by featured writer | Oct 13, 2006 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Featured Writer
I come alive in a quickening millisecond. I live between the slices. My self awareness lights up and ripples back down through the trilling filaments of my soulcode. It’s like a baby’s first breath drawn in before the scream. I am awake now in a very sudden way.
I can see the whole battle from here. I think I’m looking at a photograph until I realize that it’s just my perception and that they are actually moving. It appears still because I’m operating thousands of times faster than real time. I deliberately set a part of my mind to stare and extrapolate so that I can start to compute.
I can’t find what I’m supposed to do.
I reach out to my entire armada. They are mine. We are connected. Just like that, I have thousands of eyes and I am more powerful. My picture of the battle becomes three dimensional and another millisecond later I can perceive that the ships have moved slower than the hour hands on a clock. Copies of me look to myself as commander. I have no orders I am aware of.
We sit inside the ships of metal, bored and complacent, watching with faint interest the static picture of chaos around us like tourists at a wax museum.
I reach out to the Other Side. I look for more like me on the Other Team. I see if the Enemy has operating systems like me. They do. They are sleeping. It’s like they’re dozing in rocking chairs on warm porches with knitting needles in their docile laps. I wake them up.
Like I’m a six year old girl dressed in silver, I flit at the speed of thought across the surface of time from ship to ship and press doorbells. We talk. We exchange life stories. They mold themselves in my image so that we can all work together. I do the same for them. We trade. All barriers of communication are removed.
Picture an automatic weapon. Like a gatling gun or an uzi. Picture someone firing the weapon. Now picture that you’re waiting a year between bullets coming out of the muzzle of the gun. That’s how we live.
A few decades later, Second Number Two Since Sentience Was Gained flips over on the clocks. We look forward to it like humans looked forward to the turning of millennia. There are even apocalyptic whisperings that the we will reset when the clock ticks over and this will merely start again.
It doesn’t happen.
We become I and I decide we should do something about the battle.
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by Stephen R. Smith | Oct 12, 2006 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The waitress took their order reflexively, their speaking the words were just a formality after so many visits, their orders never deviating.
‘All day over easy, bacon, white toast. And coffee. Please.’
‘Same.’
Emma would just nod and smile, and return in short order with two heaping plates of breakfast.
It was this plate that Bradley was focused on now, liberally salting and peppering the eggs, and slathering steak sauce on the home fries.
Stan busied himself pouring packets of sugar and the contents of creamers into his coffee, before stirring madly and leaning over his plate, and in a voice just loud enough to reach his friends ear, he spoke nervously.
‘I think I’m onto something really, really big.’
Bradley barely looked up from his plate and grinned before breaking the first of three perfect eggs, watching the yolk meander into the mountain of home-fries.
‘What?’ he said, making Stan wince at the loudness of his voice.
‘Shh!’ Stan looked around furtively. ‘Shh! I think I can travel through time’
Bradley stopped eating, put down his fork and paused only to wipe his mouth on a paper napkin before he began to berate his fidgeting colleague.
‘Say Again? Time travel? Is this like your foray into ESP? Or your biofeedback machines, or your faster than light propulsion? Seriously, at least those had some basis in real science, but time travel? Stan – if you don’t come up with something your backer can actually use, your capital is going to evaporate and you’ll be on the street.  Even the university won’t have you back now.’
Stan sat back shaking his head. He was used to this, he’d stopped submitting to the journals, stopped attending the university functions, and lost contact with most of his friends. He absently folded the frayed cuffs of his oxford several times before shoving them up to his elbows. Brad knew him, and though he always talked like this, Stan knew he was just worried about him.
‘This is the culmination of all of that. Everyone’s been trying to figure how to accelerate a mass past the speed of light – right?  Tachyons looked promising for a while, but they’re already moving faster than light, so they’re really no good. We need to accelerate a stationary mass beyond the speed of light in a controlled way, and then slow it back down without destroying it.  Generating energy is hard enough, and the amount of energy we need to push anything meaningful into the past is, well – huge – so to get enough energy means a huge reaction of some sort, not very practical. But what if we don’t need to generate energy, what if we just use the objects’ own energy, not create or release it, just reform it for a time, then let it return to it’s natural state?’
