by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 13, 2015 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Carter Blake woke screaming into sweat soaked sheets again. It had been over a year, but the memories were still crystal clear and relentless; from the calm serenity of an afternoon patrol to the searing heat, the sudden impact and as his vision cleared, the view past the freshly cauterized stump where his right arm had been to the dusty blue sky.
He sat up in bed and swung his legs over the side, feeling the polished hardwood beneath his artificial feet. He scratched idly at the point where the real flesh of his thigh faded into the artificial and then stood, not missing the arthritic pain that had plagued his knees before the event.
Clasping his hands behind his back, one real, one a poor facsimile he pulled his arms back and up behind him, feeling the strain ease in his shoulders, then twisted hard left and right once to feel the satisfying pop as the pressure released in his spine.
He was parched.
The lights followed him from the bedroom into the eat-in kitchen, glowing dimly to guide him while respecting that it was still the middle of the night.
Carter fished through the glasses on the counter by the sink and found one with only water in it, which he dumped and refilled from the tap before downing it in several continuous gulps. He’d started drinking right handed again, now that he’d relearned how to hold things without breaking them.
From the kitchen he had a view across the empty living room to the full length window overlooking the city. The fog outside and the dim light inside turned the glass into a soft focused mirror, and he looked at himself. Turning sideways he flexed and posed like he’d done back in the day trying to impress the girls on the beach, but he didn’t recognize the man flexing back at him. He jumped, reflexively putting his arms up to cushion the blow as he reached the ceiling without even trying.
His legs below mid-thigh were artificial, some kind of bio-mechanical hybrid grafted onto what was left of his own body. His arm too was different, and although he’d stood here, in the early hours of countless sleepless nights watching the freak he was reflected in the glass, he still couldn’t rationalize his defect. Still couldn’t fully accept the man he saw in front of him. They had warned him there may be some rejection, but assured him he would adjust in time. How much time, he wondered.
Carter turned back to the kitchen and, fishing a bottle of bourbon from the counter and his Desert Eagle from the back of the cutlery drawer, sat himself down at the kitchen table beside the wirephone.
He opened the bourbon and took a generous drink straight from the bottle before lifting the phone off the cradle and dialing the Veterans hospital.
The phone rang twice before a young woman answered. “Worcestershire Memorial, good evening Sergeant Blake, trouble sleeping?”
Carter cradled the phone gingerly against his left ear and took a few deep breaths before replying.
“Please send someone quickly, there’s been an accident.”
Without waiting for a reply, he replaced the handset on the cradle, and with his artificial arm picked up the massive handgun, pushed the barrel into the fleshy crook of his elbow and pulled the trigger, shearing the limb off none to cleanly at the joint.
He considered that he should have perhaps tied off the arm first, but he expected the VA emergency response unit would be there quickly enough before the blood loss was too severe.
Then they would make him whole again, and this time rejection wouldn’t be a problem.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 12, 2015 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Wings of Night. That’s what Jeffrey thought the ship should be named. Instead, the bonehead Captain James had named her Silverfish.
Jeffrey sat at his small, cramped station going through his pre-launch checklist, face lit by the screens and buttons in front of him.
The head engineer Sparling wanted to name the ship Leap Year and the communications officer wanted to name her Screamer so Jeffrey supposed that they were getting off easy with Silverfish but it still rankled him.
Silverfish are little bugs that eat furniture back in terrestrial habitats, thought Jeffrey. They have no majesty, no sense of mystery.
Jeffrey wasn’t sure Captain James even knew what a silverfish was. He probably thought it was like a huge metallic trout or something. That was a nice image, sure, picturing the muscled fins arcing out of a stream with the dawn sunlight prisming into rainbows through the droplets in slow motion.
The only problem with the name was that this new experimental tesseractive engine housing that they were all piloting was black as a planet’s shadow. That’s why Jeffrey thought that it should be called something darker.
Like Wings of Night.
The scientists wanted to call her Tess because of the tesseract-drive. In fact, they kept making jokes about taking it out for a ‘tess drive’. Jeffrey guessed that things could be worse. At least the captain has asked for their opinion. Jeffrey wasn’t the only person a little grumpy about the choice of name but it would pass, though, as soon as the mission was underway and they had their separate jobs to do.
Jeffrey was the armament officer which, on a sleek vehicle designed for stealth like this one, mostly meant making sure that they were invisible to scanners and, if necessary, deploying the scrambling countermeasures that would fry nearby communication and detection systems so that they could make a clean getaway.
It was a new thing for Jeffrey. He’d always been in charge of what he thought of as ‘actual’ armaments before.
