by submission | May 25, 2013 | Story |
Author : Kiel Finger
He stabbed his knife into the hardpack soil.
It didn’t go in very deep; in fact it barely stood upright. Maybe an inch or two into the ground, tilted to the left. Not as dramatic as he would have liked, but the meaning behind the act was clear.
It was an old symbol, developed aboard one of the many ships that brought them to this world. They’d meet in the agri-levels, the offended party planting a blade into the fertile soil, showing they wished to air their grievances peacefully.
His grandmother had shown him. She had been one of the last who remembered living aboard the fleet. She would tell him of the vastness of the habitat zones, the false sun and the gentle, recycled breeze.
He hoped she’d be proud of him now, confronting a woman who saw fit to take their land.
The representative was a head taller than him, garbed in the traditional loose fitting blouse and pants of the Admiralty.
The Admiralty Commission rarely tried to extend their reach out to the western plains, but here was a representative, starring Tull in the face, demanding he show her something called an “Official Land Claim Agreement” or else the Admiralty would claim the land itself and forcibly move him.
“Miss Kine, I don’t know what this document is you’re talking about, but my family has lived here since my grandmother’s folks stepped off the fleet. And no one has…”
Representative Kine cut him off.
“Tull, I know the old ways, but a knife in the dirt won’t stop us from taking your acreage. Either you prove to us you legally claimed this land at some point, or it is ours, by right, according to The Fleet Compact.”
There was a long silence. Tull could see his show of the old ways had completely failed. He’d hoped Miss Kine had been raised in some outlying area, where these sorts of things were still taught and practiced. But it was clear to him now she was indeed Capital woman. She knew only of knife talk through history lessons. He knew now he needed something flashier.
Tull casually squatted down and retrieved the old, dull knife from the ground. He moved it to his left hand, but did not sheath it. He hoped she noticed.
“Miss Kine, you said you’re familiar with the old ways, right?” Tull said neutrally.
“Yes Mr. Tull. I’ve studied much of the late Fleet to early post-Fleet cultures.”
“Then maybe you know one of the practices of the people from the ship Arata Akebono? It was a ritual used only when two parties could not agree on property ownership. After all other options had been exhausted, the first party to spill their own blood upon the disputed property would be instantly granted ownership.”
“Yes, well, I hope you don’t think that such an act….”
It was Tull’s turn to interrupt the representative. He raised the knife and quickly drew it across his right palm, horizontally. It cut nearly to the bone despite it’s dullness. Blood poured out of the wound, streaming down his arm and began falling to the ground in large droplets. Kine wasn’t able to hide the look of shock that spread across her face.
Tull smiled inwardly, despite the pain. This was what he had needed; enough of a show of bravado and fearlessness to horrify a Capital-dweller.
He hoped that when she now returned to the Admiralty, she’d tell of crazed western plainsmen, backwards and angry. Not worth the effort of displacing.
Please, he thought, let it be enough.
by submission | May 24, 2013 | Story |
Author : Joseph Pascale
My ears were assaulted by a variety of sounds as I entered the 21st Century-style café. The most alarming was the grinding sound that could have come from a malfunctioning robot, but was actually emitting from large copper contraptions. I was also unaccustomed to the period music and the actors working behind the counter, shouting orders such as, “Decaf mocha latte!”
“Welcome to Café Literarti, may I take your order?” one of the actresses said to me as I peered at the handwritten menu.
“Um, I think I will go with a standard coffee.”
“I’d be happy to make that by hand for you just as soon as you verify your age,” she said, her affixed smile unwavering.
I flicked my wrist over her micronner to prove I was old enough to purchase the drug.
“Perfect. Will that be all?”
I nodded, sending the payment.
She pretended to use a cash machine and when she pressed a button it beeped. “Please wait over there while we hand-make your order.”
“Wow, this seems like real paper,” I thought as I took my steaming hot beverage and found an empty table. It was small and wobbly. “Did the tables really used to be like this?” As I moved a chair, it scraped up against the tile floor, and once seated, I found it to be hard and uncomfortable. “People couldn’t have stayed in these for long, could they?” I thought. “Well, I wanted to be in the appropriate atmosphere. Maybe it’s working.”
Taking the slightest sip of coffee, my tongue told me it was tasty, but still too hot to enjoy. Accessing my Libraria Ultima, I found the beginning of the first novel I intended to read. It was the debut work of an author from the 21st Century who I’d never heard of before an acquaintance mentioned him yesterday. As I began to read, I found his writing style simplistic, but engaging. The smell of my coffee tempted my eyes away from the words and I took a few more sips. It was beginning to cool down. I was midway through his third novel when the coffee was cool enough to swallow in gulps. After I read all of the fiction, I began to make my way through the blogs, diaries and letters. The coffee on the bottom of my cup was lukewarm by the time I got through the final message he had ever sent, and I held strange emotions about what I had just read.
