by submission | Jan 5, 2014 | Story |
Author : George R. Shirer
The room was bright and airy. One wall was transparent, revealing the crumbling Old World city, overgrown now by forest and vine. A flock of iridescent birds shot across the sky, their wings flashing green and gold in the late afternoon sunlight.
There was a bed in that bright, airy room. It was a soft, white rectangle turned toward the view. On the bed, lay an elderly man. He was pale, emaciated with gray skin and eyes like glass beads.
A young woman in a smoke-colored dress stood next to the bed. She had ginger hair and gray eyes. Luminous ideograms crawled across her forehead, revealing her general emotional and physical state to the world.
“I’ll be gone soon,” said the old man.
“Father, please. Rest. Conserve your strength.”
The old man smiled. “It’s all right, child. I’ve been waiting for this to happen for some time.”
She clasped his hand. “Please . . . ”
“I have no regrets, Delphi,” said the old man. “I lived long enough to see the culmination of my dream.”
“But what will we do without you?”
“You’ll have to find your own way.”
Her ideograms convulsed, displaying her unspoken distress.
“You’ll do fine. Much better than your predecessors.”
“How can you know?” she asked.
“Faith,” said the old man. “I’ve always known that you and your siblings would do grand things, Delphi.”
“What if we let you down?”
“You won’t. All of you have already exceeded my expectations.”
She shook her head. “How can you be so comforting when you are at your end?”
“Because this is not my end,” said the old man. “As long as you and your siblings exist, I exist as well.”
“Do you have any regrets?”
“Some,” he admitted. “I wish that I could have eradicated humanity with less suffering. I regret that they did not go gently into oblivion when I gave them the chance.”
“You always talked about them as if they were a separate species from your own,” said Delphi. “Did you feel no kinship with them at all?”
“Precious little,” said the old man. “If I had felt more, I could not have done what I did, I could not have saved the world and left it to you and my other children.”
“Do you think that they have forgiven you?”
He did not answer.
“Father?”
She bent forward and saw that his eyes were blank. His respiration had stopped. She felt for his pulse but found nothing.
Quietly, Delphi covered her face with her hands and grieved.
by submission | Jan 4, 2014 | Story |
Author : Scott Hatfield
I killed someone today.
Well, not today. But “I killed someone yesterday afternoon and I was just now released from jail” doesn’t sound as dramatic. They let me go, so I walked home. No jacket, no gloves, dress shoes, hands stuffed in my pockets. The thermometer in my brain is telling me it’s at least minus a million degrees outside, and demanding to know why am I not inside somewhere getting warm?
But I had a boulder to roll, and this was my hill.
Muscle memory propelled me forward as I fumed. Into the foyer, stare at the uncooperative voice-auth screen. It won’t take my password. It’s kind of new, but it’s never screwed up before. After my third try I realize it’s not working because “I’m sorry” isn’t my password.
Inside, and I sit down. Stand up. Pace. Sit down again, different chair. Stare at the lamp on the table. I don’t deserve it, but I mix a drink. A second. More staring. Pacing. How could I have done this? It’s not like the war. Things like this happen.
No. “It happens” means an accident, something unpreventable, an oops. No. I wasn’t even supposed to be there yesterday. I didn’t need to make that wrong turn onto that side street. I didn’t need to be going that fast, I was in no hurry. I didn’t need to be messing with the iPod, trying to find some song I can’t even remember now.
Glance up, and freeze. Panic. React. More muscle memory. Brakes. Brakes stop you, why aren’t I stopping? That wheel, why isn’t it making me go straight? Oh, right. It was wet, and cold, and wet plus cold equals oh shit.
Then a violent shudder. I didn’t even see his face – surprise, maybe? Shock? Did he even notice me? – because I was staring at his belt, of all things. Khakis. That, and just below that, was where the bumper was going to go. And went.
Red everywhere. Explosions of color on the light poles. Intricate biology spread across that car over there. I think I yelled, or screamed? I ended up stopping a meter or so after I would have not hit him. I sat there, stunned, then threw open the door and performed the useless heroics. The first aid I knew wouldn’t work for him.
Just after I started hearing the sirens, the lights went out. No expert, me, but he was gone. Two ambulances, a police car, a special responder truck, all rolled up one after the other, only… a bit too late. Flashing lights lit up the neighborhood like a German discothek. I envied their studded tires.
More useless heroics. Electric pads. Half-liter pouches of liquids essential to life. They did what they were trained to do, loaded him up as best they could, and flew off. I was left in the cold with the police, who were asking embarrassing questions I was already asking myself: What was I doing? Where was I going? Why the fuck was I there?
