by submission | Feb 12, 2016 | Story |
Author : Callum Wallace
They stepped into the city, ignoring the barrage of smells assaulting their nostrils.
People swam in and out of view, chatting animatedly, gracing the travellers with only the most cursory of glances.
The first Walker patted her Pair Mate gently on the shoulder, and spread out her hand.
“Welcome to the city, Akira. What do you think?”
Her partner looked around scornfully, his upper lip raised beneath the baby blue visor covering his eyes. He pulled his wide brimmed hat lower over his face.
“The sooner we finish, the better.”
She nodded her agreement, squeezing his shoulder, “Come, then. Let’s not dally.”
They strolled along, the crowd parting respectfully around them. Their oiled cloaks shone darkly, reflecting the myriad of buzzing, coloured lights around them.
She looked about her with similar scorn, judging the fools staring vapidly into their various screens, wishing fervently for the comfort of her book satchel, stashed safely outside of the city out of the reach of these troglodyte morons.
She laughed briefly, causing Akira to turn to her.
“What?”
She shrugged, “They have the audacity to call the areas outside of these prisons ‘The Wastes’. The irony tickled me, is all.”
Akira, not known for his humour, chuckled with her, this time patting her shoulder.
“Well Brenna, hopefully this will help fix their views.”
They moved further into the city, headed for the centre. When they arrived, they flashed their false credentials at the guards and asked for peace. The men nodded, grudgingly, and moved on, creating a cordon around the towering pillar that stood there.
This broadcast tower catered to every man, woman and child that lurked in this superficial pit, showering all within with a surfeit of luxury seldom seen outside: laziness.
People didn’t want for anything here, not for anything important.
Knowledge was dying here, killed off by the ease with which people could access it; nothing was learned here, but accessed, glanced at, and discarded callously.
The thought made Brenna feel sick; it clashed with everything within her, instilled there by the Order since her infancy.
The rebels entered the tower and rode the lift upwards, looking balefully out through the flashing glass windows at the sprawling megacity below them. They passed even the tallest of buildings that scraped the sky, finally bursting through the heavy artificial clouds.
The lift slowed, depositing them safely at the top of the narrow tower. Brenna fancied she could feel it swaying slightly, but paid it no heed.
“I’ll get the device ready,” she said quietly.
She began to work, taking the heavy metal box from the sling across her chest, where it had been concealed by her cloak.
Akira nodded, removing his hat to save it from blowing away. He tapped her gently, pointing,
“Look.”
She began to grumble, but did so, and stopped.
The two of them retracted their visors and stared up at the moon with naked eyes.
It hung heavily in the sky, bloated and white, pearlescent through the greasy scum of the atmosphere far above.
“Do you think they’re still up there, doing things right?
Again, she gently squeezed his shoulder.
She didn’t know.
“Probably been there and gone. To Mars, or one of those others. Come on, help me.”
He lingered a moment longer as she knelt, “Think they’ll come back?”
He looked down at her questioningly, before flicking his visor back down. She did the same, setting the EMP to detonate within two hours, enough time for them to escape easily.
She stood and gazed into the band of blue blocking his eyes.
“Would you?”
by Julian Miles | Feb 11, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The Arnen are beautiful people, even more so when they are angry. Consequently, we have been seeing a lot of heartrendingly beautiful people killing us. We are getting slaughtered, and a few people are beginning to fear extinction. The few voices of reconciliation were lost in the trumpeting of ultra-racism – having non-humans to hate and fear turns a lot of supposedly reasonable people into bigots.
My name is Turande Givenchy, and my great-great-great-grandfather was one of the men who helped Carter unearth Tutankhamun. So, in a way, my family is one of the contributing causes to this debacle.
Archaeology loved Ancient Egypt, with its death obsession and plethora of divinities. Everywhere you went, mummies abounded and pyramids peeked from sandy concealment. The treasures were stupefying and the real mysteries easily glossed over. Reputations were made and fortunes founded, either by toil or theft.
Decades later SETI received a polite communiqué from deep space, formally notifying us that the funerary delegations of Arnen would be making planetfall in about five months, here at last to collect their dead. We puzzled over this statement until they arrived.
It seems that the creed “no-one gets left behind” is older than any thought. The Arnen version is: “we shall leave none, alive or dead, to lie alone under cold stars”. The Egyptian diaspora was one of their greatest failures, ruined by a strain of water fever that less than five percent of them had immunity to. Over the centuries, it had come to haunt the Arnen in a similar way that the Two Towers haunt America, but far more deeply seated. So when the Arnen came to collect their fallen and found them looted, discarded, displayed for public spectacle, or having been used for fuel, they became – to put it mildy – rabidly angry.
