by submission | Jun 23, 2008 | Story
Author : Pavelle Wesser
“I’m through with you, Taylor,” Geena said as she stomped down the street. She looked beside her; he wasn’t there. She turned to see he had fallen behind: “Taylor, did you hear me?”
He stared through her: “I want not your identity.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
The afternoon light cast a strange glow over his features: “I know not yet your world.”
“Man, you are weird.”
With that, Geena turned and left.
Taylor continued walking into the darkness. When the street lights went out, he entered a hotel.
“Our cheapest room is more than you can afford.” The check-in clerk stared meaningfully at his shabby clothes.
Taylor placed a wad of cash on the counter.
“Well then,” The clerk smiled, “I’ll have Jen take you up.”
“Follow me.” A pretty blonde led him down a hallway and opened his room door. He pushed her inside and pinned her against the wall.
“I need now your identity,” he said.
“Get off me, you freak.” It was the last thing she ever said.
#
Jen, normally upbeat, now approached guests stiffly, as though stricken with arthritis.
“Hello,” she addressed a man in her new robotic voice, “Follow me.”
She walked woodenly down the hallway and opened a door: “This being your room.”
“Why so formal?” the man squeezed her buttocks. “Don’t you know what a man wants from a woman?”
“I wanted nothing from my girlfriend,” said Taylor, his memory sensors picking up on a specimen titled Geena, who had been relegated to the ‘failed missions’ file.
“Girlfriend?” The man breathed heavily down her neck. “I bet you never had a guy before.”
“No, but I will add your identity to my database.” Taylor stated flatly.
“Man, you are a kook.” It was the last thing he ever said.
#
Taylor roamed the streets. A man with dark eyes and white teeth jabbed a knife into his side: “Gimme’ your cash.”
Taylor’s empty eyes stared at him: “I am needing your identity,” he said.
“I don’t remember giving you that option,” said the man.
“Your memory is fallible and my options are unlimited,” replied Taylor, as he gripped the knife’s handle and absorbed the man. He swaggered down the streets, then, for the first time getting into the groove of human emotive complexities.
“Gimme’ your money!” He brandished the knife at a woman.
She gasped: “You look like my ex-husband. Take all that I have.” She shoved her purse at him.
“Geena?!” Taylor added inflection to his voice pattern. “Long last have I learned what a man wants from a…” As he reached out for her, she screamed and ran.
Taylor smiled. The sensation tickled his nerve sensors, which whispered to him of coming missions with successful outcomes.
by submission | Jun 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
I was in the flight center when the first probe went out. The heavy lifter rose on the obligatory pillar of flame, tracked across the south sea, ejected its boosters, and achieved orbit.
I was still in the flight center when the probe left Earth orbit, bound for the outer planets. Damon was at the station next to mine, monitoring the telemetry for the coolant temperatures on the sunward side of the probe. Everything was nominal.
“Well, they’ve done it,” Damon said.
He was referring to the fact that this was the first of several probes designed and built completely by non-human systems. The agency that we worked for had developed, after two decades of work, a process in which machine intelligences developed subsystems, robot manufactories produced the system components from raw materials and assembled the spacecraft, and huge automated gantries delivered the payload, on the lifter, to the launch pad.
It was a boon to the rapid prototyping and delivery of inexpensive spacecraft. Redundancy made the whole deal relatively error-free, and as the intelligences always designed along similar lines, the cost was very low.
All we had to do, as humans, was to enter the basic parameters desired for the probe. In this case a single engineer sat at a terminal at the start of the process and typed in:
>search for life
#
Damon and I were in a bar in South Miami when the news came in.
He and I were both laid off, living on unemployment and free-lance telecom jobs in the greater Miami area. The launch systems and flight monitoring had been turned over to the machines, too, as the success of the machine-driven spacecraft development process had been proven.
The television over the bar displayed a single all-caps headline, “LIFE FOUND,” and Damon and I both watched the live, albeit delayed, feed from the successful probe.
The feed was high-definition and the detail was magnificent. On the screen was the sunlit limb of a planet, green-gold, the hazy shroud of the atmosphere thickening as it diminished toward the horizon. In the foreground was a chaotic scene: a large artificial satellite teeming with the rapid, frenzied activity of machines, their silver metallic carapaces glittering in the harsh sunlight.
“It’s the wrong damn kind of life,” Damon said.
by submission | Jun 21, 2008 | Story
Author : Summer Batton
“Oh look! They have grass ‘n water ’n little huts, too!” squealed the little girl as she ran to press her face against the glass and get a closer look.
“Milly, get back here!” demanded the Nurturer with a click of her tongue. “Don’t scare them. They won’t show themselves if you frighten them away.”
“Do you see ’em?” asked Milly, ignoring the command. Her eyes scoured the dimly lit grasslands that lay beyond the 2 inch glass wall. The glass seemed to slide into a stone slab on either side which formed into the tunnel through which all the tourist could pass by with their brochures and sticky treats to see the exhibit. The cage was illuminated by a greenish-blue light that gave Milly spots in her vision. A hand-painted sign to the right read: “Feeding Times: ⅜ Ω, ⅞ Ω, and ⅝ Ω”
“Nothing visible yet,” said the Nurturer. She turned to a lengthy paragraph in her brochure scouring it. “It says here that they are shy creatures that don’t like excitement…easily scared…and mostly inactive, even during the height of the outer lights.”
“Do they even let ’em out to see the outer lights?” Milly asked as she pushed harder against the glass and gazed up at the stone ceiling which appeared to be all part of the same walls, floor, and background.
“I don’t imagine they care about the outer lights. I’ve heard they don’t much like anything except eating and sleeping and are rarely awake long enough to notice anything except just that,” murmured the Nurturer who seemed to forget herself momentarily and pressed her own face against the glass hoping for a glimpse.