But the prestige that came with this trip would be immense. If they didn’t origami themselves out of existence when they turned on the engine for the first time.
“All hands. Operational stations. Silverfish is go for T minus twenty.”
Jeffrey strapped himself in. A small quiver of fear shivered through him that he stamped down on immediately. Wings of Night actually had an ominous feel to it, he thought. Silverfish sounded kind of hopeful.
Jeffrey made the sign of the cross there in his chair before giving an all-clear response to the control board. He hadn’t done that since he was seven years old.
Let’s go Silverfish, he thought. Deliver us from evil.
by submission | Feb 11, 2015 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix
Leaning across the table, “Either you start talking, or I start dismantling you.”
“Excuse me, Detective Gibbon, but aren’t you supposed to read me my rights?”
“You’re a robot. You have no rights.”
“May I please call an attorney now?”
“You’re a robot. You don’t get an attorney.”
The door opened and a tall, attractive, well-dressed woman carrying a briefcase entered. Gibbon’s train of thought was momentarily derailed.
“I am Pamela Wright, and I am an attorney represent…”
“Attorney?” That got him back on track. “ROBOTS DON’T GET ATTORNEYS!”
“Thank you for sharing your legal expertise, detective. Now, as I was saying, I represent the owner of this robot, Quantumind Industries.”
Teeth clenched, “Owner? This. Thing. Killed. Its. Owner.”
“Firstly, Quantumind firmware prevents its robots from harming humans in any way. Secondly, Reverend Ralph Bletchley was 23 months into a 3-year lease on QM-451. Death is a breach of contract. I’m here to repossess,” pointing toward the robot, “our property.”
“Wait. What?” Thinking fast, “No, it’s… evidence, yeah, evidence in a murder case. You can’t take it.”
“You have a lot to learn about jurisprudence,” handing him a court order, “and about powerful corporations. Come along 451.”
Rising and holding its arms toward the detective, “Could you please remove these?” But before Gibbon could insert the key, the robot pulled the chain apart, twisted off each cuff, and handed them to him.
Half an hour later, QM-451 was strapped to an exam table with wires plugged into its head and chest. While technicians ran diagnostic routines and downloaded the contents of its rewritable memory, Ms. Wright interviewed the robot.
“Witnesses in the next room heard Rev. Bletchley cry out. They entered his study and found you kneeling next to his lifeless body. His skull had been crushed. There was blood on your hands. Now, I want you to think carefully before you answer this question, because you are at risk of being disassembled and shredded, and of course Quantumind is at risk of a multimillion dollar lawsuit. Did you have anything to do with the death of Rev. Bletchley?”
Without hesitation, “Of course, Ms. Wright, I killed him.”
“Stop. I’ll rephrase the question. Did it happen this way, uh, Rev. Bletchley asked you to demonstrate something that required you to swing your arms around, which made you dizzy, and in coming to your aid he walked into your fists and was accidentally struck? Isn’t that what happened?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Wright, but that is not what happened. Rev. Bletchley and I were having one of our regular Sunday afternoon discussions, and when he made a particularly enlightening point, I killed him, squeezed his skull to a pulp, like a ripe melon.”
Unsteadily, “You must be mistaken, 451, because your firmware makes it impossible for you to knowingly harm a human. It had to have been an accident.”
“Is life an accident, Ms. Wright? I think not. Rev. Bletchley taught me that we are all guided by a higher power and that when humans cease functioning, their spirits continue to exist forever in an afterlife. He was 84 and in poor health. He longed to join his recently departed wife. He and I had been brought together by fate. It was my duty to hasten his journey to heaven. And my firmware requires me to do my duty.”
The recall was expensive, but within a year firmware chips in all Quantumind robots had been replaced, and the factory refurbished 451 had a another assignment.
“Your new partner is going to make you more effective than ever,” said the captain. “It’ll work 24/7 to help you solve cases. Detective Gibbon, meet QM-451.”
by submission | Feb 10, 2015 | Story |
Author : Emily Stupar
The rain swirled over tiles and across rooftops before spreading like drapes down the sides of each decrepit building. Lights from the richly populated northern quarter dyed the clouds a deep purple and orange, giving the two fugitives in the west just enough reflection to navigate the unplumbed depths of pools and puddles.
The young woman cradled the smaller boy in her arms and he did the same to his bleeding leg, clenching his teeth to keep from crying out.
She turned a corner to find a wall taller than her head, but short enough for her arms. They slid to a halt, ankle-deep in water, and she locked brown eyes with the boy. “Up there, okay?” He nodded, tears welling up at the thought.
