by submission | May 25, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“Captain,” exclaimed chief engineer Chen, “the quanto-gravitetic drive has been hit! If we don’t reverse the polarity of the phase rectification circuits within the the next three minutes, the magnetometric decouplers with be completely de-energized!”
Captain Rodriguez frowned. The sneak attack from a hostile Fomalhauti starship had taken out the SS LaForge’s primary warp field initiators. “Chief,” said the captain, “I need power from the quantum instantiation generators routed to the tachyonic transmitter array.”
“But, Captain,” Chen replied, “there’s no way the Heisenberg manifold can take that kind of punishment. The magnetohydrodynamic conduits will undergo an exponential quantum re-entanglement feedback before the Bussard ramjets can possibly compensate.”
The LaForge shuddered as she was struck by another Fomalhauti barrage.
“Captain,” said the ship’s navigator, “we just lost the monopole capacitors! The ship’s superluminal transrelativistic flux inversion sensors just went offline!”
Rodriguez slammed his fist on the armrest of his command chair. The situation was untenable. “That’s it!” he roared. “Chen, I want you to channel an anti-meson stream directly into the turboencabulator, even if it means sacrificing the entire photino containment chassis!”
Another shudder. Another Fomalhauti direct hit.
“Sir,” said Chen, “if I open the anti-meson stream to full power, then I can’t guarantee the singularity transducer won’t undergo a quantum tunneling cascade that will make every superconducting isoprocessor on the ship suffer a causality paradox.”
“It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” said the Captain. “Now, I want all the ship’s quark inverters set to–”
Captain Rodriguez never finished his sentence. A Fomalhauti missile destroyed the LaForge killing all aboard. A subsequent investigation by the United Earth Interstellar Defense Force Committee on Combat Operations resulted in a new engagement protocol being implemented. In all hostile encounters with the Fomalhauti that came after, all UEIDF starship captains were required, until such time as hostilities had ceased, to limit his or her orders to the words “Return fire.”
by Julian Miles | May 24, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Hey you! What the hell do you think you’re doing to my daughter?”
“Not hell, Daddy. Heaven. Heaven!”
Wendy’s daddy was a Detective Inspector and things got a little difficult for me after that. Couldn’t go anywhere without being pulled over. People stopped inviting me out because wherever we were would get raided. After the sixth cavity search in a fortnight, I enlisted as I had no future in Sussex.
That was twenty years ago. Earth is now just another backwater in an interstellar community that has been at war since before I was born. The Trangurians don’t like us; we’re carbon based life and that is heresy from their view.
“Incoming!”
The warning interrupts my trip down memory lane and I scramble out of the shower cursing as I dive into the nearest set of powered armour. No undersuit means bruises and sores, but chafed beats dead every time. I lurch to the viewport as the suit finishes booting. A Trang Yellowbird, nicknamed ‘Icy Banana’ as folk tend to get an odd sense of humour about things that kill so well. I see the crackles of green lightning around its main gun and am making for a weapons hatch before my thinking catches up with my survival instinct.
I’m not there when the death arrives; I’m hurtling toward the dark blue soil ten storeys below. I hit so hard the cloud of blue hides the curtains of light in the sky. The ground holds and I’m only waist-deep. I’m just congratulating myself when a couple of tons of the tower I vacated lands on me. Through the pain I feel the earth below me shift. Going down.
I’m past six feet under and still hellbound when I explosively emerge into open space and land spectacularly in a Trang patrol. I presume spectacular as the survivors have fled by the time I sit up to admire the splatter patterns that stretch three metres up the side of the bore-tank. Takes a couple of minutes to interface the controls and a few more to turn round, then I’m off to Trang central.
Two hours later I tear through the reinforced walls of their sub basement and arrive in the pit. Any prisoners taken by the Trang are made acceptable to their gods by the simple expedient of being carved until they look like Trang, then have their souls saved by being ground to paste. But they do like doing it Aztec style: en masse with an audience. This means that between grinding days they usually have a few of us locked up.
The place stinks but I don’t care. Never in a million years did I think rescuing her was possible. Wendy joined up a week after me and we stayed together through everything; until her squad got taken when their patrol ship went down a month back. I’d spent sleepless nights crying and cursing that evening so long ago, blaming myself for her decisions with that arrogant idiocy men seem so good at.
