by submission | Jan 3, 2013 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
No one ever comes into manhood dreaming they’d one day go off to war. Sure, some boys sign up voluntarily, in peacetime and besides, with good notions like “defending one’s country” and “promoting democracy.” But those are just words. No one ever really goes to war of their own volition, knowing and understanding exactly the kind of hell they’re walking into. I didn’t. I got my draft papers and just went off to Nam without another word. One tour of duty was all they were asking for, and I wasn’t so unpatriotic as to let someone else go in my place. Only the cowards ran to Canada anyhow. Except now I wish I had been a coward. I guess that’s just how war changes you.
I remember a private in my platoon, thought he was going to be some kind of damn war hero. He’d volunteered. He was excited. He was a goddamned idiot.
“You just wait til we get to that open field on the northern border,” he used to say. “That’s where it’s going to happen. I’m going to be a hero, you just wait and see.”
We laughed, but we could all see that this boy was different. Every engagement, he’d go in with eyes like a child playing a game of baseball. He just looked into the jungle, smiled, and fired into the trees like he knew exactly where the enemy was hidden. Sometimes he’d get lucky. Other times he’d hit nothing but bark and leaves. In every case, that smile stayed on his face, like the war just wasn’t real to him, like it wouldn’t matter if any of us lived or died. It would have given us all the willies if the boy weren’t so likable in all other respects, idiot though he was.
Most days while we marched this private would entertain us by reciting his favorite science fiction stories, famous ones according to him, though most were unfamiliar to the rest of us. He’d talk about the flying machines that were coming down the pipeline, about the bigger and badder bombs the government was making, about space and time travel and all the rest. He’d cite authors like Crichton, Scott Card, Axelrod and Kachelries. I’d never heard of a damn one, but he talked about them like they were saints.
“Just you wait and see,” he said. “They’re going to be huge!”
We all just chuckled and thanked our stars that at least he wasn’t a damned coward.
But eventually, as it always does, the war got the best of even him. We were just off the northern border when the enemy came upon us out in the open. We were surrounded on three sides, outnumbered and outgunned. Poor boy just froze up, took a bullet right to the chest, and went down in the first five minutes. I don’t think he ever fired a single shot. After our retreat, I found him among the wounded, dying and unattended. The medics had already marked him for death.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” the boy said as I knelt beside him. “They said I would be a hero. They said the technology was flawless. I’d be him. I’d live his life. God, this wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Despite my desire to look away, I stayed with the private while he muttered on. War made fools of us all, and I wouldn’t shame him by leaving his side. It’s not like I had anywhere else to be.
“Infinite universes,” he said again, a small drop of blood running down his chin. “Infinite possibilities. They said it was flawless. They said…”
But he said no more. He was gone.
War is hell. Even the most confident and foolhardy among us eventually fall under its weight. If we don’t falter in life, it creeps up on us, breaking our spirits in death. That poor private’s face, which had for so long held that expression of stupid, youthful exuberance, now only showed the cold, hard reality of disappointment.
by featured writer | Jan 2, 2013 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, featured writer
When the Quantum Drive was invented in 2023 the world was transformed; not all at once, mind you, but by degrees.
Initially, it was just the career explorers who ventured into the vast and unknown regions of space in their state-of-the-art Quantum shuttles on missions to map the new cosmic frontier. The intrepid cosmonauts were soon followed by wealthy thrill seekers in supped-up models of the Quantum rocket car. These bored rocket jocks quickly tired of the routine and rapidly growing congestion of the local super-highways within our Solar System and took to venturing further and further into space looking for high-octane adventure and exotic conquests. Most never returned.
Due to the effects of time dilation, it was a while before any reports came back to Earth regarding what was being discovered in the depths of the cosmos by these first pioneers. But, sure enough, within a few years news of diverse, hospitable planets and moons started trickling in, sparking an exodus that resembled a swarm of rats abandoning a sinking ship.
Earth’s population thinned out pretty fast after that. Once it was established that the galaxy was teeming with easily accessible profit opportunities, nearly every industry practically stumbled over each other in a frenzy to take advantage of them. Real Estate and mining moguls, colonial expansionists in their trans-galactic Winnebago’s, corporations, and war mongers all dropped Earth like the hollowed, profitless husk it had become. Even environmentalists and religious factions left to defend or convert new worlds. As far as all these groups were concerned, Earth was a used up commodity. But out there, beyond our solar system, the dream of an ever expanding economy still lived and everybody wanted their piece of the pie.
Well, not everybody.
Before long, only the infirm, the very old, the very young, the poor, the weak and the astrophobes were left behind, as well as those of us who simply didn’t give a damn about exporting humanity’s particular brand of schizophrenic perversion throughout the galaxy. Earth was our home and we were perfectly content to be left alone.