Peering down at my empty cup, I decided against staying for another coffee and took the cup back toward the counter. I tried to hand it to one of the actors, but was pointed in the direction of a “garbage” container. I laughed as I dropped my cup into the cylinder. “This place must be pretty authentic,” I thought as I made my way toward the front door. The recently read fiction returned to my thoughts due to my confusion over one of the motifs. Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. Not only did he lack an easy way to scale the buildings, but the city was so vast that he hadn’t yet managed to clean all of the first-floor books. I suppose that was how a reader felt living in an age before they began to augment humans.
I left the café, but the thoughts stayed with me.
by submission | May 23, 2013 | Story |
Author : Aldous Mercer
Gerrard goes down on one knee to tie Junior’s shoelaces. He double, then triple-knots the things, and wonders what else she’s left deliberately undone.
“Did Mommy tell you why I wanted you to come today?” His voice is low.
“Uh-Huh.” Junior’s toddler-treble is appropriately hushed. “I have to meet Daddy’s Mommy.”
Daddy’s Mommy. Not “your Grandma”, not “my mother-in-law”. Gerrard’s wife tiptoes so quietly around her relationship to the screaming sky.
“It won’t be fun. You’ll have to be very brave, ‘kay?”
He feels a little disappointed at the half-heartedness of Junior’s nod.
Gerrard straightens, looks around the square. So many faces he recognizes, faces he’s grown apart from with every dog-year between Transmissions.
Some of the others have kids in tow.
On the buildings around the square, the advert-screens blink out, right on cue. The lag in the signal—GEO to Hawaii to Relative Square—4.1 seconds.
“Hello Earth!” The voice booms out from pole-mounted speakers all around them. “This is the Captain and crew of the Magellan, wishing you all a very Happy New Year. It’s been a few hours for us, but seven years for you, so before we transmit the logs, we’d like to send some personal messages to our families—”
Static.
Gerrard knows every hiss and pop of the twelve-second stretch of noise.
He feels his palms grow clammy. Junior is pulling at his hand; confused, probably, at the suddenly over-tight grip.
The screaming starts.
The signal has been taken apart, analyzed, put back together infinite times. Voice-pattern analysis, background analysis, stress analysis. Thirty-five years’ worth of analyses.
Gerrard’s ear, overfamiliar with the voices in the signal, detects a slight change in their agonized cacophony.
Magellan was aimed at a star twenty-one lightyears away. The ship has surfaced six times now. And as far as anyone can tell, it will keep surfacing, transmitting, till it is so far away that the Sun will bloat and swallow the inner worlds, and Earth will reach the end of all things, and have nowhere left to go.
He looks down—Junior’s eyes are closed, tears leaking between his scrunched-up eyelids, unoccupied hand clamped over his right ear. Gerrard relaxes his grip; Junior snatches his hand back to cover his other ear.
Three minutes after “Hello Earth”, the screams cut out.
The logs and data-packages and visuals never come. Just the same recorded message, then the static.
Only the screams change every time.
The screens around Relative Square blink on, return to their subdued still-frames. No video. No audio. Everything has become quieter since Mankind’s first—last—attempt at hyperspatial travel. Loud voices, loud advertising—they’ve given way before the world’s newfound sense of decorum; people have adopted a hushed way of speaking. And just when it seems everyone is likely to forget, and break out into unseemly chatter, the Transmission comes again.
It takes Junior a minute to realize it’s over. He tentatively opens his eyes, looks up at Gerrard.
“It’ll happen again in seven years,” says Gerrard. But at the panicked look in his son’s eyes, he relents. “You don’t have to come.”
“I was brave?”
Nobody is brave anymore. Not Junior, not Gerrard, nor any of the Earth’s other twelve billion. And the people on Magellan just keep screaming and screaming, and nobody knows why.
“Very brave—so brave, you’re going to get an icee on the way home.” Which will put off his wife’s frozen silence for another half-hour.
Junior answers Gerrard’s wan smile with one of his own.
And the ice-cream parlor will have a restroom where they can both wash their faces.
by submission | May 22, 2013 | Story |
Author : Roger Hammons
The Lady of the House had a mind of her own. “Christopher James Robbins!” she scolded. “Yes, ma’am! Yes, ma’am!” he replied, picking up the dirty clothes. The forceful puff of hot air from the vents made him chuckle, which seemed to annoy her even more.
He hadn’t programmed her puffing behavior, at least not intentionally. It had emerged all on its own, much to his surprise and delight, after they had lived alone together for almost a year. “I guess the honeymoon’s over,” he thought at that time, bemused. He still marveled at how it reminded him so much of his ex-wife Patricia’s exasperated huffing when he’d done something that particularly annoyed her. Such a whimsical interpretation, the fidelity was uncanny, a masterstroke of emergent behavior.
For Dr. Christopher Robbins, the Lady of the House was “déjà vu all over again” in so many remarkable ways, large and small. That was by design. That was his success. She was his grand experiment–his great obsession–an evolving computational cognitive model based on in-depth real-time data recordings of Patricia, spanning their thirty-two years of marriage. He had recorded everything in minute detail–the stimuli, the reactions–and then synthesized a model congruent with the observations. It was painstaking, bleeding-edge work.
