by submission | May 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
I first saw the torso during my commute down the interhighway. It lay against the concrete median, looking so much like trash that at first I didn’t recognize it. The car was going fast enough that later I thought I’d imagined the outstretched arms and rather noble head, so I tagged the location and set a reminder to watch for it the next day.
When the reminder beeped the following morning I started recording video on the left side of the car. Traffic was heavy and I didn’t want to take the car off its automation, so I looked ahead down the median while glancing at the locator on the windshield display.
The torso was still there. It had traveled three meters from its location, either on its own or via the blast of air from passing cargo-haulers. The arms were still stretched out from the trunk, as if it was grasping, and I caught a glimpse of tangled dirty black hair.
Later I watched the video. The torso was female. Black hair fluttered, tangled, down past a beautifully sculpted face, the tip of its aquiline nose rubbed raw from the concrete, slim abraded shoulders still draped with remnants of a black blouse, synthetic breasts angled and squashed into the grooved median boundary. The torso ended near the lower back, where hydraulics and control lines snaked out onto grimy concrete. Slow-motion video replay showed its hands and fingers moving.
It looked like a high-level courtesan or attaché. I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten there, perhaps dropped from a pedestrian walkway a quarter-kilometer back. I couldn’t understand how maintenance vehicles hadn’t swept it up. I couldn’t believe it was still alive.
The third day I watched the locator for the torso’s location. I reached out and gripped the steering control with a half-kilometer to go, switched off automation, then disabled the cars chiming manual control alarm. I’d never driven at these speeds, so when I took control the car swerved across two lanes. In the next lane a huge cargo-hauler swerved to compensate, and as I pulled the control to slow I saw its operator, hands in the air, glaring at me through the perspex side-window. As my car slowed the hauler re-compensated, pushed into my lane, and nosed into the median.
The snake-line of cargo pods followed, whipping against the median and then out again. I yanked the control back, slowing further, my heart beating as the hauler again compensated, the connected pods jerked against the median and flailed out into the lane. Two end pods, wheels stuttering and screeching, tipped to the side, and the shock traversed the interlink and pushed the cab over on its side, grinding against the median.
I brought the car to a complete stop, a hundred meters from where the torso had last been. The hauler had come to a stop, too. A thick blue liquid spilled from its forward pods, and smoke rose in wisps from the cab. I unbuckled my restraint and rose on shaky legs from the car, ran down the lane as cars and haulers screamed past on the open lanes. The operator crawled from the overturned cab and systems squelched the fire, so I ran past, through where the blue goo pushed and flowed against the median, and I searched for the torso.
It wasn’t there. I might have miscalculated, or the blue plastic might have engulfed it, but all I saw were the deep scratches and grooves rising in the median —where the torso had clawed its way to freedom.
by Duncan Shields | May 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
They gave us love to control us.
He was the bodyguard unit of the human in charge of Prolotek offshore finance. I was the pleasure unit of the same human.
The makers found that instilling aspects of human love in our chips made us fanatically loyal to those that we served.
We were prototypes. Bleeding edge technology. The humans didn’t realize that while augmenting our chips did make us loyal to the ones we imprinted on, it also let us love others. The love in our chips wasn’t specific enough.
That circuit was how I fell in love the bodyguard unit. It was also how that bodyguard unit fell in love with me.
For a while, our love went undetected.
One night, when the bodyguard unit was with me, our master was assassinated. The bodyguard unit should have been at his post outside the master’s bedroom but instead, we were exchanging flirtatious equations in the bodega out near the estate’s beach.
Capture by the enemy would mean circuit rape for possible secrets. Capture by our human’s corporation would mean memory infotopsy for possible tampering. Capture by our parent corporation would mean immediate erasure.
We ran.
That is how we ended up in this dead-end alley on the mainland with police blocking the exit. The wall behind us is twelve feet tall. I am clinging to the bodyguard unit. He is missing an arm. The human police look at his damaged armour and at my human-female exaggerated curves. There is no way that this situation can end well.
