by submission | Feb 10, 2007 | Story
Author : Chris Court-Dobson
“Stop, there’s something in my eye.â€
The spore had crash landed in his eye, and people were emerging. Light was blotted out as he rubbed, but the people were unharmed.
“I think its gone.â€
The people had nuclei, flagella, membranes, thoughts, emotions, roles and beliefs. They screamed as bacteria engulfed the stragglers, but through their superior intelligence fought them off and then captured them. They began to farm the bacteria for their rich cytoplasm, then they began to build.
“My right eye is itchy, I hope its not infected.â€
A city made of calcium grew out of ocean of tears. Bacteria swam in pens before their slaughter. The people were prosperous, but could not remember their home, the long journey in the spores had robbed them of that.
“Doctor will I be ok?â€
“It’s just an eye infection, drop this in your eye.â€
Deadly chemicals fell from the sky, but the people prevailed and reinforced their stronghold. Soon their civilization grew to encompass the entire ocean, except the middle where the ocean floor was dark, this was considered a holy place.
“It’s getting worse, it looks terrible.â€
The city became overcrowded, there was civil war over whether or not to build over the black centre. The priests said it would anger the ocean and make the deadly rain fall again. The others scorned, the deadly rain was no match for them. Eventually the priests left the city and struck out across the desert mountain in search of another home. They were attacked by monsters and many fell to their deaths on the slopes, stragglers were left behind. Meanwhile in the city, the centre was quickly built over, to much rejoicing, at last they had they had thrown off the shackles of religion.
“I woke up this morning and I was blind in the infected eye, is there nothing you can do?â€
“I have never seen this before, it seems to be a new disease. We’ll work on a cure.â€
The True Believers came eventually to a new ocean of tears, the same as the last one. They rejoiced and began to build.
“The infection has spread.â€
They built great buildings, statues and art.
“We’re working on it.â€
The first city heard of the second and were jealous, with their violent ways they marched an army across the mountain and took the second city by force. Then they built over the sacred space.
“I cannot see, my sight has gone. Doctor, I’m afraid.â€
“We’ve found a cure, genetically engineered micro-organisms, they’ll clear the infection right away and attack the cause as well.â€
Monsters fell from the sky, they ate through the walls of the city and the bacteria flooded the streets. The statues fell and the museums were crushed. Soon the people were gone. With nothing left to eat, the monsters died. The peaceful bacteria reclaimed the ocean and continued with their peaceful existence.
“Thank you Doctor, I’m cured.â€
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 2, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The building’s glass stretched skyward from the sidewalk, turning back looks, and draining the features from their reflections. Stone stepped into the turnstile, and with a quick twist, the glass cylinder dutifully deposited him inside.
At the far end of a wide corridor sat a single guard behind a desk. Crossing the distance, Stone could feel the space breathing him in, swallowing up the evidence of his passage. The walls shone, lustrous and grey. The floor, black as night and polished to a marble sheen was devoid of any mark. A breeze from the vaulted ceiling above seemed to be inhaled by the stone beneath his feet.
At the desk, the guard seemed outwardly oblivious to his presence, however his intra-retinal’s were scrolling reams of data onto panels projected around his field of vision, and he systematically checked and rechecked them as Stone approached. The air pulled past Stone’s body was analyzed, and the chemical signatures of everything from the coffee he’d recently finished to the perfume of the last passerby on the street was neatly itemized. Stone was a veritable soup of chemicoscentia, but for the purpose of entry, was clean.
“Mr. Stone, your weapon has been tagged and locked, do not attempt to use it while you’re here.” The guards voice was dull, unreadable, monotone. “There’s a lift waiting.”
A single door stood open beyond the guard station, and Stone strode purposefully to it, noting the lack of visible controls as it closed. Beneath his clothing, miles of tattooed network fabric bristled on his skin, the delicate and barely visible mesh of hairlines picking up the sudden onslaught of scanners surrounding him, electronic and otherwise. A hundred meters from the door he had broken the hard link between his internal and external net devices, and now his sub-dermals chattered back with random ad programs and auto-responders. Several whitehole and honeypot programs would lure the more sophisticated scanners and let them chase each other around beneath his skin, while his core remained untouchable.
