by submission | Sep 28, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
“Hi Kristen, it’s your mum…”
Jaques picked up a picture of Kristin Trinket off of her bedroom nightstand. Twenty years old, red hair, stunning green eyes. Crooked, imperfect teeth at home in one of the warmest smiles he had ever seen. He set the picture down and it made an empty noise in the cold little room, like asking for help on a crowded city street.
“I was just calling because I haven’t heard from you in a few days.”
He looked at her body. She had been pretty once, but not any more. Now she was dead. Two lacerations with a rusty old razor blade, one down each arm.
Through the door in the living room Jaques’ two coworkers were busy packing up all of her belongings into little cardboard boxes. They had the easy job. Jaques picked up her bloodied, limp left arm in his hand and reached into the cut she’d made. He found the round piece of machine and pulled it out. It was maybe four centimeters wide, and one thick.
“I was worried when you didn’t come to our tea date yesterday. And now you’re not answering your phone. Are you feeling alright, dear?”
Poor Kristen had been feeling down one day, so her Pharmaceutical Assistance Unit had administered some antidepressants. One adverse reaction run amok later, and here she was.
Jaques lit a cigarette in his other hand, inhaled. Who cared about the deposit now? Nobody.
He let the ash fall onto the floor. The cigarette sat between his fingers, waiting. Jaques was looking at her picture again. When she had needed people the most, where had they gone?
“Your father misses you. Ever since he lost his foot you coming over has been all he’s had to look forward to.”
Everybody had an assistance unit. It was state-mandated for the sake of people’s health – you couldn’t refuse it. It monitored all your vital signs. It synthesized the drugs you needed when it decided you needed them, and the pharmaceutical companies sent the bill to the state. The condition that people accepted this on was that they worked, so failure wasn’t tolerated. Jaques looked down at the device, covered in congealed blood. There had been a failure, and that was why they were there, to prevent an erosion of profits and trust in the establishment.
“Anyways, it’s getting late and I still have to visit the market. I just want you to remember that I love you, and your father loves you, and if you ever need anything we’re here for you.”
They would say she had moved, if anybody asked. Went to start a new life.
They would burn her body and all her things once they had emptied the apartment.
Jaques finished his cigarette and ground the butt into the floor. Then he produced a body bag from a pocket in his coat and laid it out on the ground. Without any ceremony he flopped Kristen Trinket onto the floor and shoved her into the bag.
“I love you, honey. I’ll call again tomorrow, alright?” She paused. “Bye, dear.”
In the other room the antique answering machine shut off, done recording its message. One of Jaques’ coworkers pulled it out of the wall and put it in a box. Jaques hefted the body bag over one shoulder and carried it into the living room. Nearly everything was packed up now, Kristen Trinket’s entire life summed up in a bag and some boxes in the back of a truck.
And then she was gone.
by submission | Sep 27, 2012 | Story |
Author : Andrew DiMatteo
“Now, there are a lot of channels down there. Some of ’em may surprise you. Be careful . It’s easy to get distracted when you’re Immersed. Always remember to pay attention to your surroundings and…”
The dive operator was giving us condescending instructions. Stupid local. Treating us like morons who’d never been in the water before, like he was some kind of expert on the tech, rather than a minimum wage deck hand. No way was he’s getting a tip when this is over. I tune him out, focusing on my gear to avoid listening to him drone on.
I start my dive as rays of light slice through the crystal water. Even fifteen meters down, the colors are unbelievable. The greens and yellows look like neon signs in a language I can’t quite comprehend. The reds and oranges that our eyes usually wash out at depth are still present, adding subtle highlights and flares of originality to the fish that pass by. Even the somber brown of the plainer corals and sponges seems stately rather than drab. The Immersion–ware is already partially active, working to integrate me, augmenting my senses.