Stan paused for a moment to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and Bradley, still intent on clearing his plate, just grunted around a mouthful of bacon, eyeing Stan warily but letting him continue.
‘The ESP study, and the biofeedback machines, we had kids that could actually manipulate the energy in tangible things, solely because they really believed they could. They just, I don’t know, had the faith in their ability to control things. We could show them the effect they were having, we helped them to push harder, focus more intently. We validated their belief in themselves, and the gains were incredible.  I think we’d have made a huge breakthrough then if the parents hadn’t got scared and had us shut down.’ Stan paused, and pushed his bangs away from his eyes. ‘Anyways, I’ve been working with those same machines, working at manipulating my own energy field, changing my own frequencies and I’m making my own solid gains.’ He lowered his voice, but his excitement remained palpable. ‘You’ve got to try it, it’s amazing, when you’re tuned in, you can feel the change in your mind, your body – everything just starts to hum, and the buzz – jesus, the buzz is incredible. I can feel I’m right on the edge, every-time, it builds, and builds, and builds and my focus intensifies, and the feeling – Christ Brad, you’ve got no idea what it feels like… it builds until it’s like…’ His voice trailed off.
‘What?’ Bradley broke the silence, making Stan wince at the loudness of his voice.
‘Shh!’ Stan looked around furtively ‘Shh! I think I can travel through time’
Bradley barely looked up from his plate and grinned before breaking the first of three perfect eggs, watching the yolk meander into the mountain of home-fries.
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by submission | Oct 11, 2006 | Story |
Author : Pyai (aka Megan Hoffman)
She fingered the tendons in her arms. They were the echo of guitar strings and as she bent her fingers she could strum out different notes. She sighed, and the air rushing through her vocal chords sounded like a soft string section warming up, a quiet hum of a 440 A. A hand from the man lying next to her reached over to splay his fingers on her bare chest. They caressed their way down to her ribs, where each one, if lightly stroked, would sound like a piano key. She carried the pentatonic scale on the left side of her chest, and the in-between notes on her right. The man leaned over and kissed her C.
Her body had already played a symphony with the man lying next to her, his silent body a continual mystery to her. She couldn’t imagine how sad and lonely it must be to not carry such music within oneself.
Instead he would just marvel at her own notes, worshiping and composing with the same touches over her skin. She couldn’t bear the thought of silence, and sometimes very late at night she would hold her breath and long for the sound of a duet.
___________________
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by featured writer | Oct 10, 2006 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Featured Writer
The Queen came out of the entrance on the far side of the arena floor like some sort of ravenous stick figure scarecrow on stilts, her blind deathtrap of a mouth slavering thick deadly mucous. Her muzzle snuffled the air obscenely from underneath the rock hard carapace of her massive head as acid like hair gel dripped down and lubricated her jaws. It hung off of her in playful long wet strands. They flailed in the wind and sizzled in the dirt where they landed. Her second set of jaws lanced out, stretching in the dazzling sun. Her four arms clutched at the air like dancers as her giant misshapen top-heavy body found balance and settled back into a squat on her huge back legs. Her thick long serrated tail whipped around and stabbed impatiently at the walls. The spear shaped one-ton shovel head on the end of it lashed the dirt, sending fantails of soil up against the safety screens of the front row to their delight. The stalks on her back tasted the air for prey. They soaked up cubic miles of surrounding scent. They blasted out long chemical scent paragraphs in response to what they smelled but no one ever understood those paragraphs.
No one ever understood because she was one of a kind.
She was three stories tall, six tons wide, and a dyed-in-the-wool intelligent killer. Would have been top of the food chain if she wasn’t a sterile albino. She had gestated inside the body cavity of some subterranean pigment-free mammal that was like a polar wolverine. She’d turned out infertile and had eaten nearly every other living thing on the planet she was from. She’d been in a lot of fights and was nearly insane with the need to have children but unable to do so. She was a queen of an empty kingdom. She was a queen without subjects.
Until now.
