by submission | Jun 2, 2007 | Story
Author : Sarah Klein
I sat in the dark doom of my living room, gazing absentmindedly at the television screen. They’d be drawing numbers in about two minutes. I knew my number wasn’t going to be called, but I had to watch all the others ones fly by to make sure. If I missed an announcement, I’d doubt myself until I found out.
“Tonight’s numbers are P32 to P105. If your number is in this category, please report to your nearest rocket station tomorrow morning. Once again, P32 to P105.”
I pulled out and fingered my crumpled, worn ticket, bearing the number Q204. Who was I fooling? I was an English student. The colony didn’t need English students. It needed the engineers, the biology majors, the young men capable of heavy labor. And what right had I to be angry? I wouldn’t be of much help. But something about picking and choosing who escaped with their life seemed wrong. It was half eugenics and half sheer cunning, devoid of all empathy and emotion. Well, that’s the government.
The meteor showers get worse daily. The garden was dead long ago, and the back porch is littered with holes. If a heavy rain comes, I’ll have to get the pots and pans out for the dining room. Every day I wake up and expect to walk outside and see the small town I live in utterly decimated. Somehow, it’s still here – the corner market, the joggers, the yellow daffodils. It could all be leveled and destroyed in ten minutes of heavy meteor fall. And so it will be, soon.
How strange that the heavens should decide to fall now. For years and years, experiments had been done in space; rockets sent this way, robots sent that way. And considering we’d already blown up quite a bit, it was strange that this imminent destruction hadn’t come sooner. When we had devastated Earth to its current, barely-livable status, we had to go for the cosmos. Being a romantic, I had always hesitated to actually believe that it was in human nature to be destructive. But what else could explain what was happening? Minute by minute, the universe came crashing down around us, and it was all our fault.
When they get to the English students, we’ll be mostly gone. When they get to the English students, they’ll extract us from piles of rubble – helicopters lifting us up by our lanky arms to the sky. When they get to the English students, we’ll be in a drunken stupor – wrapped in pages of Shakespeare, surrendering ourselves up to the sun.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by J.R. Blackwell | Jun 1, 2007 | Story
Author : J.R.Blackwell, Staff Writer
When I was eleven, I tried to kill myself after seeing an old movie. In the film, a man cut his wrists with bits of mirror and then held them under steaming hot water. At his funeral, people piled flowers on his grave. Everything in the film was grey but that pile of flowers.
I thought it looked so cool.
I was eleven and an only child. I never had so much as a dog to play with. My mother was working on a Doctorate in French film of the early 2020’s and didn’t have a lot of time for me. I tried to break my mirror in my room, but pounding on it did nothing except slam the back of my dresser against the wall. The noise caused my mom to come upstairs.
“Why are you making this racket?” She asked, smoking her cancer-free strawberry cigarettes.
“Just exercising.” I said. Behind my mirror, the plaster was starting to crumble.
“Are you trying to break your dresser?” She laughed, crossing her arms in front of her. My mother looked a lot like a chicken, skinny legs and beady eyes. “Good luck, the thing is child-proof, wail on it all you want.”
Everything in my room was childproofed. Even when I went to stab myself by running and jumping, stomach first, on my bedpost, it just turned to foam and bent beneath me. If I was going to kill myself, I needed some adult tools. I went to the kitchen, where my mother kept all the kitchen implements she bought and never used. There was a block of knives in the kitchen, and I brought out the largest one and scraped it across my palm. It flickered blue and spoke in a friendly, female voice.
“Oops! Be more careful when you are cutting!” it said. When I moved it across my flesh, it was soft as cotton. I threw it on the floor.
I don’t think I wanted to die out of any morbid curiosity or self-hatred. I think I just wanted to be raised by my Grandmother. Grandma Loretta had lived with mom and I until she died at the age of ninety-three. I was eight years old when she died. I remember mother saying that she wasn’t gone, just sleeping until she could wake up again on the Network.
She was one of the first people to get her consciousness uploaded into the Network. When she was alive, she would play dolls or blocks or immersion games with me. I would always win our games. Grandma Loretta never seemed hurt or angry that a child won playing against her. She would just giggle, putting a winkled hand over her pocked face. Later I learned that this was due to dementia, her organic mind slipping away. When she was uploaded, she chastised my mother for keeping her in the organic body for so long.
