by submission | Mar 5, 2009 | Story
Author : Todd Hammrich
The first thing to hit him upon waking was the metallic taste in his mouth. Every morning it was the same taste. It told him the machines inside his body had been working again; cleaning, scrubbing, scraping and sterilizing. It was the symbol of his life. Sterile.
He got out of bed and admired his physique. His body was muscled and smooth. He was the ideal image of man, someone’s ideal anyway. It amazed him how fluid-like his movements were as he strolled across the room. It was the machines again, always the machines. They had sculpted his body to look like this so he could do the work required of him. Their work.
“Good morning. The time is 8:05. It is time for breakfast. Your nutrition solution is awaiting you at the table.” The sound issued forth from hidden speakers all around the room and followed him as he went into the dining room. “Today’s schedule is full. You must work quickly to fulfill your quota.”
His nutritive solution tasted slightly bitter to him this morning. A clear sign his body was in need of some essential materials for the maintenance of the machines that scoured his body of all ailments. It occurred to him then that maybe they weren’t ingestible by humans, but he knew that none of the material would get through his body. The machines would undoubtedly absorb all the harmful material before it got through his stomach.
On a whim he decided to take the day off. “I don’t feel like working today computer. Please re-schedule today’s activities for another time.” His voice sounded like the rasping of tissue paper, not because anything was wrong with him, that would not have been permitted, but because he used it so rarely. He would go out walking he decided. It wasn’t necessary, he knew, but it brought him pleasure to see natural world outside his small habitation complex. He liked the thought that Mother Nature was reclaiming her world without the aid of any machinery.
“If you are certain. We will carry on tomorrow then. Do not go out of range of the transmitters. Enjoy your walk.” The computer knew him all too well. It had probably already known he would not be working that day anyway. He knew that it had when he found his hiking pack by the door already prepared.
The outside air was clean and lacked the bite of reprocessing chemicals permeating his enclosure. A perfect circle of plant life surrounded his dwelling, exactly 10 meters from the walls. Machines were very precise. His complex sat on a small hill overlooking a ruined city, the walls and streets of the ancient world decomposing at an accelerated rate because no one was there to stop them.
It was a strange thought that struck him then, a sadness that threatened to overwhelm him. “I am the last. The last of the human race.” It was so terrible that he knew he would not be able to bear it. Immediately he dashed across the open space and through the trees trying to get out of the receivers range so that the machines inside would lose power and he could die.
Before he made it even halfway there the machines released a wave of chemicals into his blood stream that calmed him. He stopped, forgetting what he was doing. After many long minutes striving to remember he made his way back to the enclosure and decided he would work after all. The computer made a silent tally: Attempt number 3650. The machines kept track of everything.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 4, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was refreshing in a way, this whole ‘not having to talk’ thing.
The blue Radocephamoeba across from me ‘listened’ patiently to the string of questions embedded in the constant flow of my pheromones and body odor. There were subtleties in our smell that we had no idea were there.
The Radocephamoebas were huge semi-transparent shape-changing tentacled scentograph andromorphs. They were here doing research. They had no outward sensory apparatus of any kind that we could see. They ate by osmosis. When they were hungry, ovals would appear on their bodies like liver spots that oozed numbing digestive juices. Food was pressed to one of these ovals, the food absorbed, and the spots would disappear.
I could still see this one’s lunch floating in the thickness of his torso.
Other than that, their bodies, as far as we could tell, were basically giant noses from tip to stern. Every slippery pore was a nostril. The connected cells of their bodies did the rest. Every cell was a small brain. Together, they computed.
When referring to ‘my’ assigned Rad, I always called him Big Blue because of his brilliant mouthwash colouring and his size. The Rads differed in colour from one to another wildly. They were called Jelly Babies or Jelly Beans in popular slang.
Using several tendrils to rapidly tap answers out on a laptop for me, he answered questions that I didn’t fully realize that I was asking. I had no control over my pheromones and they really held nothing back. I was unintentionally candid and honest in a way that I had never been in real life when Big Blue took deep, silent sniffs of my long, rambling pheromones.
The First Team had thought it was telepathy for three full hours after first contact until a communication apparatus was successfully set up. Oh, how they all laughed. It was famous footage.
One thing the Rads could do was go ‘silent’ and stop smelling. Scientists were fascinated by this and research was underway.
There was only a certain temperament of Rad that volunteered to research the humans. Earth was incredibly ‘noisy’ by way of stink. Every person on the planet was shouting out their true thoughts, unfiltered intentions, hopes and dreams for all the Rads to hear.
Apparently, Big Blue was a talker and loved to listen. His replies to me on the laptop were verbose at any rate.