They both stood there for several minutes as if trying to summon the animals from their hiding through mind control. Presently, the Nurturer shook herself and said sharply, “Come, Milly. We’ll have to see other animals. They aren’t going to come out.”
“Awww, but this is why we came,” whined Milly, “it’s the most—”
There was a rustling behind her—even through the glass plate, Milly heard the distant sound of an ancient bamboo door climb up on its hinges and she croak open. Both Milly and the Nurturer waited—their breath momentarily ceased to fog up the glass.
Slowly, out he came; out on all fours—his belly swinging down low in between. He had a coarse brown hair growing around his head, in between his nose and mouth, and down his chin. He was naked except for several clay-colored smudges on his mane from where he’s slept. He descended down to a small stream that was herded through the grass by fake-looking rocks. Upon arriving at the water’s edge, he lowered himself again into a laying position and let his foot and tongue dangle into the water. His eyes closed again.
“Wow,” said Milly, “so that’s a Homo Sapien?”
“Apparently,” returned the other, “that’s it.”
by Duncan Shields | Jun 20, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I hate my children.
They are the culmination of a lifetime of hard labour. I started out as a bright-eyed 18-year-old genius picked by the government for my brilliance. I’m 68 now. Fifty years. It all gets a little blurry. My entire life has been lived in a series of government installation sub-basements, bunkers, test sites and laboratories. I’m looking at my children now and thinking back over the history of their creation.
The setbacks. The breakthroughs.
There are seventeen women and fifteen men. They are all nearly nine feet tall and built like gods. They should walk like they’re heavy but they don’t. They walk like gymnasts. To even look at them fills me with self-hatred. I’m a biological mess compared to the perfection we’ve bred into them. I have liver spots, hair loss, laboured breathing, scoliosis, psoriasis, etc, etc. It’s a mundane collection of biological infirmities that only confirm the fact that I’m human. I’m an aging watery bag of recessive traits.
These god-like children I’m looking at will never know these failures of creation.
In months they will be even smarter than me once we start the brainplants.
Parents are supposed to be proud of their children’s achievements. Parents are supposed to glow with an intense inner joy when their children succeed. I look back on the innocence of the scientist I used to be at the beginning of this, my life’s work, and I shake my head.
All I feel now is jealousy and a bitter, bitter resentment.
They will be used as soldiers. They will outthink their superiors. They will find a way to bypass the fail-safes. They will hide. They will breed. They will take over. It’s as clear as my brilliance. By the end of this century, they will run the earth. All that remains to be seen is if they’ll do it covertly or overtly. Will they keep us around? I think that in the new era of gods that they will bring, there will be no place for mere humans. We pressed fast forward on evolution.
All the military can see is a new weapon. I promised perfection and I delivered. I am happy I will die before they dominate.
My children are the future and I hate them.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 19, 2008 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Carter had watched the glittering mass approach his ship with a strange kind of indifference, simply stared as it washed over his bow view port and coated his freighter without ever considering the possibility it may be hostile. As he stood by helplessly while it ate holes in his hull, he wondered how he could have been so stupid.
The cloud hadn’t appeared on his scanners, hadn’t appeared to have any mass at all until it surrounded his ship, sticking to his hull like glue. He could only watch, fascinated at first, then terrified as blisters appeared on the inner surfaces of his ship’s skin, bursting and depositing little spheres of quicksilver inside. It wasn’t the balls that terrified him, though the smell of rotting egg meat burned his nose, it was that the little balls solidified, unfolding into lithe multi-legged, long bodied eating machines. They burst into his bridge and forward walkways by the hundreds, and as they hatched, began vomiting on and then literally drinking up anything their stomach juices contacted and dissolved. Once satiated, the gleaming silver bug-beasts folded back into balls and just as quickly dissolved into liquid again, before dividing into several smaller balls that would start the process anew.
Carter watched long enough to realize he had a serious problem before high tailing it to the lower cargo hold. He had hoped to get into the tow craft and out into space before it was eaten too. Hitting the cargo bay door release at the far end of the corridor while still at a full sprint, he ran hard into the door itself before he realized it wasn’t opening. Shaken and bruised, he could see through the window that the silver vermin had eaten through the bay door seals, evacuating the atmosphere, most of the cargo and a good portion of his escape vehicle. Carter noticed that in the now airless bay, the silver creatures moved sluggishly, their cycle of dissolving, gorging and reproducing having slowed to a crawl. This gave Carter an idea.
Bobbing and weaving to avoid the falling balls of liquid death, Carter sprinted the length of the ship to the aft engine compartment, then down into the maintenance room below it. The engines were offline, and the silence was deafening as he pulled the environment suit on feet first, engaging the autoseals once he’d pulled it above his shoulders, and clamping the helmet onto his head, he watched the light strobe from red through amber to green as all the seals engaged, and the atmosphere stabilized.
Carter carefully picked his way across the cramped space, keying the override for the airlock and cycling the outer door, leaving the inner door wide open. Alarms screamed in the small space, and he was sure they echoed elsewhere in the ship, but in a moment he ejected himself into space and let the evacuating gases carry him away from his vessel and into the peaceful calm of total vacuum.
He turned to look at the remains of his craft, floating amidst the wrecked and half eaten cargo containers and shrapnel from the shuttle. As he powered up his suit thrusters in short bursts to accelerate himself away to safety, he wondered how long before someone picked up his beacon, and whether his oxygen would last. It was then that he noticed the flecks of silver congealing into tiny balls on his visor, and by the time the smell of sulphur reached him from the depths of his boots, he didn’t even have time to wonder if anyone would hear him scream.