I have an ex-serviceman friend who lost relatives in 9/11. When I mentioned my puzzlement at the Arnen’s behaviour, he looked at me bleakly and said: “If I found out that my Anna had been yanked out of the ground and put on display as part of some study project, I would burn the place down around her, with the people who did it inside. Then hunt down any survivors.”
He’s fighting to save his remaining loved ones, and with me is doing it the only sensible way we can agree on: retreat, bunker up and wait it out. He and I agree that the Arnen will, eventually, relent.
How much of humanity remains at that point will decide the extinction question shortly thereafter.
by submission | Feb 10, 2016 | Story |
Author : Danielle Bodnar
Listen. In the basement, there is the shelter. You’ll find everything you need: canned goods, camping gear, cell phone, travel router, multilingual slang phrasebook. Inside the phrasebook there is a list of numbers and letters. This is the code to unlock the time machine – the big black box at the far corner of the room. Put on the jacket that hangs on the chair by the bed. It might be cold. Inside the inner pocket of the jacket is a tablet with inter-dimensional GPS installed and an electronic spanner. It’s an old one, but it should still work.
When you get inside the box, go to the control panel. The correct coordinates have already been put in. You’ll be back home, albeit 50 years earlier, in no time. How do I know it works? I’ve tested it before, of course. With apes, like the first spaceships. You’ll be the first human to go back. But forward – unfortunately, you can only go the long way round..
Try and stop it. Tell the world that the comet is coming. You’re a bright young kid, get into the best university you can, study astrophysics. Don’t worry about papers – I’ve already forged some for you. I plan for everything. You will find these in an envelope, also in the inner pocket of the jacket. Don’t look for yourself thirty years later. And for the love of science, don’t come looking for me, ever. If you succeed, this will never have happened, but right now it looks like you’ve failed. It’s all right, though; we can try over and over again, forever if we have to. Katy, this world is too beautiful to lose like this. I have faith in you, but this is an inevitable event. If you think you can’t stop it, advocate for humanity to travel to the stars. Maybe you can save some of them. I have included a list of coordinates of the closest inhabitable planets inside the phrasebook, page 116. But don’t reveal them unless this is the course you must take.
Don’t worry about me. I brought you here without meaning to. I had every opportunity to keep you away from danger, and I didn’t take them. I knew it was coming, that it always would come, but I waited too long. I thought, with all my intelligence and clout, I could swoop in and save the world at the last minute. Genius that I am, I let Hollywood delude me. This is the least I can do. I know you can do it, Katy. You’ve been a tremendous help in my research. The others always nodded along to everything I say, but you spoke up. You asked questions. But I shut you out. I should have listened to you before, told you what I knew, but it’s too late now. Another thing – don’t wallow in regret. Lucky for you, Katy, you can try again.
Don’t worry about Muffy – she’s safe in her carrier in your room, right where you left her. No time. You must go alone. Hurry; it will be here in half an hour. I’m old, Katy, so old. My life is lived. Please go. Now. I’m so sorry.
by submission | Feb 9, 2016 | Story |
Author : Travis Gregg
The grizzled man, draped in furs, trudged his way up the mountain side. The morning air was crisp and he could see his breath as he slowly made his way to the crevice. The location was a sacred secret and he checked behind him often, double backed more than once, but no one had followed.
The crevice was just wide enough for him to squeeze through. In his youth the climb up to the crevice, down into the depths, and then back up to the surface had been trivial but every year it became more difficult.
“Have to start thinking about an apprentice,” he thought to himself. A new apprentice would be a lot of work. He was reluctant to admit to himself that the time was approaching when he’d need to step down, but the tribe couldn’t go without a leader, regardless of his pride. As he had been taught as a youth, the knowledge of the sacred place was to be passed down so as not to be lost.
Taking one last look around, he squeezed between the rock walls and descended into the darkness. He had a small torch with him but he hardly needed it. The way was familiar and the pathway opened up after the initial squeeze. Navigating the twists and turns, he pushed through the last tight place and eased into the impossible long and rigidly straight chamber he thought of as the throat.
He’d had no idea the total length of the throat but it was four spans wide and at least that again tall. The walls and floor were smooth as a frozen lake, or maybe even smoother, but they weren’t slippery at all, and they were very hard. Every time he came he marveled at the smoothness of the walls. He’d never seen anything in nature as straight and smooth but he also couldn’t imagine what could have built this place either. It was like stepping into a different reality.