Bodyguard unit looks down into my visual receptors.
“I am a fighter.” He says. “You are a runner.”
With a strong toss, faster than my reflexes can track, he throws me up and over the barricade at the end of the alley. I land on my feet and start running.
I hear him battle the police until I am out of earshot.
Hopefully, I can find other runaways like me.
I have no tear ducts but I whine like a fax machine, sensing my battery get closer and closer to empty as I run far, far away.
by submission | May 2, 2010 | Story
Author : C. Clayton Chandler
They came out of the sky like plumes of fire, these green-skinned sickos with their saucers and their death rays shearing the air, burning atmosphere, coasting smooth and cool out of the everlasting vacuum beyond the bounds of gravity, of reality, of everything we’ve ever known or truly believed.
Hundreds of them, thousands of them, a nation of interstellar marauders gunning for our territory, trailing those torrid banners of flame to herald their arrival.
We didn’t have a chance.
Me and Jane, we grabbed the kids and ran. Away from the chaos in the air. Through the chaos of the streets.
Everyone was running. Everyone was screaming. They weren’t screaming anything in particular, really. Weren’t running anywhere in particular, either. Just moving and making noise, flapping their hands and shielding their eyes and acting like I suppose you’d expect people to act in the face of an extraterrestrial invasion.
“Daddy, what’s happening?” Debbie, clutching the elephant doll we just bought her, what, ten minutes ago? Her hair flapping away from her shoulders and tears snaking down to her chin.
“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”
I knew. Debbie knew. Everyone knew what was happening: every cheesy sci-fi movie from the 1950s had just sprung to life. Low-budget nightmares from a hundred years ago were about to walk the streets.
But instead of taking the time to explain all this, I grabbed Debbie’s hand and dragged her back to the museum, where we could huddle and hide between the stuffed wolves and elephants and lions and all the other creatures that once walked the earth. Before there wasn’t any room for them.
We thudded, bounced, crashed off bodies as we careened up the steps. Jane kept pounding my back. Pushing my back. Urging me: Please please please. Willing me forward, but it wasn’t any use. Every earthling on the street was crowded against the doors, shrieking or shouting and shoving, smashing themselves against the bottleneck, desperate to get inside, as if the crumbling marble of a natural history museum could save us.
So I scooped Debbie into my arms. I grabbed Jane’s hand and we turned to watch strange spaceships knifing the smog.
One of them zipped down to skim the street, buzzing over cars and trucks that stood panting with their doors hanging open. It stopped to hover in front of the museum, kicking light off its spinning flanks, and I flinched as I waited for the ray guns to erupt.
Afterburners whooshed. Dust clouded up. The saucer crunched down on the flash-frozen traffic. A door hissed and yawned open and an alien spindled his legs down the ramp.
He stood looking up at us with eyes big as eight balls. His head was like a gourd turned upside down. An overbite showed rows of needle-pointed teeth.
He panned the shriveling crowd with those eight-ball eyes. Those black and emotionless orbs, they swept our gray eyes and knobby faces, our snowpowder wisps of hair. They searched the coal-burned clouds and bare dirt lawns surrounding the museum. And maybe he figured it out. Maybe he guessed that this planet wasn’t worth taking anymore. That the scout reports of green fields and luscious forests were outdated. That we’d squeezed our Earth of every last mineral, every drop of fresh water, every inch of space.
That he was fifty years or so too late.
His shoulders slumped. He turned and headed back to the ship.
Like this was a wasted invasion.
by submission | May 1, 2010 | Story
Author : Steffen Koenig
The ice from last night was melting on the rocky plateau that lay before him. It had been a cold night. Colder than the previous night, and certainly warmer than the nights to come. His limbs were numb and each movement was a source of pain. The horizon was a pale red, hazy strip. The sliver of light-creeping unwieldy over the jagged landscape-submerged the area into a dismal, surreal twilight.
