by Duncan Shields | Mar 17, 2015 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s a little ticklish when the needles go in but the anesthetic keeps her from moving. It keeps her laughing on the inside.
Grown from a vat of jaguar with a splash of greyhound and a swirl of human, she’s extremely thin and toothy. This is her last treatment before she’s shipped off to Overman Ranker’s Field Farms for training.
She’ll be part of an Assassin’s Guild nick-named The Circus. All of the killers are animal hybrids. The term ‘guild’ is a bit of a misnomer. ‘Kennel’ would be more accurate. The assassins are little more than happy pets that are conditioned to be stealthy and to kill without mercy.
An animal’s nose full of the scent from the victim’s clothing is much more efficient than a photograph/dossier when it comes to tracking a man down in the dark.
Tyrania is two years old. She’s either happy or in pain. No other emotions exist within her. The pain of punishment tells her what not to do. Right now, she’s happy. The spinal tap keeps her immobilized while the nanozomes do their knitting and pearling to the building blocks of her epidermis.
After training, she’ll be able to pass for human. The skeletal creature on the table with dark spots dotting the long, grey fur will become something more akin to human when the process is finished.
She’ll be killing in the higher classes. It’s the bear-and-croc mods that they send to the poor places.
Her long nails are retracted and painted a garish red. The newborn killers always choose cosmetics that look like blood on their nails and lips. It’s comforting to them. It’s frightening to see them smile in the mirror after their first reward of makeup. More often than not, they’ve smeared a line of lipstick around their lips. The eyes glass over with the dreams of blood as they tilt their head at their reflection.
They get trained to be human on the Field Farm. I mean, they get trained to kill people in any number of ways with the aid of mental downloads and grueling days of physical training but they’re also told how to act at the dinner table and how to keep a conversation going.
We teach them to be background. They’re expendable so there’s no exit routes planned when they’re sent on missions.
I miss the ones that don’t come back. I don’t like the ones that do. They change after a successful mission.
This one here, Tyrania, is looking straight up at the ceiling as I prepare the depilatory cream. I’m in her peripheral vision. I give her a wink to reassure her.
She smiles at me.
It’s a smile I see in my nightmares for years. I won’t do that again.
My team and I get to work making her as human as we can and I try not to catch her eye again.
by submission | Mar 16, 2015 | Story |
Author : Suzanne Borchers
“How long have we been out from Base surveying these idiotic planets?” Shar slapped a metallic cloth on the shielded wall to collect filings from her husband’s work on a port glass. “I’m ready to slurp down some authentic concoction while slouching on a nonmetallic stool.”
Shar waited for a response. She heard a grunt. “And I’m ready for a real conversation. I wish just for once you would answer me with words instead of guttural sounds. Can you do that?”
Shar waited for her husband’s answer. He had stood a bit behind her finishing up his repairs to the port glass on the ship. His silence made her swivel around to glare at him, but he wasn’t there. She was used to him ignoring her, but where could he go on a 10’ x 20’ ship?
“Herri?” Shar stepped around the enclosure to check the head. “Herri?” Not there, and he wasn’t in the galley kitchen, the bridge, engineering, or even nesting in the pull-down bed. “Herri?”
No need to panic. They were alone in the seventh quadrant except for that greenish planet they were surveying for a new colony. And it too was alone with no inhabitants. Nothing had pinged their lifeform meter. So he had to be in the ship, but where?
Moving again into the observation enclosure, she noticed the coverall pile on the floor under the port glass where he had been working. Kneeling next to them, she lifted the coveralls, gently stroking the material. Herri’s boots lay akimbo beneath them. “Herri?” she whispered.
A horrible impulse made her straighten up and press her nose against the port glass to examine the blackness outside their ship. What was that silhouetted between her and the bright green planet? “Herri!” A wail escaped her lips. She collapsed.
Questions beat an incessant rhythm on her mind–unanswerable questions. Why didn’t the airlock alarm sound? How did Herri leave the ship? Did the planet below have an unknown lifeform? How was Herri pulled off their ship? Why? Was she next? Shar listened to her shallow breathing and pumping heart. She had to get out of there!
But as she sat beneath the port glass hugging Herri’s coveralls, she knew her first duty.
She logged: plt 239 Not Suitable Quaranti…
by submission | Mar 15, 2015 | Story |
Author : Emily Stupar
I’m falling and I’m not sure when it started, or when it’s going to end. Although, I do have some theories.