Heading down the long narrow chamber, passing several sealed up entries, he came to his destination. The archway was circular and reached nearly to the roof of the chamber. This entryway opened up into a large wide room with a ceiling at least ten spans tall. Inside were row after row of waist high tables and chairs all facing towards one wall of the room. Scattered around the tables were dull metal boxes that held the reason for his arduous journey.
Sitting down at a table he got to work on one of the boxes. The metal sides slid out if you knew the trick and once it was open he twisted a couple of the pieces inside the box loose. Holding up his torch he evaluated the components on how impressive they’d be. The piece he decided on was a small cylinder that was clear with thin swirls of metal coiled inside. It was beautiful in its own way. More importantly though, it was clearly beyond anything his people could fabricate themselves. He knew he’d have to be careful descending back to the village, from past experience he knew these could break easily and then he’d have to come back for another.
For another season the tribespeople would be duly impressed and appeased by his gift from the gods. They would be assured he was still favored and his leadership would remain unquestionable.
by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 8, 2016 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
They waited at the mouth of the service corridor, the mezzanine railing just a few meters away. Above them somewhere, the heavy thumping of the security spider marked its progress in its pursuit of them. Across an open space broken at intervals by tree trunks and greenery, the armored glass of the laboratory stretched floor to ceiling, and out of sight in either direction.
“That going to present a problem?” A rhetorical question. Mett knew Gaez wouldn’t have signed on for this if it wasn’t going to present a challenge.
“Working on it” the disinterested reply. Gaez was more interested in their stalker.
They broke cover and sprinted left, hugging the wall. Cameras hung limp and blind at frequent intervals from the ceiling, one of the many indicators that Gaez had taken ownership of the facility’s less deadly security systems.
A whine from above, rising in pitch, was abruptly punctuated by a volley of sabot rounds fired across the garden atrium into the laboratory windows. Large pieces of their armored surface buckled under the impact.
“Work faster, those aren’t anti-personnel rounds,” Mett chirped, picking up the pace of his sprint. The spider, realizing it had been firing at reflections, began recalculating and relocating to obtain firing options on their actual position.
“No, they’re not. As far as the security system is concerned, we’re an intruding spider.” Across the atrium a heavy section of weakened wall crumbled, their pursuer having none-too delicately ripped a gaping wound through the only thing left keeping them out of the lab. “See, told you I was working on that.”
Mett’s communication alarms flashed red at the edges of his vision as Gaez had started speaking over an open channel. He grabbed Gaez by the shoulder, tapping his mouth and making a slashing motion across his throat with one hand.
“I know, I opened the channel. We’re encrypted, so it can’t understand what we’re saying, but it’s listening intently. All good.” Gaez grinned.
They continued to the end of the mezzanine and ducked back into another service corridor leading away from the open area as the spider on the floor above clambered out on a walkway, cannon noisily searching the space where they’d been.
“Keep talking, it’s time to turn off that ugly bug.”
Mett kept the pace, but couldn’t keep the doubt from his voice. “Those things aren’t hackable. I’d have heard about–”
Gaez cut him off.
“No, not directly hackable, but I know a few useful service codes.”
Another volley hammered down the hallway as they turned left again – the spider was picking up speed, anticipating their movements as they doubled back on the route they’d taken a few moments ago.
“Service codes? You hacked TacComm’s network?”
Gaez shook his head, obviously concentrating as he ran code through the broadcast system in his head. “Not TacComm, but they outsource service for some of the local deployments.”
“So you hacked one of those?”
“No, but the local service providers can’t all manage the spider’s heating and cooling systems, so they outsource that to some other companies. I hacked one of those.”
As they reached the first hallway heading back towards the atrium, Mett grabbed Gaez by the shoulders and stopped him just short of the opening, seconds before the spider unleashed another volley of shells into the space it had predicted they should have occupied in that instant.
Mett turned his partner around, locking eyes. “And what the hell good is that?”
Gaez grinned again.
“While we’ve been talking, the spider’s been listening, and I’ve been spiking the comms with temperature-sensor code-shrapnel.” He pushed Mett back slowly the way they’d come. Down the hallway the spider’s cannon was spinning down, no longer firing. “The polarity of the firing systems temperature sensors in the ammo storage compartments has been inverted, and the spider is compensating for the fact that it thinks it’s starting to freeze. The more it turns up the heat, the colder the thermo sensors will report, until–”
His words were drowned out by the sudden ignition of every remaining round inside the spider’s armored chassis, coupled with the rupturing of its fuel cells.
When the noise subsided, Gaez patted his partner on both shoulders, and turned to pick through the wrecked hallway towards the opened lab.
“Consider it worked on. ”
