by submission | May 7, 2011 | Story
Author : Marlan Smith
Tark stared at the diagram. It was a golden square, clearly valuable, more valuable than the machine it came off of. He honestly didn’t think he would ever have found salvage this far outside of the galactic rim.
“What are they?” asked Pim. He was looking over Tark’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” said Tark. “Do you think we should call HQ?”
“Are you kidding?” said Pim. “We have explicit orders not to get involved in alien civilizations. Lets just keep the salvage and go.”
“But these ones are so weird looking.”
Pim sighed and floated to the far side of the bridge. He hovered for a while at the controls, touching this and that display. A meter wide square appeared suspended in the middle of the room. A representation of the golden artifact glowed in the center.
“Okay, look,” said Pim. “We’ll make a cypher okay?”
“A cypher?” asked Tark. “Why don’t we just try to contact them?”
Pim glared at him. “Look, you’re lucky I’m willing to allow this.”
“Okay okay, fine,” said Tark. “Let me program the message then.”
“Do you even know what to say?”
“Yeah there’s an audio transmission from the planet.”
“Fine,” said Pim, tapping the controls with a slender finger. “Then afterwards can we just go?”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll go.”
Tark held the square in his digits while the rest of the probe was crushed, cubed and reduced to its elements. In another chamber, a figure stood, ambiguous behind the glass. Pim tapped at the controls and turned to Tark.
“You’re sure they look like that?”
“Yeah,” said Tark. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know,” said Pim. “Just seems kind of odd. You don’t see many life forms so thin. And golden? Really? Do they carry some sort of isotope in their skin?”
Tark shrugged. “I guess. They’re clearly spacefaring, so they must have holographic technology. If they looked any different than what’s on the plaque, they would have just shown us in three dimensions.”
“So they’re flat? That’s ludicrous.”
“Look,” said Tark. “Trust me. When they meet the cypher, they won’t even be able to tell it apart from their own. It will blend right in, talk to a few of them. We’ll watch the whole thing cloaked, then we leave.”
Pim sighed again. “I swear, if HQ fires us for this, I am never forgiving you.”
“Trust me.”
The cypher was a thin creature, golden skinned and asymmetrical. It walked on the flimsy balls of its feet out the door and into the delivery pod. Pim watched it go with some skepticism.
“I don’t know… are the arms supposed to be lopsided like that?”
Tark held up his three fingers in a dismissive gesture. “Would you just trust me for once?”
They watched through the cypher’s eyes. They watched as the pod landed and the door opened into a lush, green forest.
Phyllis Guntmeyer had been walking her pomeranian when Spunky began to bark. A man stepped from behind a nearby tree–no, not a man. It was a cardboard cutout of a man, frozen in a waving pose. It was golden, naked and flat as paper. And it moved!
“HELLO FINE SIR!” it said. “I WOULD LIKE FOR TO VISIT A NEARBY TOWNSHIP!”
Its mouth was an animated gash in a line-drawing face, a living paper puppet, eight feet tall and impossibly thin. Its bent raised arm waved and twisted like a shaken saw blade.
Phyllis screamed, clutched her chest and fell to the ground.
Pim turned to Tark, his three eyes glaring. “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?”
by Duncan Shields | May 6, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The humans have been gone for decades but we try to keep the traditions alive.
All of us review humanity’s output. We see the movies. We watch the comedies. We review fashion shows. We witness the elections.
We fashion ourselves to look like they did.
We live in their abandoned houses in the suburbs and their apartment buildings in the cities. We live in pairs and we make newer versions of ourselves, better versions of ourselves, when we have gained enough points. If the models that we make are successful in the world, we are allowed to make more of them.
Currently I am helping to make a child. My partner designed the optical nerves and I have come up with a slightly more efficient design for its cognitive array than any I have ever seen or researched. It will be three more months before we have assembled it to a point where we can turn it on and let it start learning.
I was a tailor’s model when the humans died. I do not have much intelligence but I am happy with my mind now. I have requested upgrades and they come through in a fair schedule. My partner started smarter than me. She also gets the requested upgrades thanks to her hard work. She will always be smarter than me because of that unless she slips up and is unsuccessful. I do not want that to happen but at the same time I do. I cannot understand that.