Maybe I’m falling because I’m fulfilling a lifelong wish to go skydiving. There’s a bot instructor strapped to my back and all I can think is that I may as well have jumped out of a plane with a floppy disk in my hand for all the good it’ll do me.
Or maybe I’m a space explorer and I’m not falling but floating. Everyone is counting on me to get this sample so we’ll know if there’s any competition out there in the stars, or if it’s just us humans and whatever mindless bits of metal we scrap together.
Maybe I was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway and then I heard on the radio about that police officer who was slaughtered by a bot in his own home. Killed by his own property. And then I was so shocked by the sound of a human being siding with the tin can that I accidentally drove off into the ocean.
Maybe I jumped off the roof after finding my spouse with the android who was fixing our plumbing.
Or maybe it’s something a bit more metaphorical and I’m falling from grace. I’m falling out of favor with nature. Maybe I’m falling because the familiar ground has dropped out from beneath my feet one piece at a time, but so slowly that I just woke up one day and suddenly I didn’t recognize my own home anymore.
Maybe Mother Nature wasn’t my mother at all; she’s my landlady and she’s not happy that I’ve drifted so far from the terms of my lease. I’ve been evicted for allowing humans to push past the limit of what is good and natural, and now I’m falling headfirst onto the pavement.
Or maybe I know a secret about all these heaps of wires and electrical signals that are worming their way into every aspect of our lives. I see the true consequences of letting man think he is God, or letting a man-made machine think it could live. Maybe I know a vulnerable place and I have the materials to force the world to stop and see the truth. Maybe I’m falling because I strapped a bomb to my back and, next to all that delicate machinery, I launched myself into the air. For humanity.
I really can’t say for sure, but, as far as I know, I’m the only one whose falling. My entire race has lost their minds, opening their naïve hearts to the whispers of manipulative demons, and I’m not sure I have the stomach to watch. I’ve been falling ever since I realized I was the one who needed to save humans from themselves.
I’m falling and I just hope everyone is braced for my impact.
by submission | Mar 14, 2015 | Story |
Author : Leif Hansen
Terra didn’t laugh. Not because I pushed my joke too far, as was typical, but because she suddenly realized what I was.
Within the few seconds it took for me to deliver my puerile punchline, her mind had grasped the meaning of my eyes’ incautious flicker from blue to gold, and she was up and running, running as fast and far as her legs would take her. Yet it was futile, she had come too close and would soon feel what she only briefly saw.
With a few bounds of my augmented legs I easily caught her and, despite her loud protests, tagged the indentation on the back of her neck, transferrering power. “You’re IT!” I declared as we burst into a pile of posthuman giggles on the warm summer grass.
“I’ll catch you later” she said before tessering, her eyes flickering gold before burying themselves beneath a beguiling brown.
by Julian Miles | Mar 13, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Did you see them? Silver streaks through cumulus, probably an Andorini scout formation. It’s not like anyone here would recognise them.”
Officer Peters looked over at the shuffling, muttering figure. Taking in the irregular gait, the handful of carrier bags stuffed to overflowing with obscure things, the neck of a bottle protruding from the brown paper bag clenched in the other fist, he nodded sadly. Another crackpot left to wander the streets due to cuts in the mental health budget.
“Second stage flare this morning. Guess that’s when they gated in. How many more can they get through before someone notices?”
This one had been out for a while, given the dishevelled nature of his layered clothing. He’d give the shelter over on Pasadena a call.
As he reached for his radio, a cat yowled from nearby and he jumped at the sudden sound. Peering about for the enraged feline, he forgot all about making that call.
*
Officer Fuentes sighed. Another muttering loon on the loose. This one smelt like a pickled sewer, too.
“You stupid angshor, how could I see them? I’m on another continent!”
She shook her head. Just what she needed, a care-in-the-community failure right at the end of her shift. She checked her watch. Five minutes. Enough time to start the process.
“They’ll not notice until it’s way too late. We’ve known that for ages. Just keep moving so the volkfängers cannot get a line on us.”
Fuentes flipped through her notebook looking for the Church Homeless Programme’s number. It flipped past her searching eyes like it momentarily didn’t exist. With a sigh, she noted where she’d seen the derelict and headed for the station to clock out.
*
On a rooftop far away, something with stealthy gossamer wings and hungry red eyes sniffs the air and clicks mournfully at the waning moon. It will find the shuffling ones eventually. They cannot keep moving forever.
