifold for Samsara’s microbial hive they weigh him down with meaning. They bind him to his place within the kingdom and decades of financial debt still to be paid. His scalp harbours his craft, his industry and his caste, all impossible to hide. Those of the Breed spend half their lives physically unconstrained but in monetary bondage before they cultivate the 9 foot long archipelago that marks a master of the art. A sage so skilled as to be rooted to the spot and cared for by concubines, physically encumbered but spiritually free.
In some ways, even now, it is difficult to determine where each compound filament of Samsara’s hair ends. They thread through their own strands of infection into the pheremonal plumage of kingdom socialites and prostitutes, the telluric ephemera of engineers and navigators, the chemical sequencing of medics and pushers alike. Even bald, Samsara is telepresent. Which is good, considering, but no real consolation. Stone burns into his knees in the mid-day heat, ankles bound, and the crowd is silent. No-one will approach but the perfect men with swarming skin. Samsara can send nothing past their gracious smiles and he weeps. No fear has been greater than this moment, every nerve is wracked with grief. They walk closer now, and closer. People like Samsara creep up against every boundary, breaking laws that have yet to evolve, but every loop-hole curls in on itself in time. He is caught dead centre in the web of New Delhi, broken, while around him bronzed razors flash in the sun.
by submission | Mar 30, 2008 | Story
Author : Brian Armitage
“He’s up. Turn it on,†someone says. The doctor.
As I open my eyes, the whiteness hits. It’s like I’m having an idea, but it’s too much for my brain to hold. I squeeze my eyes shut and gasp, trying to…
…where am I? The doctor is looking at me, smiling. Confidently. Behind him, the other doctor, holding an implant control. “What’s going on?â€
“Always the first thing they forget,†Dr. Meyers says, the one in the back. Like I’m not even in the room. How do I know his name?
Dr. Canton pats me on the knee. I can barely feel it. I’m strapped to the bed at the knees. “Watch the wallscreen, Mr. Daughtry. This video should explain everything. Screen one, play.†The white idea is alight again, and it’s burning… and I can’t remember where my house is. The video starts, and a face pops onto the screen. I jump, and the bed slides against the wall.
It’s me.
“Hey, Mike. It’s me. You. Well, yeah,†the recording says. Chuckles. “But man, soon we’re not gonna be anyone anymore. We’re getting the Parson Treatment.†The recording grins. “It’s all getting erased.â€
Another pulse. What’s my last name? What’s my dad’s name? And the recording just grins at me. It starts talking again, and I just gawk. I grip my hair, eyes vibrating. “No, no, no… you dumb bastard. What did you do?â€
The doctor in the back of the room laughs aloud. The doctor by the bed shushes him, but he’s trying not to laugh himself.
“…done, you’re not gonna remember anything! Nothing! Not Kiera leaving, not…â€
“Kiera left me?†When? I start crying. The white idea roars. Why am I crying?
“…won’t hurt. They say they need you to be awake for the procedure, because of the brain chemistry. It’ll be weird, but… we’ll finally be done.â€
What procedure? I can’t remember any… no. Not a Parson Implant. No.
“People say it’s suicide, but it’s not. They’re wrong.†The man in the video clenches his jaw, looks like he’s going to point a finger at the camera, but he doesn’t. Who is he? “We’re finally going to be useful for someone. They’ll use our body, but we won’t have to deal with it anymore.†He tries to smile. “Finally done.â€
“85 percent,†says the doctor with the device in his hand.
“Good enough. Go ahead,†says the other.
The doctor’s finger taps the device. What is it-
A white idea rushes at me. It burns, but… it burns, but… A white idea. A white. I try speak. I try stop. Wall man say okay. Is okay? No! Not wanting!
Not wanting.
White.
* * *
“And, done,†said Dr. Meyers. Flatline on all three scales. Nice and clean.
Dr. Canton patted what was Mike Daughtry on the knee again. The patient started, then squinted at his own knee. “Screen one, pause recording.†He waited for the confirmation chime, then burst into laughter. “Oh, man! We’re watching that one again tonight. Did you see that? He forgot his wife left him! Perfect timing.â€
“Perfect timing,†Meyers repeated, shaking his head. “Classic. We should probably think of a better excuse to wake them up first, though. Someone’s not gonna buy it. But thank you, Mr. Daughtry, for totally buying it.â€
The patient had turned toward Meyers. His jaw moved slightly, once.