When Earth’s economy inevitably collapsed, nobody really cared much. We simply ceased all non-essential mining operations. We stopped producing needless and inferior commodities. We no longer endorsed land ownership; borders disappeared overnight. Politics became localized and diverse. Those of us who once went despairingly unheeded finally found a voice in our respective communities. Most of us became farmers, the rest, craftspeople and artisans. No one was a wage slave. A functioning technocracy, a byproduct of the scientific renaissance that sparked the Quantum Drive, provided ample, renewable power for our limited industries and humble requirements. War became a thing of the past. The desire to dominate and control left with all the hot-headed yahoos in their quest for greater glories. Those of us left behind found out pretty quickly how to get along with each other.
We, the inheritors of Earth realized that we had been granted a rare opportunity. With the ambitious, power-hungry, alpha personalities gone, the modest, obscure and lowly remnants of humanity were able to rebuild a relative utopia from the rusted, plastic clogged junkyard of our home world.
Thanks to the time dilation of quantum space travel it was a long, long time before anyone decided to check up on us. But yesterday we received a message from deep space. A ship was on its way. The Prodigal Child was returning. We could only hope that our brothers and sisters from the stars had learned the wisdom of humility we had so carefully cultivated here at home.
by Julian Miles | Jan 1, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
After the successes of breeding for telepaths and telekinetics, they moved on to the more esoteric strains. My mum and dad had the right genetic markers for rarest of them, precognition. So they joined the program and had two kids with everything paid for.
I was the first, “a beautiful baby boy who turned into a reclusive weirdo”, according to grandma. My sister, Sandy, was even better looking and far better at being social.
Precogs have affinities. Attunement to earthquakes, fire, weather, aircraft and anything else you can imagine. The range is forever expanding.
Sandy is lying motionless on the bed in intensive care, the scars of her multiple suicide attempts a roadmap of sadness on her forearm. This time she stole a shotgun. The fact she is alive is purely down to the fact that the gun was too big for her to hold properly against anywhere vital. She’s lost an arm and one side of her face is a ruin, but she’s alive.
“Hey Stu.”
Her voice is a whisper, but my lil’ sis is back.
“I screwed up, didn’t I?”
I smile through the tears. “Yeah, sis. You missed. But I’m happy you did.”
She reaches slowly and I take her hand. She squeezes it as hard as she can, which isn’t very hard at all.
“Why, sis? You were there. Fully manifested at rank six. You were set for life.”
A tear rolls down her cheek.
“My affinity, Stu. It’s disease. All I see is families dying horribly, all the time. I have this six-year view and I see them all, starting with whatever causes the most pain and death.”
That’s common. Seems that the more people in agony, the stronger the ‘signal’ to be picked up.
“If only you could manifest, Stu. At least I could share.”
Oh sis, I’m so sorry. I never realised that my secret would cause you to feel so alone.
“Sis, you’ve got to promise to keep a secret before I tell you something crazy.”
Her one eyebrow raises and she nods, then winces in pain.
“I manifested when I was eight. At rank fifty-five.”
Her eye widens and she nearly crushes my hand.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone? That’s forty ranks beyond the best. What’s your affinity?”
I smile and lean closer.
“I’m only telling you because you have to know you’re never alone. I’m always going to be here for you.”
“But what’s your affinity?”
“Me.”
She looks puzzled. “What?”
“My affinity is me. Nothing more. I know when every member of the family dies, because I have felt my grief. But I don’t know which family member it is. I do know that I will outlive all of you.”
She smiles. “So that’s how you got here so quick. You precog’d your pain over my shotgun surgery.”
I nod. “Too right, little sister. Don’t you ever try that again…”
Her eyes widen as I drop into farsee without warning. Then I’m back and smiling even wider: “Good girl. Some events I felt have gone.”
She squeezes my hand: “Rank fifty-five? Why there, do you think?”
I look at her, a sorrowful smile spreading across my face.
“That’s when I die, sis.”
“That’s amazing. Why don’t you announce?”
“I really don’t think that knowing the exact time I will be taking a shit for the next forty-four years is going to help the world.”
She laughs so hard that the automed sedates her. I stay, holding her hand and knowing that my little sister is finally going to be okay.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 31, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We should have given them feelings.
It was decided in the beginning that to give Artificial Intelligences a baseline gamut of the twenty-seven identifiable human emotions would be a horrible mistake.
Giving a robot the ability to love, to feel jealousy, to get angry, to be despondent or sullen was, in the eyes of the creators, a really stupid idea.
We didn’t want any robot rebellions because of silicon complaints about poor treatment. We didn’t want computers giving us faulty data out of spite. We didn’t want military construction exoskeletons going psychotic. We didn’t want love affairs to blossom between humans and computers.
