by Duncan Shields | Aug 7, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
They stood on level sixteen of the meat building, waiting for their order of sharkbeef.
This vat boutique specialized in hybrid delicacies and Kay was hosting a birthday dinner party tonight. The invites and accepts scrolled across her vision as she looked down at her son. The store prided itself on having curious antique items for the customers to handle while they waited. He was engrossed in something.
“What are these?” posted Adam. He was six years old today. “They look ancient. What were they used for? They look heavy enough to be weapons.” He turned it over in his hands while his pupils irised wide, scanning through several spectra and mags to see if there was something deceptively complex under the surface.
There wasn’t. He was looking at a book. He’d never seen one before. He had yottabytes of information in his cranial cavity just like everyone else but like his parents always said “It’s about asking, not having.” He had perfectly decent search engines installed but like most children, he just wasn’t that curious about the past.
“It’s a book.” Kay said. “It’s how humans used to record information when we stored it externally. Sort of like a baby internet. You remember that from your history downloads?”
“Yes.” Adam lied. He never paid attention to his school feeds. There were so many other cool things happening with his friend’s challenges in the socials. Pretty Renee from crosstag was finally paying attention to his scores.
“I know you haven’t.” she said with a sigh. She remembered being so curious at his age and wondered why he wasn’t. She took the book and opened it. The title had rubbed off but she recorded the first few lines into her eyes. The results fluttered through. No exact matches. Must have been a small publishing run with little to no success. Looked like a collection of poetry. She scanned it in to the general knowledge Linksys, tagging ownership and viewing rights to see if there were any challenges. There weren’t. It must have been quite obscure.
“It was a painfully laborious process and in real-world costs, entire forests were given over to these methods. Businesses made money off of them. Government sponsored storage facilities kept entire buildings full of them.” She searched. “Ah. Libraries, they were called. Like our file systems.”
Adam was already bored. He hated shopping with his mother.
She went on. “It’s a form of meditation in some of the enclaves to read them. Taking in information that slowly is like eating a great meal over the course of days. Flashing a book in seconds still gives you the same comprehension but it’s not the same. Actually reading, using your meat mind, well, some of them say they feel connected to our ancestors by reading this way.”
She had to admit to herself that it sounded boring. But she’d never tried it. She turned it over in her hands like a curious animal inspecting a possible trap.
The shopkeeper came over with the sharkbeef. “Here you go, Miss. Creds received. Ah, I see you’ve found something interesting.” He said, friendly eyebrows waggling at the book.
“Thank you Jake. How much for this, uh, book?” she asked.
“Take it.” Jake replied. “Bring it back if you don’t like it.”
Adam sighed theatrically. Kay tucked the book into her bag.
“Okay, let’s go, kiddo. Your birthday dinner awaits. Thanks, Jake!” she said.
Tonight she would read in the bath like her grandmothers did. She was looking forward to it.
by submission | Aug 6, 2012 | Story |
Author : Kevin Crisp
The judge gave Rick several choices, of which the young men’s wilderness therapy program on an uncolonized but certified habitable world seemed the most palatable. He learned to pitch an atmosphere tent, tie a tourniquet and find cover from acid rain. He was light years away from his pregnant ex-girlfriend and any means to procure nervous system stimulants.
Rick stuck a forked stick in a hole in the ground until he felt a soft resistance and twisted it. It tangled firmly in the fur of a plump, rat-like thing, which he pulled squawking out of its burrow. He hit it on the head with a convenient rock, deftly skinned and gutted it, packed it in mud and lay it on the coals to bake until the flesh was tender and free of parasites.
Shawn, his assigned “buddy”, sat down on the rock beside him. “OK, your turn, the doc’s on the screen for you.”
Rick trudged between several tents and campfires to the therapy tent and sat in the folding chair in front of the over-sized two-way video monitor that made the tent feel cramped and claustrophobic. The jitter in the image and the echo in the sound reminded Rick just how much space separated him from his therapist.
“Ricky, my man! How ya’ doing?” the young doc said with overbearing enthusiasm. “How ya’ settling in?”
“Well, I feel more like a kid at summer camp than a juvenile delinquent undergoing state-mandated therapy.”
There was a pause during which the image was frozen. “And how’s your buddy working out?”
“Shawn? He’s okay. He snores. Say, doc, what’s the plan here?”
Pause. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, when do we get started with the therapy business? It’s been three weeks already, and we still haven’t–”
“I know, and you’ve already come a long ways! You’re learning to be self-sufficient, and you’re building confidence and making healthy friendships–”
“But shouldn’t I be lying on a couch and talking about my cold mother and my relationship problems and my anti-social acting out?”
Pause. “Absolutely! Talking is very important. What’s on your mind?”
“I — I don’t know. Shouldn’t you ask questions or something? I mean, that’s what all the other shrinks did.”
Pause. “And did that help?”
