by submission | Apr 24, 2011 | Story
Author : Ian Eller
People said that the house was haunted. It sat alone along the broken asphalt road surrounded by parched fields feebly overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. It was a small house: one story, with a covered porch and attached one car garage. The house would have seemed perfectly at home in one of the subdivisions, just another dilapidated and empty structure on a sun-burnt, grassless lot, with broken windows and a collapsed roof inviting the elements inside.
But this house was not dilapidated. Its roof remained strong and its windows were unbroken. Nor was it on a dry, weeded patch like the others, but a vibrant green swatch, exactly square. A narrow concrete walk, unbroken by time, ran from the porch to the street. On one side of the walk was a mailbox atop a post, and on the other was a large square sign that, despite exposure, remained unfaded. The words on it were unknowable, but the image of the house and a smiling family were visceral.
Either the strange location or the unmolested state of repair of the house would have been enough to fuel suspicions and rumors about the place, but there was more. At night, when the world was dark save for campfires and the rare battery powered lamp, the house was aglow. Some swore they could sometimes see a shadow move behind the drawn shades.
Across the street from the house was a deep drainage ditch, bone dry and carpetted with long dead reeds. Within, pressed against the dirt wall, Wallace and Adrian glowered at one another.
“Well, go on then, if you’re so smart,” snarled Wallace. He was big for ten, with a meaty head and hands, but covered in dirt and pallid from malnourishment.
Adrian, who was smaller than Wallace and no cleaner nor better fed, snarled right back. “I will, I will! Get off!”
The sun was lowering in the west behind the mountains. Dusk stretched across the land and when it touched the house, there was a brief flickering from within, then a soft, cold glow.
Adrian swallowed hard.
“You’re chicken,” Wallace said quietly.
“I’m not chicken!” hissed Adrian. With a courage fueled by boyish pride that even war, death, famine and pestilence combined could not extinguish, Adrian pulled himself over the berm and onto the cracked asphalt.
Wallace opened his mouth to heckle Adrian again, but found his mouth too dry and his chest too tight. A wheezing, “Go!” was all he managed.
Adrian moved uncertainly across the street, one step then two and three. When he reached the center of the road, where the dashed yellow line was just barely visible, a light above the porch blinked into existence. Behind him, Wallace squealed and dove into the ditch. Adrian steeled himself and crossed the street.
Finally Adrian stood before the walkway. Slowly, his eyes never leaving the from door, he reached out and opened the mail box. Bright lights on either side of the front door came to life and a voice, tinny and distant, spoke from within the mail box.
“Welcome to the House of Tomorrow! Please come in and see what the future brings!”
He heard Wallace yelp and then bolt down the ditch.
Again, the tinny voice said, “Welcome to the House of Tomorrow! Please come in and see what the future brings!”
Adrian thought of Wallace, running for their burrow, digging for grubs to eat, crying late into the night.
He stepped forward onto the walk. The door of the house opened with a whisper.
Adrian went in, to see what the future would bring.
by submission | Apr 23, 2011 | Story
Author : Robert Sooter
The captain watched from around the corner as his small crew nudged the sleeping form with their brooms, utility poles, and various other implements as gently as they could. As captain he certainly couldn’t openly condone such behavior, especially towards a new crew member, but that didn’t make it any less funny. The trip was long and there were stretches with not much to do. Picking on the noobs before they really got their legs under them was—well, it was fun.
Assuring himself that he hadn’t been noticed, the captain quietly drifted away from the scene, chuckling to himself.
Satisfied with their work, the crew quietly whispered across the room at each other debating how to wake their sleeping victim. The debate settled down, and the first mate quietly counted down, “3, 2, 1.”
“Alien attack!!!” the crew screamed all together and the sleeping figure floating in the center of the room came instantly awake, flailing and twisting as his muscle memory tried to use the gravitational field he wasn’t in to spring from his bed.
After a few seconds of this awkward zero-gee ballet the young midshipmen calmed down a bit, and looked around. His flapping had imparted a slight momentum and he spun slowly in place. A quick look around reveled his full predicament, zero-gee, nothing within reach, and, thanks to the careful efforts of his shipmates, zero relative velocity. He was stuck.
“Aw, come on guys! This isn’t funny. How the hell am I supposed to get out of here?”
“Oh, come now, midshipman. It’s not that hard to figure out,” the first mate intoned solemnly. “We’ll be back in a few hours to check on your progress.”