Browsing the options coming into range on the mask of my rebreather, the number is overwhelming. I haven’t dived this reef before so I set it to cycle through the top rated channels. I can feel my senses sharpen fully as the Immersion takes hold and
Languid motion washes over me. I graze lazily, knowing there is nothing here to harm me. My shell instills a constant sense confidence. The slow, pulsing need to store energy drives me between seagrass beds at a casual pace. The painfully awkward crawl to lay my eggs on land will take much out of me, but that is many months from now. Until then I beat my flippers slowly in the rhythm of the current, gracefully migrating around
We are myriad. We build, we filter, and we grow with furious abandon. We are not a static feature. That is an illusion for slow-lived macro organisms. We build a new city every year and abandon the foundation. We are the substrate of all life in this world and they are blind to
Squeeze! The gaps in the rock are tight, but I am flexible! The crevice ahead is only just wider than my beak, but I get through to the juicy mussels on the other side. Grab, pull, eat! My patient suckers are more than a match for that stupid mussel. Shadow! Change color, match patterns, freeze
There is laughter everywhere – in the sunlight, in the waves, and in the water. My brothers and I laugh at the silly land dwellers with their masks and clumsy movements. Hilarious! I flip my tail and swim in fast circles around them to make my brothers laugh. One brother’s laugh to turns into a chitter of warning. Something hungry arrives. We could beat it – my brothers and I could beat it with our blunt noses, we’re so tough! But it’s not worth the effort. We leave, laughing again as
It moves slowly. It acts injured. It is no threat, it is prey. I sweep my head back and forth, sensing, smelling. It is not prey I have tasted before. No matter. I close in, my eyes roll back, and I taste
by Clint Wilson | Sep 26, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
The one-hundred-and -eleven year old man stood at the transit stop listening to an antique MP3 player. His electric blue faux hawk practically glowed in the afternoon sun.
Suddenly an eighty-eight year old man came strolling up, twirling a neon yellow cane and said, “What’s with the delay Daddyay? I’ve been walkin’ up this street for a while, and what I see holds back my smile.”
The older man grunted in disapproval of the stupid punk’s needless rhyming.
The man with the yellow cane continued… “The transit runs every two minutes on the clock, and all I see here is an empty block. But don’t get the blues, I’ll check the news.”
The super centenarian continued to stand with his defiant look of disgust.
No sooner had the younger man tapped his temple with a forefinger than he quickly came back with a report. “Ah here we go. Here’s why the traffic’s slow.”
The older man snapped back, “Stop with your ridiculous rhyming you punk. There’s been an accident on East 15th Street. Everything’s backed up. I got the news off my iPod four minutes ago. The transit’ll be along when it gets here.”
“iPod? Say daddio, you still listen to a wooden raddio?”
“Don’t get cute. I was reading news offa iPods when you were still ten cc’s of spunk in your old man’s sack.”
Just then a spry fifty year old walked up to the transit stop. His silver foil clothing glinted brightly in the sunlight. “Beep boop beep beep boop boop boop beep boop boop beep?” He inquired.
The eighty-eight year old turned to the one-hundred-and-eleven year old and said under his breath, “Damn these kids and their binary talk. I wish he’d stand on some other block.”
Suddenly the speech of the rhyme-talking punk didn’t bother him so much anymore. “Fucking right brother… someone should have killed his mother.”
by Julian Miles | Sep 25, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The pastel decorated walls were hung with tasteful art that changed as needed to offset any negative morale the system garnered from the gestalt of everyone’s mindnets. Since the advent of the cranial implant, society had changed beyond all recognition and this had forced policing to evolve as well.
Two figures leant against the wall of the hushed office, engaged in silent conversation like everyone else. Some predicted the death of all but the most rudimentary spoken language skills before the end of the century. Detective Reid paused to put a datapad on the desk before resuming his conversation with Detective Constable Moore.
*So we caught him at last?*
*Her. She’s a basket case.*
*Given her hobby of vivisecting prostitutes, I’m not surprised.*
*No, not in that way. You know the transcriber purchase that originally flagged her?*
*Yes. Uniforms spotted it and we were following her for the regulation twenty-four hours before arrest. She went out killing that evening.*
*Seems she did it deliberately so we would catch her.*
*What?*
*You need to listen to the transcriber. It’s been verified.*
The pair of them headed for the audience room and in the presence of an evidence unit the transcriber, and illegal device for undetectably recording mindnet chats, was set in playback mode.
*We’ll skip the early stuff, which includes the murder in full sensory pickup. It’s the end you need to hear.*
Moore gestured to the evidence unit. It cued and started the playback.
Her hysterical voice was shrill with emotive bias. She had bought a top of the line unit: “Oh god, oh god, oh god. No. No. I can’t take this.”