“No, but–”
Outside the tent, the camp rocked as a sonic boom split the air. Rick was familiar enough with the sound at this point to know that a supply rocket had just broken through the atmosphere and was streaking across the alien sky in a blazing arc of fire. Outside the tent, the other boys were hastily digging out their field glasses and compasses and estimating where the next week’s supplies would land.
“Sounds like we’re breaking camp again, doc.”
Pause. “Is that rocket landing already? Seems early; sorry we got cut short. We’ll touch base next week. I wanna hear all about that mother of yours, okay?”
Rick walked back over to the campfire and checked his dinner. “Looks like two days marches due east,” Shawn said watching the rocket.
“They really keep us on the move, don’t they?” Rick dragged the mud-caked rat-like thing off the coals with a stick, and began chipping away the baked mud with a knife. The meat looked tender and moist, but the smell was characteristically sour. “Shawn, are you getting better here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are you feeling — I don’t know — less depressed, angry, whatever since you got here?”
“Yeah, I think so. Don’t you?”
“Think things’ll be any different back at home?” The rat-like thing tasted better than it smelled.
by submission | Aug 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Aldous Mercer
It was a deathbed recantation. The Astronaut lay, sunken and frail amidst his bedclothes, as they set up their equipment. There was a window on the other side of the bed, framing a portion of the nearby mountain range.
“Beautiful view you’ve got,” said the man from NASA. “Peaceful.” Remote.
“We’re ready, sir,” said a technician.
Everyone took their places, duly time-stamped their notepads.
“I was mistaken,” began the Astronaut, age-mottled skin stretched tight over his hands as he gestured. “It was a late-stage booster shell. Couldn’t have been anything else.”
“That’s what you were told when you reported it,” said the NASA official, stern and somewhat smug.
The Astronaut nodded. “I’m sorry, Administrator, for all the embarrassment I caused the Agency. Convinced myself—wanted to convince you all.”
“Why?” Not publicity—the agency’s heroes had too much of that as it was.
The Astronaut was silent for a while. When he continued, his voice was quiet. “I saw auroras dropping like curtains of fire beneath my feet. A sunset, and a sunrise, every 90 minutes. More stars, Administrator, more stars than any human being has ever seen before. I touched the outer edges of what humanity found possible, and I found… that I couldn’t go further. I desperately wanted to believe that there was something more out there. That the threshold of our reach was not limited…”
When it was clear he wouldn’t say anything more—his water-pale gaze was fixed on some faraway memory—they gathered up their equipment and their papers, and respectfully let themselves out. The doors were left unlocked for the nursing service’s nightly visit.
The Astronaut lay on his bed till the long rays of the sun were angled low enough that they brushed the tops of the mountains in his window. Not the Ozarks, but they would do. The Astronaut nodded to himself.
“This will do.”
He expelled a breath. But before he could take another, his dulled—trained—hearing picked up the blue-shifting Doppler screech of an approaching ballistic. Confused, the Astronaut scrabbled weakly at the bed-sheet—the sound of a plane in a nosedive where there shouldn’t be a plane—automatically calculating descent rates, vectors.
He braced for impact.
Light bloomed, outside his window, scattering incoherently onto his upturned face, the creases of the sheet, the window-sill. But there was no impact. When the light faded, the Astronaut saw the burnished metallic lines of a cylinder—about 75 feet in length, impossibly wider than it was long—hovering a foot above the newly-laid sod in the backyard.
Then he heard the footsteps coming towards the bedroom.
—-
The Visitor, upon entering, found the Astronaut on the bed, wheezing with silent laughter.
“I swore, up and down, I’d never seen…” the Astronaut gestured towards the window. “Not a UFO nut. Not anymore.”
The Visitor’s head tilted to a side in amusement. “We are not gods, Commander, to require belief in order to justify our existence.” When the Astronaut shook his head, the visitor hesitated, then stepped forward. “My name is—”
“Could you speak up please?”
The Visitor raised his voice. “I wished to congratulate you on your iconic flight,” he said. “One test-pilot to another.”
The Astronaut squinted in the Visitor’s direction. “You were there.”
“In a ship,” said the Visitor. “Beside yours. We passed each other, in the eternal night.”
“A long time ago,” grunted the Astronaut. “Why are you here now?” A slight odor—half-absolved bitterness—clung to his last word.
The Visitor smiled. “I don’t suppose you could call it an abduction, per se. More like…an invitation…”
—
Author’s Note: “The threshold of our reach is written in neither support nor skepticism but love: of certain astronaut-stories that have a tendency to embarrass the agency.”
by submission | Aug 4, 2012 | Story |
Author : Chris Capps
She’s a shrewd old lady. She knows things. When she gave the Parch brothers the treasure map, she said the journey would be dangerous. She even asked them if they had twelve shooters and – more importantly – knew how to use them. When they assured her they had killed before, she nodded and handed it over.
The treasure itself was a relic of our planet’s past, back when the interstellar mining syndicate owned the rights to the massive thorium deposits wedged deep in the canyons. It had been this simple isotope that had justified years of terraforming and careful city building. And when it dried up, so did the supply runs. When that went, so did most of the decent people and a great many roughnecks like the Parch brothers had landed in what was left hoping to gain some windfall from the planet’s past.