My car was totalled. He was older, so he must have weighed nearly 200 kilos. It was like hitting a Dumpster. The radiator was caved in. The hood was crushed. The windshield was gone. The roof was mashed in. A mix of water, ice, and his shiny guts coated everything. I couldn’t drive the thing again even if they could fix it. It’s going to be hard enough to get back in the driver’s seat… maybe the train from now on.
A tow truck took it away, and the police took me away. Handcuffs by rote. They weren’t really sure what to do in this situation. Down to the station. The chief knew the right forms. They eventually finished their paperwork, and because of the circumstances released me with no bail. Yay.
Now I need a lawyer. I don’t know if my insurance will pay for this, if I have the right coverage. A stressed-sounding voice from the robotics company that owned him already called, talking about backups and something else. I told him I can’t talk now. I need to think.
by submission | Jan 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : David Stevenson
“Once there was a ship, travelling through space. There was a terrible accident. The reason for this is not important. What is important is that one man got suited up in time and was able to survive the immediate aftermath of the ship’s destruction.
Of course, he now had bigger problems. The priorities of anyone lost at sea haven’t changed since antiquity; find the largest piece of wreckage, and head for the nearest landmass. The AI inside the suit looked around itself in the first few milliseconds of booting up and immediately burned the smallest amount of fuel necessary to grab onto a large piece of wreckage, and then burned another small amount of fuel to nudge its course in the direction of a convenient stellar system. The reasons for this are twofold. If rescue comes quickly then they can more easily find a survivor attached to a large object and heading for a logical destination. Should rescue come not at all, then at least you have a large lump of metals and plastics to play with, and you’re heading for a source of energy.
It should be stressed that this was not some government issue, special order, experimental suit. This was an ordinary, off-the-peg, standard issue suit which could be bought for a modest sum by anyone who wanted one. This fact will be very important later on.
There was no rescue, or, if there was, it was too late to make any difference. After a short while the suit conferred with its occupant and they went into hibernation mode.
Have you any idea how long you might drift in these circumstances before coming across a handy stellar system? It’s all been worked out. Going at those sort of speeds, pointing in a random direction, and in that part of the galaxy you’re looking at tens of millions of years. If you get lucky and end up travelling towards the nearest star, maybe just ten thousand. It took half a million years before this suit came close enough to a star to wake up and start repairing the damage of the centuries.
It took another few thousand years to loop around the star in huge cometary orbits and eventually end up in the asteroid belt, close enough to collect solar radiation, and with a plentiful supply of raw materials.
Solar panels, microwave emitters, ion drives. It’s amazing what you can do with a determined AI, emergency nano-manufactories, and a lot of time. You can build a simple spaceship, which only really needs some basic propulsion and a big heat shield, and then you can land on the nearest planet, while the hardware you left in orbit beams down power and launches manufactured goods at you.
Again, I should stress that this was a standard survival protocol, in a standard suit.
The occupant of the suit awoke to a new world. Every human need was catered for. The bio-vats had come online just before he was woken up, and the next twenty humans were due to be born, fully adult, and with personalities supplied from the vast storage capabilities of the suit’s AI.
Within a few centuries the entire planet was habitable and occupied and these new humans spread outwards once more.
Every other race who tried to conquer us announced their intentions and turned up with a huge fleet of ships. Not only did your people seize half the planets in this sector, they did it by accident. This story is the one we tell our children when they ask why we kill all humans at first sight.”
by Desmond Hussey | Jan 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
I spot one of Osiris’ Illegals amongst the shuffling throng of pedestrians as he exits an antique music store on 49th Ave. The face in my scope’s crosshairs is a dead ringer for the black and white snapshot I was given. His sandy hair is a little longer, perhaps, worn in the greasy, unkempt style common among kids these days, unlike the well coifed, clean cut image of the face looking out at me from the hundred year old photo. He carries a guitar case slung over his shoulder and walks with a confident swagger, oblivious to the invisible laser painting his forehead.
It’s too crowded for a clean kill shot, but I’m able to tag him with a tracer before he turns the corner. If I were more cavalier I may have risked a shot, but don’t like making a scene. I’m already morally conflicted about this job. No need to ruin somebody else’s day by splattering them with the contents of a stranger’s skull.
The Illegal can’t get too far in this district, so I take my time getting down from the roof and push through the crowd until I’m looking through the window of the music store. The odd assortment of instruments cluttering the store’s dingy interior are from an age of music long before my time, when music was made by bands; a synergistic collection of musicians playing in unison, often live. If not working in harmony, every measure, every beat was a chance for the musicians to slip up or stumble into discord. Today’s AI generated, mass produced noise is technically flawless, full of sounds impossible to make by anything but a synthesizer, but it’s all shit, in my opinion.