Now, I call him Big Blue when I’m writing my reports down but he says that I named him something else from the complicated smell reaction I had when I first saw him. He took my name for him from that reaction. It goes something like:
“Holy (alarm) that thing is huge I don’t know if I’m up for this it scares me I wonder how my mom (parent twosex breed half) is doing I think I’ll have a late meal (food type) am I just standing here staring be professional they think in smell they think in smell they think in smell-“
Each time he types it out it’s a little different but he always colours a bit darker up top with what we now know is mirth.
They’re equally fascinated by our ability to have not only one but five senses to their two senses of touch and smell. They marvel at our ability to deal with the input.
The Rads told us about a far-off race that has over twenty-six senses.
The two-way research traffic has so far been very rewarding. First contacts don’t always go this smoothly.
by submission | Mar 3, 2009 | Story
Author : Eric L. Sofer
Humanitarian, Not Vegetarian
We were assembled for the yearly Meal of Thanks, and we had imported food, delicacies from Earth. Dad gets it through his job; he works for a corporation that does space exploration. About forty years back, they found this planet, Earth, and its inhabitants, Humans, and it turned out that we can eat Earth food. I don’t like it, but the rest of the family loves it – and it was what we having for the Meal.
I was helping my mom with appetizers, preparing Spanish peanuts and Brazil nuts. I was more than happy to be in the food prep chamber because Great-Uncle Goje joined us this year. Dad said Uncle Goje was actually born on Earth, but I don’t know if I believe that. Dad says a lot about Earth that must be fabrications. Example: he says Earth people live in square constructs called “buildings” instead of caverns. How could someone want to live in a fake cavern?
I brought out the snacks with a spon for each bowl. My stupid little brother was hanging on Uncle Goje’s every word. The old beast was going on about how he had been on Earth long before we ever landed there, and he wanted to live in peace, but there wasn’t anyone on Earth like him. Except for his old friend, “Mr. Cong” – “…and they treated him like a king, I tell you!” Uncle Goje sputtered.
I settled down to suffer when mother came out. “Hope everyone’s hungry! There’s plenty of Earth food Earth tonight!” My mother had worked overtime this year – to make my dad happy, I think. After the Observation of Silent Gratitude, Dad had to name every single thing, as if he personally had gone to Earth, caught everything, and prepared it.
“That’s Virginia ham, that’s Canadian bacon, those are French fries and Idaho potatoes, and these are called Brussels sprouts,” he said, pointing at each container. “English muffins, Belgian waffles, Hungarian goulash, and Elle, this is called Irish stew – I bet you’ll love it!” he said to me. I thought he’d probably lose that bet, but I showed respect – it [i]was[/i] the Meal of Thanks. My stupid brother, picked up something from a bowl – I think Dad called it Swiss cheese – and started to pop it into his mouth.
“Aarg!” my mother hissed at him. “You remove the stasis field from that or you’ll get sick as a spinner, and I’ll have to take you to the med center!” Aarg stuck one of his tongues out at her when she turned away and used his spon to remove the stasis field, and stuffed the wriggling bit of food into his maw.
As predicted, the family dined with gusto, while I just toyed with my food. At last, Uncle Goje leaned back in the special split back chair we have for him, to accommodate his back spines, and asked Mom, “’Thra, my dear, do you mind if I smoke?”
She sighed and nodded, and Uncle Goje puffed out three rings of smoke, and then ignited them with his breath, and I took my cue. “May I be excused to do homework, Dad?”
“Go ahead, Elle,” he answered. “And Aarg! Stop playing with your food!”
My little brother lifted a claw as a small piece – I think it was a German rye – screamed and struggled as Aarg grabbed it with his fangs and gnawed it to pieces. I ducked down the corridor into my chamber, and into my slime pit.
I don’t care what the rest of my family says. I hate Human food.
by Sam Clough | Mar 2, 2009 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
We stole the blinkpacks from the research facilities at Ceti Alpha. Stable displacement technology, suitable for individual use. We sealed the holes in our assault armour and slapped on the packs: suddenly we could step through walls and down corridors, infiltrating past sentries and guards and turrets with ease. You could even rig a spare pack to act as a bomb: find something big, displace it into something bigger. If you squint, an overlap detonation looks a lot like a nuke.
From there, we blinked around the perimeter worlds, looting, stealing, hoarding all the high technology and research material we could find: and what we found shocked and horrified us. The colonies were so far ahead of the core worlds that some of them had ceased to even resemble humans. Halfman recombinations with terran or alien stock, populations translated entirely into a digital form or living out in the open under a half-klick of liquid methane.
We blinked out as far as we could; we found terror. Machines. Of arguably human origin. Some even still bore ancient factional flags. There were hundreds of millions of them in every system we checked. Half our men didn’t return, and most of the rest never left again. We dug in the archives, and the libraries; we even unearthed a few buried data centres to find out who to blame.
These were clanking replicators, skewed by thousands of generations of isolation from intelligent guidance. They replicated out of control, torching systems and turning the rubble into more of themselves. One advance party discovered a strain that spent the resources of entire planets to extinguish stars in one shot.