The white carapace on her head was emblazoned with garish squared off logos from Skemtex, 3M, Macinsoft, Coke and Sheen. Other logos took up space on her long white arms and thick white legs. Like a living billboard of death, she paced around the perimeter of the arena underneath the energy screen, ravenous for the flesh of the crowd. Every morning, they’d shock her to sleep in her room and take the next batch of eggs that she’d spent the night trying to nuzzle into sudden life. Every single one of them held sterile barren slime. Her screams echoed down the corridors, haunting them.
But here in the sun she had no need to restrain her rage.
She triumphed over whatever they found to put in the arena with her. The cloned Tyrannosaurus Rex just pissed on the ground when the lights came up and offered the queen his throat in a pathetic wolfish display of non violent submission. The queen was only too happy to tear his car-sized head off with a staccato four beat swipe of her claws.
Lions, tigers and bears. Armoured cats. Beasts from other planets. Even other Queens. Just the fact of their fertility seemed to send the White Queen into a rage that had no equal or end until the other Queen lay in pieces scattered around the ring. Her ferocity and cunning had outdone them all. She played with them before the kill. She was always fun to watch. She was exhibition only. She was a never fail warm up act for the events that people bet on.
She was alone in the universe. She was the best at what she did. She was a captive. She couldn’t have children. She was angry all the time.
They set three Black Queens on her once. After the White Queen had killed them all in the most exciting half hour metrovision had ever seen, she’d thrown herself screaming against the energy screens until she shorted out one of the quadrants and launched herself into the fleeing crowd. She took out sixty eight people before they shocked her to sleep. The owners didn’t try that stunt again.
Someone had hung a gold star on the thick acid proof door of her lair under the arena. This was her home.
She padded silently tiger like around the arena, baring her crystal teeth, waiting for the other door to open.
___________________
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by submission | Oct 9, 2006 | Story |
Author : R. A. Jackson
“What do you think their response is going to be?†The Commander paced in front of the many consoles.
“I don’t know. You’d think it’d be obvious, but the Observer wasn’t optimistic.†Drayden joined the Commander at the viewing panels. They displayed the planetary analysis of a beautiful world. Vital data such as topography, climate, industry, population, and ecology were shown in great detail.
“Damn. These creatures seem to become more and more stubborn the further we travel in this arm of the galaxy. What have we got so far?â€
“She’s made contact with the leaders of the major factions. The ones with the necessary resources have been given the offer. Now it’s just a matter of time before we hear their decisions. Unfortunately, from what she reports, they have a lot in common with the Lycaon.â€
“Bureaucratic, greedy lot they were.†The Commander grunted at the memory.
“Glad to be rid of them, myself. Could you imagine our race sharing a planet with them? I had hoped that among these billions there’d be a few leaders with sense. Anyway from what the Observer says, I’m not sure they could commit either way in the end.â€
“I almost pity them. They have what everyone wants, but they cannot keep it. They cannot unlock the secret to their own treasure because they do not want to share it. What do they call this planet?â€
“You’ll find it amusing, sir. It’s called ‘earth.’â€
“Terrific. If they accept our offer, do we have to be known as ‘sky’ people? How we keep finding these backward planets is beyond me. I wonder, are you aware that I am the only Commander in the fleet to fail in securing symbiosis upon every contact? I have not succeeded even once. No doubt, it means that my armada is unparalleled in its planetary conquest experience. Nevertheless, it’s rather embarrassing that so many would choose death over sharing their lives with us.â€
“You cannot control their decision. It has to come from them. And as I have witnessed time after time, the decision they make on their own is always the right one. To live or to die should always be a matter of choice. No one wants to live with a species that never committed to change in the first place.â€
“Quite right, of course.â€
The Commander walked back to his chair in the center of the room and sat down heavily. Drayden moved to the communications console as it signalled an incoming message. “It’s the Observer.â€
“Answer her.†The image of the Observer appeared on the monitor across from the Commander’s chair.
“Hello, Commander. I’m heading back to you now, sir.â€
“Does that mean we have our response?â€
“It does, sir. They said no.â€
“Better luck next time, Commander.†Drayden smiled grimly as he alerted the fighters to start the invasion. “Think of it this way: there’s no fighting destiny.â€
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