And then there were the urban areas. Even folk fixing to end it all didn’t go to the cities.
Unfortunately for the Parch brothers, the treasure map led them directly to an abandoned greenhouse complex in a little town called Good Night Sunshine, named in its heyday because of the massive ore drilling complex one town over that stretched up nearly a half mile into the sky. The sun rarely peeked over into the town proper. Needless to say, the greenhouses had been retrofitted with indoor lights.
They set up camp in the artificial wilderness of one of the buildings.
They had already run into their share of bandits, so when the doors to the greenhouse opened and the Parch brothers saw a trio of rough looking thugs springing to get in at them, pistols in hand, it was a simple enough flash of lights before the victor was declared. The Parch brothers had added three more to their kill count.
The older of the two, Buck, walked over to the bodies to see if they had anything on them – no doubt stolen off of the decent folk. Buck hollered at his brother holding a closed fist around ninety-eight dollars in gold bullion. Not a bad claim, but pocket change compared to the wealth that awaited them if they found the treasure. While Buck was searching the bodies, the younger brother Ed said he wasn’t interested – said he had only “the big one” on his mind.
When Ed awoke, he found himself alone with the sound of rain pelting the glass windows all around him in the perpetual artificial sunlight of the greenhouse. When he went outside he found Buck’s footprints imprinted in the mud filling up with water leading back the way they came.
When he found Buck, he was outside the old lady’s house, gun in hand and murder in his eyes. He said he had found a familiar looking map on the bandits leading dangerously close to the trail they were on. He had a few questions for the old lady.
Ed, being the younger, smelled the rank of lies on his brother’s breath, and the two carried on from there yelling and spitting until someone -we don’t know who- raised a gun and they shot each other stone dead. I’d say that’s the closest anyone ever came to figuring the whole thing out.
The Parch brothers had ended each other, but I’ve got to hand it to them. Buck suspected something was amiss when he found that map. I can’t say I feel too bad, though. It takes a cold-hearted man to shoot his own brother.
She says she didn’t hear the gunshots. With the thunder carrying on that night the way it did I’m not surprised. She never even knew they’d come back for her until she found them both lying outside her front door. Maybe one of these days we’ll figure out what to do about the cities, but you know it’s a lot easier to walk around at night these days with all the rough and tumble folk out of the picture.
You see in this town we don’t hand out death warrants. We hand out treasure maps.
by submission | Aug 3, 2012 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
When man first delved into the depths of the sea, they discovered a teaming ecosystem like nothing they’d ever imagined. When he first ventured out into space, he found bright stellar formations in the midst of barren blackness. And when men finally learned how to venture into the very heart of a star, they discovered something they’d never thought possible. They discovered something new. A single particle, like nothing ever witnessed or theorized, glowing in an unknown color, humming with an unknown tune.
The Particle was all at once the most important discovery in the history of mankind, both aesthetically and scientifically captivating. People clamored to see it, traveling from across the globe for a chance to catch of glimpse of this new thing that scientists couldn’t explain. Many theorized that these particles could exist in the heart of the every star, that if we could only reach another solar system, then we could have two something new’s.
As belief in that theory spread, the people of Earth became unified in a way they hadn’t been in all of history. Economies boomed, international tensions eased, nearly every country on Earth with something valuable to offer took part in the interstellar project. Within fifty years we had reached Alpha Centauri, ready to delve within the depths of her central star to find another piece of heaven to bring home to Earth.
But there was nothing there. Nothing but hydrogen and helium, the most unextraordinary particles imaginable. So the world moved on to another star system, then another, and another. From star to star we traveled, searching for another taste of newness, and still we found nothing. Gradually the united Earth began to crumble. Our cooperation waned. Old feuds were reignited. And suddenly, without anyone realizing it, without anyone anticipating it, we each began to covet the Particle for ourselves.
The first bomb dropped without warning, a preemptive strike, followed immediately by the demand to give up the Particle. The following exchange of missiles devastated most of the northern hemisphere. Southern countries who had long been minor players in international politics suddenly became world leaders, their presidents and parliaments and dictators all promising the people one thing. Control of the Particle.
The wars went on for years. They are still going on today. As the current caretaker of the Particle, I’ve come to realize that this world deserves neither its beauty nor its wonder. I’ve decided that it’s time for the Particle to leave Earth. As my transport leaves the solar system, I pity the world I’ve left behind. They weren’t worthy. They never were. Their lust and greed and arrogance cost them their right to paradise. Maybe, when they reunite to pursue me and my treasure, they’ll at the very least spare themselves Armageddon.
As for me, I will hide quietly away in another star system, alone with my prize. This is really the only way it could have worked out. I am, after all, the only one who ever deserved the Particle’s majesty in the first place. Its beauty exists only for me. For me, and me alone.