The chrome door disappeared silently to one side and Stone found himself in another long rectangular room, featureless but for a pair of chairs opposite a large flat desk, cantilevered from one wall. On the far side, a grey haired gentlemen in a dark pinstriped suit stared coldly at him, his eyes strangely magnified by rectangular lenses suspended from either side his nose.
“Come, sit.” His voice crackled with impatience. Stone stepped from the lift, and crossed the room to the chair, noting the lack of retort as his boots impacted the floor.
The desk was bare save for an alloy ingot, the word ‘Director’ etched into it’s long face. Stone slipped into the vacant seat, feeling rich animal hide stretch beneath him, and sensed the chromed alloy tube frame re-tension itself to accommodate his considerable bulk.
“Director.” Stone eyed the man suspiciously across the dull surface of the desk “I guess you’d be the C.O. then?”
“I’ll not waste your time or mine, Mr. Stone. I am the only man you need to concern yourself with.” The Director leaned forward, steepled his fingers and propped his elbows up on the desk. He spoke with obvious purpose, enunciating each word carefully.
“You’re a man with skills Mr. Stone, your military and public service exploits have not gone without notice, which is what has brought us together today.” The tone was factual, not conversational. “Your talents are being wasted, and we have a want for men with your potential within our group. We prefer to recruit post-military service personnel, as you are as a group far easier to augment with training, and upgrading wetware is much more expedient than installing it and waiting for the development of adequate proficiency. We can offer you significant expansion of your capabilities, and in return you will be indentured to us for a period, reporting solely and directly to me.”
Something about this man wasn’t right, and on a whim, Stone leaned forward and abruptly severed the hardlink to his retinal-implant. The usual overlay of information disappeared, environmental data no longer littered his vision, and the room softened and the shadows deepened, no longer digitally enhanced. For a fraction of a second, he could have sworn he was alone in the room, until he blinked, and found the figure still before him, no longer haloed in a heat signature, and now clearly amused.
“Mr. Stone, you’ll find that your sense of reality and ours differs on many levels.” The Director sat back in his chair, smiling. “You’ll also find that I don’t need your archaic hard links to get inside your head.”
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | Jan 29, 2007 | Story |
Author : Daniel Nugent
The stars shone coldly through the solar plane of the binary system XJ-22V. At a point 100,000 kilometers away from the lone planet in the system, space began to warp itself in such a way that if you looked at it, you would vomit. Which is what the grey, blast-marked ship resembled as it was ejected from the cross-dimensional tear.
A moment elapsed and the ship’s antimatter annihilation engines came to life, hurtling towards the gravity well of the planet. As it breached the atmosphere, its hull, bristling with menacing tubes began to glow with friction. By the time the ship slammed to an abrupt stop 20,000 meters above the surface of the planet its skin was glowing white hot. Again a pause of but a moment and the ship shot off again, slower than before, but still leading an immense sonic boom through the acidic atmosphere.
As the ship slowed, now a mere 500 meters above the surface, the belly of the half flattened, convex hull split and a series of electric eyes and sensory apparatus emerged. They picked apart the bizarre, slooping alien flora and disfigured landscape atom by atom, searching for the ship’s destination. The olfactory boom picked up a chemical signature that matched the designated profile. All the eyes swiveled in the direction that the scent had come from and pinpointed the origin. The craft’s organelles retracted and its belly sealed again.
The ship maneuvered to the destination and again dropped like a rock, this time with landing pads extended. The ship didn’t slam, so much as pat the ground. Even as it was settling into the marshy earth, a circular airlock on its side swiveled and hissed as atmosphere escaped.
A biped in a khaki colored suit that made him look like a scarab emerged from the portal and mounted a ladder leading to the ground, a boxy kit on his back. After jumping off the last rung, he looked at a panel on his wrist and walked up to the precipice of a small cliff, his suit trailing noxious gases as the atmosphere slowly dissolved it.