Laughing and kidding one another, the crew drifted off to their various neglected duties leaving the poor man drifting alone. Sullenly, he floated there, his small spin leaving him with a constantly changing view of the same scenery. It reminded him of a road trip he’d taken with his family, driving through the endlessly repeating fields of Nebraska. A few moments thought had lead him to the conclusion that he would be able to claw his way to a wall by “swimming” through the air for a few hours. And he knew that’s what they thought he would do so they could come back every once in a while and laugh at his nearly futile flailing.
This would not do. So he floated and he thought, noting the occasional disappointed crew mate sneaking a peek. Eventually, he started to smile to himself. He floated, still and calm, exhaling in one direction, turning his head and inhaling in the other, imparting a tiny change to his relative velocity with each breath.
by submission | Apr 22, 2011 | Story
Author : Wasco Shafter
“Thirty minutes until heart failure” chirps a voice in Mark’s head. He flips through the internal photographs on his heads-up display, but there’s nothing new there. His heart is a confused, rotting lump of electrified meat rattling his ribcage. Five minutes has not done much to change this.
Beyond his display, surgeons twiddle their scalpels. Mark can see one chain-smoking on the observation deck. The surgeon closest to him waves a breathing mask in his face. Mark shakes his head, then returns to the medical feed on his earpiece:
vaccine for brain flu … cure for cushing’s disease … bionic arm … Ping!
“TOKYO: NEW PROSTHETIC HEART OPERATES AT 10X EFFICIENCY”
He drags the figures around in his mind. Three minutes for the 3D printer to assemble one, twelve minutes to do the surgery, fifteen minutes to play with.
“I can wait.”
The surgeons throw up their hands and sub-vocalize queries into their own earpieces. The pieces obediently sift through the sum total of human knowledge, aggregate relevant data into feeds, whisper the results into their ears. They listen to baseball scores, celebrity gossip, the whereabouts of their spouses. Mark listens to the steady march of biomedical research:
cure for anorexia … vaccine for hopelessness … bionic eye… Ping!
“Twenty minutes until heart failure.” The surgeon in the observation deck puts out his cigarette. He moves his lips, and his earpiece’s sensor reads them. Mark hears,
“Ready?”
“I can wait,” he replies.
The surgeon digs around for a lighter. “You’re really letting this go down to the wire, guy.”
“The wire keeps moving. Got a ping just now tells me a new type of heart takes half the time to install.”
“Great,” Says the surgeon, “Get it. We’ll have you out of here in nine minutes.”
On the operating table, Mark shakes his head. “I don’t want that heart. I want the time its existence gives me. Can’t afford to get surgery, just to have a better heart come out fifteen minutes later.“
Mark sets his earpiece to ignore the surgeon and focuses again on the medical feeds:
cure for addiction … vaccine against starvation … bionic breasts … Ping!
“Fifteen minutes until heart failure.” Six minutes left to find a better heart. Information pours into Mark’s skull through his ears, his eyes. He mutes his death-clock, places it in the corner of his display instead. Eleven minutes, twenty seconds. Scripts comb the torrent, highlighting breakthroughs of tangential interest:
cure for heartlessness … vaccine for heartworm … bionic blood … Ping!
“3-D PRINTER SOFTWARE UPGRADE. PRINTING TIME REDUCED TO THIRTY SECONDS.”
He teaches a widget to calculate the time until his point of no return, places that countdown directly beneath the death clock. Two minutes, forty seconds.
He sees the mirrored image of his death-clock on the surgeons’ displays.
cure for common cold … vaccine for impure thoughts … bionic hair …
Nothing.
Thirty seconds. The surgeon with the breathing mask moves in. Mark flails his arms. He can’t speak, but his earpiece reads his lips:
“NO! NOT YET!”
Ten seconds until point of no return. One. Negative five. Mark doubles the breadth of his searches, combs four datastreams at once. The surgeons solemnly disconnect from his feed one by one, and file out of the room. The surgeon on the observation deck crushes out his cigarette, and then he too leaves.
And four minutes later, when Mark finds a new prosthetic heart in Beijing that operates at 100x normal efficiency, and can be easily installed in the time he has left, there is no one to do the surgery.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Apr 21, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
The skiff shot swiftly across the calm waters of the harbour as if pushed by a giant hand. A young woman, her thick red hair flying wildly in the wind, sat in the stern manning the tiller. Around the little craft, pacific striped dolphins danced. Blissfully lost in the enveloping sweep of the moment, she was shocked back to the present by the subtle buzzing of her iPlant.