A second voice made Reid start. It was male. An exquisite old English accent reproduced with emotional tones of smug satiation.
“That’s fine, Penelope. This was the last one for you. The police are on their way, they seem to have gotten wind of us. You can have your body back and remember, if you say anything about me they’ll lock you up as a lunatic, because bodyjacking doesn’t officially exist.”
“But it wasn’t me!”
“Of course it wasn’t, Penelope. It was me. It has always been me. Now you lie down and they will be here to collect you soon. Sleep, dear Penelope.”
“But I don’t want to-”
Her voice became unintelligible as her consciousness was overridden. Reid turned to Moore, who raised a hand for him to wait and pointed at the transcriber.
“This is for the detectives listening on the transcriber this clever filly bought to get your attention.”
Moore gestured for the evidence unit to pause the playback. He looked at Reid, who resorted to speaking, a stress related habit of older people.
“Good god. We’ve got a slasher that hijacks normal people using their mindnets? ABM stock will tank if this gets out.”
Moore shook his head before replying verbally out of politeness, his voice scratchy from underuse: “You’re right. This one’s going to be a huge mess. I thought you should hear the whole thing before an edited version becomes the official one.”
Reid raised an eyebrow in query. Moore paused his gesture to the evidence unit to ask a question: “What was District Seven before the Rezoning?”
Reid scratched his head then hunched as an ominous suspicion came with the answer: “Whitechapel.”
Moore’s shoulders slumped as he gestured to the evidence unit.
The smug voice seemed to fill the room: “Let this be the start once again. My name is Jack. Catch me if you can.”
by Duncan Shields | Sep 24, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We were so wrong.
We saw evolution as a paring down to essentials. Our pinkies were getting shorter and soon we might only have four fingers, for instance. We theorized evolution as a process that winnowed away the unnecessary. It aspired to simplicity, we thought.
The spiked and glimmering ships that came down through the clouds all over the world looked nothing like each other. The only characteristic they all shared was that they were complex.
One ship was a series of two hundred rings interlocked and rotating. One ship had millions of thin antennae pulsing and waving, landing like an obscene sea urchin and balancing on fibers no wider that a hair. Impossible half-invisible cathedrals, glowing neon origami, ships comprised of stuttering light floated down from the sky. Ships made of dyed bones, ships made of all types of metal, and ships made of patchwork flesh warbled their way to the earth. One ship appeared to be a sixteen-mile long piece of crimped silk twisting through the air currents ever closer to the ground. Another had thousands of orbiting asteroids chasing each other around playfully.
Since no missiles were flying and the newsfeed stations showed the ships landing around the world with no gunfire, I could only assume they had arranged this with our governments already or that the entire planet’s military had been struck frozen in fear like a caveman spotted by a sabertooth tiger.
A mirrored mobius dodecahedra touched down on the soil in the central park near where I lived in Iowa. It was only a few blocks over so I walked there to see what I could see. If this was the end of the world, I was going to grab a front seat. There were around fifty like-minded people in the park near the craft.
It shone and sparkled in the sun like a mutated disco ball. My head hurt if I tried to figure out its impossible shape. One panel of the ship disintegrated into a cloud of metal butterflies and an alien cantered down before us.
What I assume was its head looked like an ornate chandelier. It moved quickly, rippling on millions of tiny legs. No two legs appeared to have the same number of toes or joints. It had so many arms that I initially mistook them for fur, each arm ending in what looked like a job-specific tip. Its back was infested with softly cooing antlers. I couldn’t guess at the purpose of most of the appendages. The complexity of the alien was almost too much for my mind to handle. It was hypnotizing.
Two other aliens ambulated out behind the creature, each of them more bizarre, colourful, and complicated that the first one. One looked to have hundreds of blinking cat heads, each with too many eyes. It rolled forward on a festival of coloured tentacles and flapped a hundred types of tiny wings. The other one kept going in and out of focus like it wasn’t tethered to this reality very well but when I could see it, it looked as if the instruments from an entire orchestra had been glued together by some welder gone mad.
The one in the lead spoke by rattling its glittering chandelier head and formulating the sound waves into words in our direction.
“We’ve come to help.” It said in a lilting voice. “Apparently, you’re evolving backwards.”