I thought that if I died, I might get flowers thrown at me and then Grandma Loretta would raise me on the Network. Grandma Loretta seemed to have lots of free time. She was always going to parties, making experimental art environments, and conducting science experiments. When I sent her voice messages on the Network she would get back to me in seconds.
“Things move faster here,” she would say. On the Network, she had built her own virtual house with large white pillars and flowering ivy. She sent me pictures of the place that she had built with her new boyfriend. The pictures of the both of them almost looked real, just a little too perfect, a little too smooth. I knew if I died, I could go live with them, where things moved faster.
I drank every cleaning fluid in the house, but all I got were hiccups.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | May 31, 2007 | Story
Author : Suzanne Phillips
The scent is the worst part.
Sweat, stale cigarette smoke, ethanol, ear wax, cheap hair gel. When your face, and therefore your olfaction sensor, is pressed against a client’s neck, it’s impossible to avoid it – you weren’t given an option to switch it off.
But there isn’t supposed to be a “worst”. There isn’t supposed to be a “bad”. You’re programmed to detect chemicals wafting off a client’s body and interpret them as stages of arousal, or nervousness, and use the information along with visual and auditory cues, to choose the appropriate program.
The client clinging to you now should be a simple case: access humor files, cheer up with some light banter, relax, entice, satisfy. But satisfaction, in a more encompassing meaning of the word than the mere physical, is exactly what you can’t provide or achieve, and your programming whispers there should be more you can do. There’s not. You’ve tried. With this client and with many before him.
Maybe you made a mistake that day you plugged into the ‘Net outside your cubical. It’s part of your programming to seek new information if it will benefit your performance. But how much information was too much? There were so many databases to access. Human psychology, health, history.
Now you know that the ethanol and cocaine metabolites evaporating from his skin signal problems you can’t solve; That the un-washed lingerie, still giving off a faint perfume, that he brought and asked you to wear is probably from a girlfriend or wife whose memory brings as much pain as it does pleasure; That the saline and protein mixture you detect on his unshaven cheeks are tears – and what other human secretion so perfectly represents suffering?
And you can’t wipe them away, not with all the sex in the world. Not if you fucked him every day of the week.
He doesn’t belong to you. None of them do. You can temporarily satisfy his body, but all the other problems remain, pleasure a thin veneer briefly covering the pain.
You now know these things, but you lack the programming to respond. You’re programmed to please, to help, to comfort, but these are things you can’t fix. Brief gratification is all you can offer. The same programing that pushes you to do more denies you the parameters to act.
The scent is the worst part, but it’s just an indicator. You could go to the manager right after this client, request to have your olfactory sensor shut down, but it wouldn’t shut off the knowledge you have. You’d still know the sorrow was there. A complete reformat would wipe all your memory, but it would also wipe out any chance that, one day, you could help them. Any chance that you can go beyond the programming.
So you take the client to the padded bench in the back of the cubical, and revel in the few seconds where pleasure is the only thing on his mind, and pain is forgotten.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | May 30, 2007 | Story
Author : Helen E. Kourous
Vijay had arrived early at New Windows on the World, expecting the worst. He knew she would be late, so he took the opportunity to adjust the mood of his BlueShark textile-display sleeve stripes to his personally-designed schema Variations on Green Funk. That would annoy her. Ads for senso-cocktails followed picotech news summaries in flickering chartreuse Mandarin characters down his sleeves.
An eyeblink later he had opaqued his ZeroFear wireless wraparounds and downloaded his favorite politic-pundit vidblog. Newspeak shorthand marched along his lower peripheral vision before curving out to crawl, muted vintage-DEC orange, across the mirrored lenses. In a moment the waiter arrived with his Australian lager 10 degrees Celsius, fresh sprouted bread, and tarragon olive oil. Damn. Forgot to change my eve mode prefs.
Another waiter swooped by and swapped the lager for a Manhattan, angostura and rye, nearly frozen, with a sashimi plate.
He leaned back, fade-into-woodwork observer mode, ankle casually on knee. He studied his worldstock valuations for the sino-adjusted previous trade period on his boot sole, sparing roving glances of the expanse of the rotating sky-café. He of course had his back to a partition.