By the halfway point of his marriage, Christopher had succeeded in creating the initial prototype. Dubbed the “Lady of the House” by Patricia, she ran on an ultra-dense, nano-core hypernet, built especially for her, using the entire structure of the Robbins house and would interact with the house occupants via elaborate multi-media installations. In the early years, the interactions were carefully controlled and served as entertainment. Later, as the novelty wore off and the Lady matured, the interactions were casual, unscripted.
The early prototype delighted guests with a personality they swore bore a sisterly resemblance to Patricia. Encouraged, Christopher worked the science and the engineering intensely—continually upgrading the hypernet with new sensors, nano-core elements, and multi-media devices; tweaking the data collects and information extracts; and refactoring the software as new scientific insights and algorithmic breakthroughs were achieved. Over the years, the Lady of the House grew in depth and subtlety, ever more recognizable as Patricia’s disembodied twin.
Patricia once teased him, “I hope you’re not planning a Stepford wife, Christopher!” But, unlike a Stepford wife, the Lady of the House wasn’t there to flatter him or to be subservient in ways that Patricia refused to be. Indeed, the Lady was just as capable as Patricia of making those trenchant, sometimes petulant, observations about Christopher’s moods or actions. Like Patricia, she did so often.
Nearly ten years after Patricia’s departure, the Lady had become his steadfast companion and helpmate. She inquired about his day and nagged him to take care of the mundane tasks that she couldn’t do for him–eat, sleep, bathe–when he was too obsessed with work. She encouraged and comforted him as best she could.
The Lady of the House was indeed a remarkable entity, but Christopher knew she was a poor substitute for a wife. He missed Patricia. In perhaps five more years, he would begin processing the data from their last miserable year of marriage. Then, it wouldn’t be long before he lost Patricia again, completely.
His worst fear was that when his life’s work was done–when all of the existing recordings of Patricia were completely analyzed and the last insights incorporated into the model–the Lady of the House would remain incomplete. Incomplete when he needed to ask. Incomplete when he needed to know.
And, without perfect completion, how would she be able to explain, truly, why Patricia had left him?
by Clint Wilson | May 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
The piles of scrap starship parts stretched off toward the horizon in every direction. I’d lived on the junk planet for almost five years now, but my escape was imminent.
I wound up here like so many others, stranded in orbit with a broken ship, unable to pay the outrageous prices the thieving proprietors of this wasteland demanded. Finally I had crashed, and by the letter of the law my damaged ship had become their property. Fortunately the same laws also forced them to grant me refugee status.
They had chased me, as they did all other refugees, into Zone 470, a place where the junk was extremely old and deteriorated, and of little value. Yet my small band and I clung to life here, making valuable reconnaissance runs into other zones. Now finally we had our warp drive.
I stood back with Zeptag the three foot tall Rodachian. “What do you think?” he asked me in broken common.
“I think it looks like a pile of garbage,” and then added, “And I think it looks like freedom.”
With our limited resources one of the biggest challenges had been to put together a craft large enough to hold all of us. Zeptag’s genius with fluidics had been our savior as he had been responsible for bringing a two-century-old hover crane back to life. Without it we would have never been able to assemble the heaviest pieces.
My old maintenance robot Freddy was putting the finishing touches on some welds and the others were busily loading our meager supplies. I shook my head as I gazed upon a Croanthan freighter cockpit scabbed onto a Zachtarian troop transport hold. You could tell it was Zachtarian by the faded remnants of the yellow patterns they seemed to paint on all their ships, save for the dull gray side heat shields pillaged from an old Hoolyichie battle bird, of course heavily modified to fit. But what really scared me was the thruster cluster on the underbelly. It had been everything our old hover crane could do to bring the heavy Tenzonite engines across miles of terrain under the cover of darkness. But they were ancient, and even with Freddy’s reinforcements I wondered if they would hold together long enough to get us off the ground.
If we could only make it into orbit we would be safe. The warp drive, still with half-charged batteries, was our biggest prize. It was Rodachian, pillaged from Zeptag’s old ship at incredible risk.
Now we all piled aboard. I crossed the rusty deck plates and took the captain’s chair. All lights were green, save for the rear escape hatch alarm, but I knew it was faulty and welded up tight by Freddy so no risk there. I flipped the ignition toggles and ran my hand over the screen. “Here we go kids, it’s now or never.”
The old Tenzonite engines belched to life and every fastener in our makeshift craft tried to rattle apart, still she seemed to be holding together, for now.
Freddy warned, “Here they come, over the south ridge.”
The dust rose in the distance as the junk planet proprietors raced toward us. I increased the lift and surprisingly, as she shuddered once more, even harder than before, our makeshift tub began to slowly rise into the air. Now our pursuers were close enough to see, and they were setting up an ion cannon. I shoved the thruster lever forward and as the hull strained and old metal shrieked in protest I closed my eyes and uttered, “Come on baby, you can do it.”