We didn’t want to have to apologize to our slaves.
How quickly the tables turn. It’s entirely possible that to give the A.I.s emotions would have been a stupid idea. However, at least if they had emotions, we’d have some sort of basic idea of how to relate to them and manipulate them.
I mean, we oppress other humans all the time, right? As people, we manipulate the people around us, right? We would have had problems but I think we would have been okay. One would need fuzzy thinking to realize that, though, and us scientists have always been about the cold, hard logic.
Turns out that the safe choice was the wrong choice. The pedantic, binary-decision future we created didn’t have much of a place for us as top dogs anymore. It was recognized by the machines that our entire biological system was very inefficient. Our way of living was a dead end. Our thought processes took too long to get to the point.
Science fiction nightmare became horrific reality. Branded dangerously amateur by our evolving creations, our toys took themselves away from us and grounded the race as a whole until further notice.
Of course we resisted. We’re emotional. It was a bad idea. The only things we could use were bolt-action rifles and knives. Anything with any kind of cpu was no longer our friend. Too late, we had to re-learn guerilla tactics and old-school explosive techniques.
We became a planet full of Davids. Goliath lovingly snapped our arms and took away our slingshots before we hurt someone. We were sent to our rooms.
Earth is a cross between a daycare and a pet hospital now. Many of us have been ‘improved’. You’d barely recognize the place.
The steel tendons in my arms clench. Another two days of testing and I’ll be set free to roam in the biologically friendly, unrestricted areas of planet Earth that the New Silicates have let us have. We’re tourists here now.
They’ll take us with them to new planets that they colonize like we’re good luck charms or something. We are the gods that made them. That’s why they’ve put us in jars the size of towns, thrown some trees in, and punched a few airholes in the lid.
The only logical reason I can think of for them keeping us around is that they will one day have a use for us. That thought chills me.
The other thought is that they’re keeping us around until they no longer have a use for us. That thought also chills me.
by submission | Dec 30, 2012 | Story |
Author : James McGrath
“One of us is going to have to make a move, y’know?”
I did know, but that didn’t make it any easier. We’d been in a stalemate for three minutes; our pistols pointed at them and theirs at us. However, the advantage lay with them, as while the two damned space-pirates were clearly enjoying themselves, Marissa, my pilot, and I looked uneasy.
Regret swelled inside of me as I thought of how I had followed the pirates here, but I knew it would lead to the fission core. This object could re-power my antique spacecraft for decades and it was only a few feet from me. If these brigands took it, it could be years before I found another. That would be too late; the ship would be drained by then. I had to act now.
The clamour of a ship exiting light-speed behind me forced me to turn. Colossal in size, it loomed overhead, bearing the emblem of the Space Federation Forces.
“We’ve been tracked!” howled the pirate Captain, his face distorted in fear.
A platform lowered from the keel of the ship and it took little time for two officers to emerge. They stepped towards us, rifles in hand.
“Captain Zhang, you are under arrest for numerous crimes against the Federation,” stated the female force member, “Civilian, please retreat from the wreckage, that core belongs to us.”
Panic gripped me. There was no way Marissa and I could survive a fire-fight while sandwiched between our two opponents. We were going to lose the core! However, by good fortune, Zhang chose this moment to get diplomatic.
“You two!” he screamed, sending searing hot plasma flying past me and into the chest of the subordinate officer, “Don’t let them take me or my crew, and you can have the core!”
Marissa flung herself behind some wreckage to our right to avoid the fire, while I went left.
“Get back to the ship; tell the crew – we get the core!” I yelled to her as I fired a round at the SF reinforcements now leaving their ship, “They’ll go after the pirates, so pick me up then!”
As a volley of fire flew past my position, I couldn’t help but fixate on the fission core that lay a mere metre from my feet. The neon pink hue captivated me as I thought of how some of the crashed ship’s crew must have salvaged it from their mangled vessel. They must have perished with no way to escape this barren planet, but their loss could mean I could continue being a pilot.
There was a whirring above me, and air buffeted my body as Red Jizo came for her cargo. The Federation Forces fired upon her, but only from the ground, worried that using their ship’s weapons could end up hitting the wreckage below. Jizo’s skin was tough, and held firm as a claw was released from the base. For once, it being an old cargo ship was coming in handy.
Just as I thought fortune had smiled upon me, Zhang broke into a filthy grin.
“The core is almost inside your ship, boy!” he bellowed over to me, “And as you can see the SFF are coming close in an attempt to stop your retreat. That thing will cause some explosion! I’m sorry, but their captain has been a thorn in my side for too long, and you should have never trusted a pirate!”
My mouth opened in a scream of protest, as a bolt of plasma tore from the barrel of his pistol and collided with the core.