We figured out a plan. It was our only hope of long-term survival. No-one could see any other way. We knew we’d be remembered as monsters, but in the grand balance, we thought that it would be better that someone was there to remember us at all.
We committed grand and unholy sabotage across the thousand worlds. Shocktroops equipped with blinkpacks teleported deep into power stations, factories and defense relays, breaking and fusing and detonating. Navies were brought down in port, armories reduced to useless scrap. We left a thousand worlds without a single communication array or functional ship.
Quickly-assembled arrays folded space, and our navies appeared in colonial orbits. Purification-yield nuclear devices, biological warfare agents and cleansed the hundred worlds we needed. The engineers of the core worlds were flung to these hundred barren wastes, and were set to work. All the while, our fleets tore through the perimeter worlds, conducting a campaign of total annihilation: the might and fury of old humanity, rage driven by our history, our twenty-four thousand years of hatred, violence and war.
We didn’t understand the science, but we certainly understood the engineering. We turned those hundred worlds into the triggers for a giant chain reaction that would wipe out a reasonable portion of our cosmological back yard; isolating the core worlds with a rift of space washed clean of matter. This was our firebreak, our last best hope of survival. We doomed two hundred and fifteen billion people for the sake of thirty billion.
Was it worth it?
I don’t know.
by submission | Mar 1, 2009 | Story
Author : Benjamin Fischer
“I want to talk to the shaman.”
Borhani’s words drew blank looks from the Lakota braves. A few raised their eyebrows and the surliest of the lot paused his cigarette long enough to spit.
“The medicine man,” said Borhani.
“What the hell are you talking about?” said the surly one.
“Your wizard,” Borhani added.
“Ain’t got no wizards here,” came the reply.
Surly took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled. The soldiers waited, radiating their collective distaste of the foreigner.
Borhani started again.
“I’ve been told that your war party has strong magic. That you can call in the gods against your enemies.”
The Lakota shifted awkwardly, a few fingering the automatic rifles slung across their flak vests.
“Mister, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said a tall brave.
“The raid on Saint Cloud,” said Borhani, growing impatient, “where you were ambushed by antitank elements at that bridge over the Mississippi–you were able to regroup because a meteor strike stopped the counterattack. Who did that?”
A slow, toothy grin broke across the faces of the braves.
“You want Stars-Fall-At-His-Command,” said the tall one.
“Yes,” said Borhani.
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” asked Surly.
“Take me to him,” replied Borhani.
Surly flicked aside his smoke and started for a nearby hovercraft. Borhani fell in beside him, trudging quickly through the crushed grass of the circled war party. The plump camouflage skirts of a dozen raider skiffs marked out its edges. Surly led the pale foreign man to a particularly worn and dented specimen.
“Stars, you got a visitor,” Surly called into the cavernous hatch.
“Roger,” someone answered.
A lean, tanned Lakota wearing a grey field jacket clambered out of the hovercraft. A mean-looking submachinegun swung from a sling on his back. His face was just as welcoming.
“Major Stars-Fall,” he said, offering a hand.
Borhani shook it.
“Travis Borhani,” he replied. “Junior partner at Lino, Rubin and Ozgener.”
“Lawyer. Huh. What brings you?”
“Messenger duty,” said Borhani. “I represent off planet interests.”
“Don’t you all,” said Stars, taking an offered cigarette from Surly.
“My clients have been attempting communications for a few months,” Borhani said, “but connectivity has been poor to say the least.”
“We don’t do the net,” said Stars.
“We noticed.”
“Uh huh,” Stars said, lighting up.
“My clients sent me here to request that you surrender your targeting equipment and cease calling in orbital strikes.”
Stars gave him a blank look.
“You may turn it over to me,” said Borhani, unfazed, “or you may deliver it to our satellite offices in Springfield, Kansas City, or Topeka.”
Stars was silent for a minute, nursing his cigarette.
“I suppose you have papers.”
Borhani nodded, pulling a sheaf from under his coat. He held them out to the Lakota.
Stars shook his head.
“Naw, I don’t need to see them.”
“You are refusing?” asked Borhani.
Stars nodded.
“You realize that this will result in further legal action.”
Stars took another drag on his smoke, the hint of a smile in his eyes.
“Tell your bosses that they ain’t collecting nothing,” he said. “And even if they did, it wouldn’t do them a bit of good.”
Borhani shrugged.
“It takes codes,” Stars said. “The gear alone is useless. Tells me your clients aren’t legitimate, else they could just shut it down on their own.”
“I’m just the messenger,” said Borhani.
“Fine. But we burned Minnetonka last night,” said Stars as he climbed back into his ship, “and we’ll probably have another go at Duluth soon. When whoever’s in charge up there gets tired of me, I’ll let you know.”
Surly touched the lawyer’s elbow. It was time to go.