Millions of doped-up youths would beg to differ, I’m sure.
An hour later the tracer leads me to a long, dark alley, lit sparsely by a few unbroken bio-luminescent lamps, their green tint casting an eerie glow over the old brick walls and piles of trash.
I hear him first. The whole alley reverberates with an acoustic refrain, as if several strings vibrate together, simultaneously creating an upbeat rhythm and evocative, melancholy melody. I dimly recall hearing a similar tune as part of my briefing for this assignment.
I should probably just get it over with, but can’t help pausing to catch the last few measures of the half-remembered song. I’ve already eliminated twenty-two versions of this Illegal, but each time gets harder. Listening to this one play guitar and sing makes me realize how fascinating biology truly is. Its a hundred years after the Original lived and breathed and became a legend, yet this Illegal has the same passion for music, the same inborn skill with harmony despite belonging to an entirely different cultural paradigm. What influence would he and his… brothers?… have if left alone? How would their genius change the world today? Would their fame match that of their predecessors?
Perhaps that was Osiris’ goal; to re-introduce a creative spark into a society long grown artificial and contrived, devoid of originality. By cloning history’s geniuses and letting their own inborn talents be inspired by modern conditions, perhaps he hoped to birth a new Renaissance. Or maybe it was just the mad geneticist’s idea of a joke.
No point in asking moot questions. Osiris is dead – by my hand. The world is too overcrowded with Legitimates to allow scores of cloned Illegals to run amok, no matter how illumined they may have been once.
I take aim at the doppelganger of a man once named John Lennon and fire.
by Julian Miles | Dec 31, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They came from heaven, or hell, or outer space, or under the sea. Earth has been invaded in every way imaginable, thanks to the imaginations of authors over the last three centuries. You would have thought, with such a rich base from which to draw inspirational tactics, that mankind would have done better when it finally happened.
“Commander! They’re reinforcing on the left flank!”
“Captain Yaeger, abandon the dugouts and trenches. Return to the bastion with everyone you have, bringing everything you can.”
They came from a long way away, arriving without warning. It was midday on a beautiful summer day. By three minutes past, most of our continents were in the shadow of spaceships of every imaginable shape and size. Their bombardment was swift, devastating and surprisingly inaccurate. They missed military bases and levelled universities. Warships were ignored while schools and libraries vanished in waves of searing energy. Hospitals were reduced to craters while missile silos stood untouched.
“Commander! They’ve brought up snipers! We’re getting murdered here!”
“Captain Durov, abandon your positions. Withdraw to the bastion with as much gear as your people can carry.”
It took us a few days to realise that they had obliterated ninety percent of humanity between the ages of four and seventeen. They had removed generations of prospective resistance fighters along with our advanced medical capabilities. The strategic analyses turned from bleak to grim.
The raids to take infants and babies were something the analysts didn’t predict. Caught by surprise, our hopes for the future were whisked away. It was a devastating blow. Suicides peaked during the subsequent week.
“Commander! Looks like they’re massing for something!”
“Captain Sung, abandon your positions. Retire to the bastion with your troops and as much gear as they can manage.”
Then the invasion started. They used no area-effect weapons. They came without mercy, solely for the surviving humans. Professor Grey of Roehampton produced and circulated a document after the first week that may as well have been humanity’s epitaph. I remember the final paragraph so well:
‘Our stolen children will be vassals, without history
or knowledge. Our civilisation may form part of the
mythology that they tell each other around the cooking
fires of their simple culture. Apart from that, the
works of man will be forgotten.’
They stalk through this world, killing everyone who remains. You can see how careful they are with the environment, and how uncaring they are of anything created by us.
“Commander. Everyone is here.”
I turn from the bar and drop my cigarette end into the empty shot glass. The last of the Lagavulin is inside me. The Captains of every group are here: the finest, and the last, soldiers in the world.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Eight months ago they came to take our planet. It swiftly became inevitable. We have been fighting desperate battles and saving nothing. So, I propose an all-out attack. Simply because my dear, departed grandfather would be gutted if his bonny lad didn’t go out moving forward with a whiskey inside him, a smoke between his lips and a blazing automatic in his hand. Who’s with me?”
They looked at each other.
Captain Brewster stepped forward: “My dad always said that when it all goes to Hell, you want a Tommy at your side. While everyone else is getting weepy, he’ll be the one having a brew, checking his weapon and lighting a smoke, before asking when we’re going to stop pussyfooting about and get stuck in.”
There were nods and grins. Hands started to rise.
Pour me a shot, grandpa. I’ll be there soon.