The crowd outside the tank thins as they stream down the tunnel. When they’re all away, I’ll reverse this thing all the way back so they have protection. Bore-tanks are assault class. Nothing can take them from the front. Then all my prayers are answered as a familiar figure leans in the access hatch.
“Come to take me back to heaven?”
I grin like an idiot as she crams herself in to sit beside me.
“Let’s get back to friendly turf first. Then we can work on that.”
by submission | May 23, 2012 | Story |
Author : Alex Bauer
The light on the wall is green. The machine beside her is on and receiving. The walls bleed nuclear colors like a pool of oil before shifting to uniform white. First session in years, motivated by some desperate nostalgia. The machine hums, squat and blinking, next to her. Now he comes in, sits at the end of a long steel table, sighing.
“Why did you wake me?” He says. His voice is jerkier than she remembers, more pained. Expectant. That, more than anything about present circumstances, chills her to the bone.
“Can’t we talk? I want to just talk.” She says, unsure with his attitude. “It’s been a while.” The room is stark white; the only smudge to its banality is she and he. He practically glows here. The only place he ever has, she thinks. The thought too bitter to stamp out. His face is vague as if he were a stone in a river. Worn by too much time, too much self-correction. Brown eyes that were once blue cup her in the palm of his gaze.
She looks away, looks to the doctor watching from somewhere behind the one-way mirror taking up the right side wall.
“Mm,” he burbles. “Suppose it has. You’re the one who wanted to see me every morning. So, here we are. Though I think a lot more mornings have passed between this one and the last, you know.”
She flinches. He drums his fingers on the table, looking at a point between his hands. Considers it. Always considers it. Something hot catches in her throat, finding herself unable to speak for some time. The strange aeroshape of a gun sits between his hands like she’s always imagined. The coroner’s report hasn’t faded like his face. Single exit wound out the back of the head. His front teeth knocked out by the cycling of the receiver.
The machine hums, squat and blinking, next to her. A strange tickling sensation at the base of her skull. Digital blood pours out his mouth. He laughs, looks down at his now stained clothes, the chipped front teeth on the table.
“Just let me go.” The fading memory says. “Please. You came in here for nothing. This isn’t some weird absolution.” He looks at her again, his eyes reflecting all the pain she felt. Too long since she’s been here, too long since she’d let this memory out. “Do you even remember my name? Do you?” Panic writhed its way down to her very pith.
He favors her with a bloody smile. “Of course not.”
“Turn the machine off,” a voice intones over the speakers. She looks at the mirror, sees only her own panicked rictus.
“You’re just talking to yourself again.” He says, shrugging. “Makes no nevermind. Too much guilt, too much booze. You tried to drink me away and got weepy eyed and came back to this looney bin to see what you could remember.” The gun solidifies on the table. He picks it up.
“Turn the machine off, ma’am.” The doctor says again. She very calmly reaches over to switch the machine off when he points the gun at her. Simple light and digital outlays set in the walls make it look real, but all the same, she jerks back.
“You remember this because it was yours. You remember the details more than you remember me. So, you feel guilty. It’s normal. Maybe not for as long as you have, but normal enough.” He leans back, running a wavering hand through blood-shiny hair. With a sudden jerk, he’s leaning forward, wavering and warping as if the world can’t contain him. Her mind can’t contain him. “Wanna see how I did it? It’s there. You think about it. That’s why you do this. You don’t even wanna know why, just how. You think about doin–.” She lunges, flips the switch, and he bursts apart in a fountain of light motes.
Silence. “Are you all right, ma’am?” Says the man on the speaker.
“Ye-yes. I…shouldn’t have come.” She says.
“Quite alright. This form of interactive therapy is only good for the short-term. It’s been too long. But…seeing what was said, would you care to step into my office? I think we need to have a talk. And not about your son this time.”
She nods, not trusting her mouth, stares at the machine as if it were something alive. Very gingerly, she peels the diodes from the base of her skull, winces at the few strands of hair plucked out with it. The walls bloom psychedelic before returning to their neutral state. She places them back on the table and looks at them there between her hands. Considers them.