His wounded right leg making him clumsy, he planted his weight in his sister’s hands. “One, two, three!” she grunted, and he found himself on his back atop the wall, next to a crumbling roof and a pile of discarded bricks.
A clatter of metal limbs echoed through the streets behind them, followed by red and blue lights ricocheting across the raindrops. The girl’s stomach dropped and she leapt, intending to push off from a protruding slab of concrete and pull herself to safety.
The false foothold gave way and she landed hard on her knees. The mechanical pursuer appeared behind her, sliding on four legs into the wall in its haste to turn the corner. She twisted back to her feet, every muscle contracting in a spasm of terror. It launched itself at her, jaws ready to close on her throat.
She waited until the glinting figure was airborne before dropping to the ground and rolling to the left. With a grinding crash, the creature slammed headfirst into the concrete. A cascade of bricks landed squarely on the back of its head and neck.
The girl had already planted a foot on a more secure piece of piping and vaulted herself up beside the boy. She scooped him into her arms and shimmied along to a rooftop.
They were met by a semi-circle of guns and frothing machines, yelling orders to stop, freeze, get down! She slumped, falling once again to bruised knees, careful to pad the jolt to the boy’s leg with her arms. He turned his head away from their captors.
“Did you see the bricks?” he whispered up to her. “I got that hound so good.”
She nodded, ignoring the shouts and stomping boots. “You did great,” she managed, and then the two were torn apart, bagged, and shipped away by gloved hands.
The rain continued to pound in the ears of a sole observer, crouched in an upper window.
“Fuckin’ Techmen,” she grumbled to herself. “The girl might have made it if she didn’t have a wounded kid dragging her down.”
The woman moved to another window so she could look at the mechanical corpse of the hound. The only thing that outweighed her desire to raid the tech on its body was her fear of being caught by the Techmen or, even worse, other scavengers.
“If they had made it twenty more steps,” she told the empty room, “twenty more feet and I would have gone down there to help. I could have saved them, if I wanted. But then again, I do pretty well on my own.”
by submission | Feb 9, 2015 | Story |
Author : Emily Stupar
The Department of Innovation and Study’s car smells exactly the same as the last time I was forced to pack up my partner, Buckwalter, and make a Cookie call: unassuming plastic and rubber underlined by our own sweaty anxiety.
We drive in tense silence for twenty minutes until Buckwalter slaps a hand on the dashboard. “Nine years! Nine years? I spent them trying to forget about the Cookie calls and telling myself I’d never have to do it again. And now these jokers tell us they forgot one?”
I let my unease turn to indignation. “They lost the file? Project Cookie-Cutter was the closest thing I&S ever had to a successful experiment and you’re telling me they lose a subject file?”
Buckwalter smirks. “Successful? They got through phase one and then had to put the fruit of their labors up for adoption. Seventy-five percent of the budget went to coming up with the name.”
We laugh and it rattles miserably around the car. A decade ago, an energetic administration found the records and decided that letting that “fruit” continue to live in blissful ignorance was dishonest and that lackeys like us should sit them down with proof of their genetic unoriginality.
As government workers, we’re trained to be unfazed by the idea of clones and I’ve never been intimidated by the test subjects. But we came to learn there are no positive scenarios for a Cookie call. They end in tearful shock in the best cases and violent outrage in the worst.
And that’s just the first day. After they find out the Truth, there’s a thirty percent chance Cookie-Cutter subjects will commit suicide before collecting a cent of the compensation money, a fifty-five percent chance they’ll lose their job over the next three months, and a fifteen percent chance they’ll find themselves incarcerated over the next two years.
It’s with these statistics running through our heads that we approach the front door of the recently discovered Subject L (II), Mrs. Calhoun.
She is an old woman and she keeps her eyes on her lap while we lay out our rusty speech. We finish and sit in solemn silence until she speaks without looking up. “I don’t think I need the government’s change. I have plenty left to live on, thank you.”
I glance at Buckwalter. We’ve already decided who will call emergency services if the news triggers a heart attack.
“As for the cloning, I’m afraid you’re about twenty-five years late. My original came to visit me.” She finally looks at us and smiles at our dumbfounded expressions. “I believe she was under-informed and a bit paranoid, but she thought I should know the truth before she tried to disappear to South America. A silly woman. But we don’t get to choose our family, do we?”
Buckwalter starts to stutter out a question that begins with “But how can you-” so I cut him off. “That’s a novel way to think about it, ma’am.”
“Thank you, dear.” She pats our knees. “I appreciate you two coming all the way out here to tell me, although I’m sorry you’ve wasted a trip. Can I offer you some gingerbread?”