She subvoked the ‘plants menu which appeared to her eyes to flutter against the saffron sail. The call was priority from Confed command. “Shit,” she muttered, “not even one fucking hour of peace.” Reaching up to her right ear she pulled away a lock of crimson hair… and as she pulled the lead of the Sony DreamMan from behind her right ear, the dismal reality of her berth congealed around her.
“Murphy here. What is it?”
Only appearing in her brain, but to her perception, materializing before her was a tall broad shouldered man with close cropped hair wearing the uniform of a Marine brigadier general. “IT, is your DIVISIONAL COMMANDER, Captain Murphy.”
Instantly she snapped to. “Sir, sorry Sir, I just thought, I had no idea Sir, I…”
“Never mind. Our base on Pearl was bombed. It’s gone. O’ahu is gone for that matter.”
“Sir I don’t understand. What is going on?”
“The Asiatics. They violated the Earth Non-Aggression Treaty. They brought the fight to Earth.”
“Sir, I am afraid I still don’t understand.”
“You have the captured yacht of Hikachi Muromoto in tow, correct?”
“Yes sir. I am to escort the defence minister, his staff, and the yacht’s crew to the detention centre on Ganymede for interrogation.”
“Captain, destroy that ship.”
“But Sir, they are just unarmed civilians.”
“CAPTAIN! DESTROY THAT SHIP AT ONCE!”
“Aye aye, Sir.”
Captain Adelaide Murphy muted the neural connect. “Bridge,” she called, opening a secondary connect, “Cut the yacht free. When she reaches 300 kilometres fire one salvo singularity torpedoes. Maximum spread.”
“Yes Sir.”
She pulled up her main feed. “Sir, I…”
“I heard Captain, I just hope that…”
At that moment, the reaction drive motors of the Asiatic Alliance yacht, Divine Wind, went critical. Her hull breached and washed the Confederate battle cruiser NCS Juarez, and her crew of six hundred in the warming glow of white thermonuclear fire.
by submission | Apr 20, 2011 | Story
Author : Clint Wilson
Even though the thing had now had a couple of weeks to absorb our language I didn’t really think it could understand me, but all the same I still uttered the pre-scripted line.
“Living Being… I address you as a devoted protector of the Terran empire. Know now by proof of this official proclamation, that I have one duty and one duty alone.”
I absent-mindedly massaged the butt end of my still holstered but ready and deadly razer.
“I am to keep an ever-watchful eye as you interact with my fellow Terrans, and should you ever once make any move that I perceive as threatening in the slightest, it is my sworn duty to immediately exterminate you at will and without prejudice. You have been fairly warned.”
The thing was squat and wide, with rough grey skin as tough as rock. But it also had surprisingly hominoid features, two binocular yellow eyes, quite ape-like indeed. It probably stood straight up half a meter shorter than me, but was easily twice my mass.
And what then was its preposterous response to my official yet ludicrous proclamation? I swear to god the thing actually smiled at me.
Still I have never once left my post. I was raised for this position in the empire. I’ve spent every waking minute of every single day with this seemingly somewhat intelligent alien up until now. I have gotten to know it, even developed a respectful friendship with it I guess you could say.
But over the last two and a half years I have never once broken protocol. I go where it goes. I sleep when it sleeps. I have never once turned my back on it as scientists and business magnates alike cajole and frolic with the happy-go-lucky beast. And even though it is officially named, Specimen 3249A, we affectionately call it Clyde.
Yet as always my duty remains the same. I stand at the ready; hand never far from the handle of my razer. I shall never relax my attention.
And as I stand here in the new solarium with its variety of alien trees and foliage I can’t help but let my mind wander to all the happy times I have experienced thus far keeping guard over Clyde, as he readily explores his new expensively sculpted world.
And it is in that exact same moment that I realize in sudden and utter defeat that I have let my guard down.
I had always suspected that Clyde was more intelligent than he had let on to be… but also always remained optimistic that all of his mysterious idiosyncrasies were part of some sort of harbored wisdom reserved for our eventual discovery.
But alas I failed to recognize what I have always been so extensively trained to spot; the telltale signature of alien clandestine maneuvers afoot. In other words, the unexpected.
So what an opportunity for him in this lovely garden paradise, to take final advantage of my failure to adhere to my duty as a protector of the all mighty Terran empire.
I feel a warm breeze caress my face as Clyde drops down on me from the foliage above. The last two words I ever vocalize are, “Oh shit,” as, in an instant, a set of claws not unlike a panther’s, tear my throat to ribbons.