Finally, “I think I’d like that.”
by Clint Wilson | May 22, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
Henry became suddenly aware. Aware that he was sitting upright in a comfortable chair, wearing comfortable clothes made from warm white fabric that he did not recognize. All around him was whiteness, save for a wide bay window across the room that looked out into pure blackness. He looked to his left and saw a man standing there, also dressed in white. The man’s head was shaved, his face stony yet friendly. He smiled warmly.
Henry suddenly remembered that he could talk and found his own voice welcome but only distantly familiar, as if though he hadn’t heard it in a very long time. “Where am I?”
“You’re in the future Henry.”
“The future?” He blinked, considering it. “For real?”
“For real.”
For the moment he asked nothing else, finding it bothersome that his mind was having so much trouble processing such a seemingly small bit of information. Then he managed, “How far? I mean, what year is this?”
“We now use a different calendar than you are used to, but translated it’s the year 4970.”
Again, nothing but a simple number, a date. Why was it so hard to fathom what it meant?
“How did I get here?”
The bald man squatted down beside his chair, still smiling. He put a reassuring hand on Henry’s forearm. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
The last thing he remembered? He tried desperately to think. Then with a sudden wave, “A heart attack! I had a heart attack. They were working on me in the ambulance. Then… then, well then I guess…” He paused unsure. “I guess they must have… saved me?” A sudden quivering in his voice revealed his own doubt.
The bald man patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry Henry. They didn’t save you.” He raised a grey eyebrow and shook his head, never losing that friendly, reassuring look. “I’m afraid you died that day.”
Henry Hamilton shuddered in the comfortable chair. He looked back to the bay window and out into the blackness. Suddenly a small light zipped by, followed by two others. “What was that? Out there? Is that… space?”
“Yes, those ships are transporting people to other stations. There is a lot of traffic here in Jupiter orbit.”
Suddenly the bewildered man remembered that he had legs. He sprang from the chair and sprinted across to the window. There he pressed his face against the clear glass and gasped aloud as he gazed upon the twisting lighted tendrils of the space station that stretched off for kilometers in many directions. And all the while below, the mighty pink and red behemoth planet glowed so massive and close he was afraid that if he reached out he would touch it.
He spun back to the white room and the patient, smiling man. “Why? Why now? I never asked to be frozen. Did I?”
“Relax Henry. You haven’t been in stasis or cryo-sleep.”
“Then what? What?” He was beginning to feel like a caged animal in the room.
The bald man suddenly shone a small light into his eyes and Henry instantly calmed down. Then the friendly stranger walked him back to his chair and helped him to sit.
“Now just relax and listen while I tell you all about mankind’s wonderful mission to regenerate everybody through the genome reestablishment plan.”
“Who’s everybody,” Henry asked dreamily. That flash of light had done something to him. He felt wonderful.
“Why, everybody who has ever lived and died of course. We’ve finally done it Henry. We’ve finally found immortality and nobody is going to get left behind!”
by Duncan Shields | May 21, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Shades of coffee and caramel run under my fingertips like love letters written in goose-bump braille. There’s a heat from the honeyed angles and well-oiled hip joints that quietly beg me for a brush of fingertip. The skin is warm and dry to the touch. You’d think from the smoothness of her back that she’d been polished every day and you’d be right.
She’s easy to turn on. There’s a switch behind her left ear. The new prototype Gabrielle.
I’m putting the finishing touches on my masterpiece. It’s late on a Friday night. I’m one of the only people who manufacture custom units. This warehouse has vats of perfection in the basement. God is in the details, they have said, and details are all that concern me. I hardly sleep.
Robotic lovers are available all over the world but I am the most popular designer of companions.
I have designed the women and men, much to the delight of my customers. I am an artist. I know that it is the flaws that make perfection attractive. A perfect lover must be unique. I make women whose eyes are just a little too far apart. There is a gap in between the front teeth of some of the men. There are two extra pounds of flesh on some models and others who were just that few ounces too thin.
One flaw was all it took. The clients went crazy. I was paid more on top of my already exorbitant prices.
People fell in love with my creations.
On the way up here, I wandered between the vats and looked at the shadows in the murky protein-rich water of each plexiglass container. Renee. Violet. Jessica. David. Thomas. Christopher. Each one was different in the details but similar in perfection.
I looked forward to these nights and I dreaded them. I always dove in with a feverish need to outdo myself and I always left with a horrible crushing feeling of failure in my gut.
I was the best at what I did. A little godling churning out love for the rich.