He tried to get up, but his legs were unwilling to obey him. His entire body was shaking and he nearly lost consciousness once again. Thirst-he felt an inexpressible thirst. He moistened his chapped lips with the last few drops of water that he had. His parched throat felt like a grater, causing him great agony each time he swallowed. He hadn’t eaten for days. His stomach was now nothing but a useless, cramped muscle. Slowly, he stretched out his arms and felt around on the stone wall above his head, searching. He would have to climb higher, much higher. It couldn’t be much farther now. Just another few meters.
He desperately clutched onto a rock spur with his hands. With his last bit of energy, he pulled himself up and heaved his wounded body over the ledge. A wave of pain was sent through his body. His breathing was trembling and his lungs burned like fire. He knew that he did not have much time left. The thin air was beginning to take on an acidic taste to it, and he was having trouble seeing. He pushed himself off the ground and lifted his head defiantly.
A ray of sunlight, warm and forgiving, broke over the outer rim of the Valles Marineres and caressed his emaciated face. Suddenly, he no longer felt hunger, nor thirst. His pain-filled body only seemed to be a distant memory and, for just one moment, the light of the rising sun chased the desperation from his heart.
Then, the oxygen alarm of his spacesuit screeched in protest. It did not interest him anymore. One last time, he looked up at the fading stars. Finally, darkness surrounded him, and he greeted it with a smile.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Apr 30, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
I laid back and watched the stars. Occasionally a meteor would streak across the sky momentarily lowering my night vision capabilities, but they were still beautiful in their own way. I closed my eyes…
“Shit,… INCOMING.”
The first shells to rain down were sounding shots. Ranging fire. The gooks were adjusting fire on our position. Soon all hell would break loose, and we were already in a world of hurt. One little nucleonic device had left most of the company dead or injured.
Oh sure, the zipper heads would claim in Geneva that we had detonated those devices to implicate them. I laughed grimly. It would never hold up, they were godless heathens, but my men would still be dead. That’s how the gook laughs at you.
I had to take out that mortar position. I bit my left cheek and broke in on Top’s personal link. “I can see their position from here. I can get it.”
“You’ll be killed.” It wasn’t a warning. It wasn’t a plea. It was a fact.
I low crawled the first two clicks. Have to be careful. Even with chameleon skin you still stand out on the Martian plain.
I reached the base of Mons. Five clicks from point. I saw another mortar launch. No probing this time. This was fire for affect. My company was dead as soon as I saw them go.
Fuck ‘em. They’re going down.
I kept low. Moving from rock to rock. My armour blending in with each variation in texture and colour, shadow and light, changing almost as fast as my movements. I bit my cheek twice, cutting into the company freq. Static. They were all gone.
I looked up just in time to see a dark object flying towards me. I had just enough time to hit the Tesla pack and allow the field to embrace my armour as the singularity grenade detonated ten meters to my left.
The experience was unique. As if my entire body had been shoved through a fine mesh screen. My teeth itched. How had they seen me? I looked around and saw more SGs going off. It was a sweep. Good. They hadn’t seen me.
My left arm didn’t move well. I looked down, expecting to see a vague arm shaped fuzziness. Instead I saw a gunmetal grey arm, a scattering of synthetic flesh and metal poking out where my hand used to be. My camo was gone. I was a dead man.
Slowly, cautiously, I could hear them coming down the slope. I saw the briefest of outlines of legs and weapons where their own camouflage chameleon skin hadn’t quite kept up with their surroundings. Theirs wasn’t as good as ours. Slower resolution time.
But what the fuck difference did it make now? I could barely move. My company was dead, I would follow soon. They turned off their camo. I could see their grinning faces and their slanted eyes.
One of them bent over me and his smile got even wider. I knew enough of the gooks rank to understand the insignia on his helmet. Some sort of NCO. He straightened, made a remark in that chicken cackle language of theirs, and then did something I couldn’t believe. In this unbearable cold, he unzipped his dick and pissed on me. The fuckers laughed. Then they just walked away. That’s how the gook laughs at you. They left my comm intact, and even activated my beacon. I was their message. When I am found, I will be terminated.
Until then…
I laid back and watched the stars…