Then Vijay saw her. Ana was wearing a throwaway cosi-cola wrap and was speaking conspiratorially with the Maitre d’ by the entrance vidfountain among the palms. She was a mauve-gold shimmering confection, the subtlest sparkles from platinum-plaited head to razor-stiletto foot. He knew how long it took her to achieve that fuzzy, glinting, slightly out-of-focus soft effect. He shivered. I hate that dress. And she knew it. As he watched, the gold-mauve schema was melting into her favorite red-black combo. He gritted his teeth.
She obviously thought she had arrived first and was chivying up some sort of special treatment. A welcome interruption with a vitally important vidcall, perhaps, on an agreed-upon signal. A gilded salad fork would drip from her fingers to the adcarpet, shimmering with aerial scenes of desirable resort destinations, and the Maitre d’ would swoop in and rescue her from an interminably boring and extended breakup.
Well. She’s got another thing coming.
An advance wave of her new pheromonic engineered preceded her barracuda-spiral approach. He blinked, taken in despite himself. Her runway-strut approach was only slightly marred by the clashing Caribbean colors of the ad-carpet. Still, it could not compete. As the Maitre d’ seated her, Ana flashed her teeth strategically in the natural window-light and folded her spidery legs beneath her. She settled herself, fabric fluttering down about her like butterflies alighting. She opened a compact makeup case and unnecessarily inspected her flawless complexion.
She closed the case with a snap and graced him with the calculated flash and lash-look again. She narrowed her eyes. Yes. He thinks he will surprise me with bad news.
He’s got another thing coming.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by featured writer | May 29, 2007 | Story
Author : Mur Lafferty, featured writer
Cthulhu Bob and Hominy Jack were warming their hands over a barrel one chilly night on Londo 13, right outside of Hazy City, where hoboes were dumped after branding.
Hominy Jack looked up. “Gonna snow.”
Cthulhu Bob squinted into the blackness. His stomach rumbled, distracting him from the weather. “Don’t look like snow.”
Hominy Jack snorted. “Gonna snow.” He pulled back his tattered coat and sweater sleeves to show Bob the brand on his forearm.
“Snowflake. That’s for meteorolon- uh, weather predicting, isn’t it?”
Hominy Jack nodded. “I was Hazy City’s premier meteorologist ten years ago.”
Cthulhu Bob rubbed his hands. They usually didn’t get into pasts. That led to tears and drinking. He looked around and groaned.
“Aw hell. Space Cowgirl.”
She was about as old as Cthulhu Bob, with better teeth than most. She wore a purple scarf regardless of weather. But despite the hobo brand on her forehead – a capital H with a sunburst around it, the last brand anyone received – she always acted superior. But you didn’t turn a hobo away from your fire, so they made room for her.
“Boys,” she said.
“Gonna snow, Space Cowgirl,” Hominy Jack said. “Cthulhu Bob doesn’t believe me, but I got the meteorology brand.” He showed her.
She nodded. “Cold enough to snow. Cold as space, almost.”
Cthluhu Bob rolled his eyes. Some people weren’t just content to live their lot in life. His stomach rumbled again. Space Cowgirl glanced at him.
“So when were you in space, Space Cowgirl?” Hominy Jack asked. “I thought astronauts never fell this low.”
She sniffed and stared into the barrel’s embers. “I’ve never been.”
Cthulhu Bob laughed. “Then why do you call yourself Space Cowgirl?”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. I said I haven’t been yet.”
“Wishes ain’t for hoboes, Cowgirl,” Cthulhu Bob said, deliberately leaving off the honorific. “Wishes are for people who still have dreams. No astronaut program is gonna take you into space with that brand on your forehead.”
Her hands rose and touched the brand. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll get there. Somehow.”
Hominy Jack just looked impressed. Cthulhu Bob opened his mouth and was about to mock her again, but the entire outskirts lit up around them.
Space Cowgirl looked up, grinning, her mostly-good teeth shining in the bright light coming from the unidentified space ship above them. With her head thrown back, the scarf slipped down and brand underneath her chin was visible for the first time. The eye of Horus. The seer.
Without a word, she sprinted toward the landing craft and up the descending ramp. The alien ship rose into the air and disappeared.
Hominy Jack threw some trash into the barrel. “Huh. I thought we got our names arbitrarily. I like grits.”
Cthulhu Bob felt his hunger, deeper, now, stir within him, and wondered for the first time why Space Cowgirl was so eager to leave Londo 13.
He was just so hungry.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