Looking down into the pit below, he saw what he was there for: A massive, black-green, tentacled figure, shiny and oozing. He flipped on his suit’s external speaker and said loudly, “Hi, I’ve got a package for a Mister Xelquarkle?â€
“I’m him,†said the hideous terror from beyond the stars, with a timbre in its voice that could curdle milk.
“Okay, I’ll just need you to sign here,†said the man, extending a pad and a stylus. Two tentacles grabbed them and scribbled a tainted symbology upon the pad, which promptly melted.
“Oh, sorry…â€
“Nah, don’t worry, that’s the third one that’s done that this week. Here’s your package.â€
“Thank you!â€
“Have a nice day.â€
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | Dec 2, 2006 | Story |
Author : Curtis C. Chen
The first crystal fell on Los Angeles in the middle of rush hour, killing thirty-two people. Caltrans spent an hour trying to move the enormous mass before it drilled itself into the ground and disappeared.
Two hours later, another crystal splashed into the Pacific Ocean. The Navy sent a submarine to track it, but they couldn’t go deep enough. Three hours after that, another one hit the Pacific. Then a fourth crystal struck the ocean south of Japan, flooding the coast.
Someone noticed that all four impacts had occurred on the same line of latitude, proceeding west. Governments evacuated cities while the bombardment continued, every three hours, like clockwork: China, Iraq, Algeria, the Atlantic Ocean, South Carolina. Then the tenth crystal impacted off the coast of Mexico. They were moving south.
NASA triangulated the origin of the crystals to a point outside the Moon’s orbit. Observatories all over the planet turned their lenses that way, but saw nothing. The ship was too small to be visible at that range.
We had no vessels that could reach that far. All we could do was evacuate, and attempt to study the crystals, which we were so far unable to halt or slow as they burrowed underground.
Five days later, the last of the crystals fell into the Pacific, west of central Peru. There were now one hundred and eight crystals embedded deep in the Earth, arranged in a precise grid circling the equatorial region of our planet. The aliens had parked their ship in space and let Earth rotate each target into position for them.
Eight different research teams had crawled down the crystal tunnels. Two teams were broadcasting live video when the crystals began burning. Again, we could only watch, helpless.
The world burned for nearly a year. Most of the plant and animal life died within the first day. The crystals weren’t just raising the temperature– they were also causing chemical changes, using the planet as raw material to terraform itself.
The aliens waited a decade before landing, to let their new vegetation and prey animals grow. The few humans who had managed to survive, in Antarctica and other frozen places, were slowly suffocated by the toxic atmosphere. We mourned them, but only briefly. We still have work to do.
The crystal fire had killed our bodies, but freed our minds– some say souls, or spirits. We don’t entirely understand it, but we know that we’re still here. We can see everything. And we can do things.
We watched the aliens land, and sent scouts to verify that they couldn’t sense us. Creating six billion angry ghosts had not been part of their invasion plan.
They use electronics, just as we did, and we’ve found that our incorporeal forms can directly affect electrical systems. A million physicists, no longer restrained by language barriers, are devising a plan to sabotage whatever the aliens do next.
We’re betting that they won’t want to live on a haunted planet.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | Nov 26, 2006 | Story |
Author : James Mallek
It was with a running leap that he finally brought himself to do it. John hurled himself off the top of the eighty-story Hertz Building.
5 seconds of free fall before he righted himself, face down, parallel to the ground.
Terminal velocity achieved, no more acceleration. Immediately reversing his acceleration would splatter his guts against the inside of his suit. A twitch of his calf ignited the chemical rockets sticking out of his ankles. Horizontal velocity increasing, thus a complete increase of net velocity.
“Shut up Computer.”
The suits A.I. promptly stopped giving a narration of his actions.
Spreading his arms granted lift, and he swung gently upward between the towering skyscrapers. An optimal state of powered flight had been achieved.
“Damnit Computer I told you to shut it!”
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