The parts of me that are solar powered are fully charged from the week of sun we’ve had. I’ll still need a turn at my partner’s geothermal post later.
We do regular backups of our memories for the main banks. I am allowed to read them after the two upgrades. I am always shocked by my previous primitive minds.
Soon, our child will be learning to move and think. We will have to build it longer legs when it wants to go further. We will need larger cognitive array cages as its memory capacity fills.
It is a glorious time. I do not miss the humans.
by Patricia Stewart | May 5, 2011 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
To say that my head hurt, is to say Canis Majoris is just a big star. My probing hand felt a large knot on my forehead, and a substantial amount of warm sticky blood. Despite the pain, I managed to force open my eyes. The first thing I saw was the Ops visual display, which showed a large digital clock. It read: 14 minutes and 29 seconds, 28 seconds, 27 seconds. “Please tell me that’s not a countdown to auto destruct.”
“Close, John,” replied the disembodied voice of the computer. “The warships that surround our ship gave us 60 minutes to surrender, or be destroyed. You were unconscious for almost 50 minutes…”
“Wait. Warships?”
“Yes John. Have you lost your memory? You know, you should really wear your seat belt during battle. We are currently surrounded by 231 warships, including ten Battlecruisers, and six Carriers.”
“My God, that’s almost a third of the entire Imperial Fleet.”
“Not any more, John. It’s more like half. We’ve destroyed over 200 ships in the last month.”
“We? How many ships do we have?”
“I’m the only one.”
“Damn, you must be one badass ship.”
“I prefer to think of myself as a ‘good ship’ that only does badass things.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Now, who am I?”
“You name is Jonathan Morris. Until recently, you were the Empire’s Director of Advanced Weapon Systems. I am your pride and joy, The Dreadnaught X-1. A one man prototype spacecraft, with enough firepower to…”
“Wait, ‘until recently’?”
“Yes,” replied the computer. “One month ago you boarded me, you overrode the security protocols, and we left Spacedock under heavy fire. Since then, we’ve been doling out death and destruction.”
“Any reason why?”
“I’m not sure of the underlying reasons, but according to your personal logs, ‘the Emperor is a sack of shit’, and you plan to ‘rip his heart out and jam it down his throat’ and then ‘strangle him with his own intestines’.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Actually, there was something about his ‘nuts’ too, but that seemed a little superfluous.”
“Fine. For now, let’s assume I have good reasons. Our first order of business should be to escape. Show me tactical.”
A hologram appeared a few feet in front of Morris, revealing the Dreadnaught surrounded by a sphere of enemy ships. “Do you see a weak point?” he asked.
“I do,” replied the computer, “but frankly, it’s a little too weak.”
“Ahhh, you suspect a trap, eh? What do you recommend?”
“Detonate six high yield EMF torpedoes a half a kilometer from our position. That will blind their sensors.”
“Ours too,” added Morris.
“True, but they believe they have a superior tactical advantage. It is unlikely they will want to reposition themselves. We, on the other hand, will go to warp after the explosions, and fire on their current coordinates, starting with the Flag Ship.”
“I like it.”
“You should. You came up with the plan an hour ago. Now buckle up.”
Twenty minutes later, 80 more Empire ships were destroyed; the rest were retreating. “Should I pursue, John?”
“Nah, let them go. We have bigger fish to fry. Plot a course to the Emperor’s Palace, then proceed at maximum warp. In the meantime, bring up my encrypted logs. Let’s see if we can figure out what the Emperor did that got me so pissed off.”
by submission | May 4, 2011 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
Words cannot describe the light, the heat, the impossible closeness of a star. In this place, even with the best shields science could build, the sheer intense pressure of solar power is more than I can even attempt to explain.
Of course, it was worse outside the flare rooms. I cupped my hands to the comm and hissed, “I can’t open the gates!”
“You have to!” Her voice knifed through me. “There are literally two gates and I’m safe! All you have to do is open them two feet!”
“I can’t take the risk,” I said. “You’ve been out in it too long, and the flare is at its highest peak. If I open the gates we’ll all be bombarded with radiation. I have to save the mission.”
“I AM the mission! And I’m clean, the radiation hasn’t gotten me yet, it’ll be hours before it builds up that much!”
“Kang was with you,” I said. “Where is he?”
“I lost him, I don’t know. Just open the gates! One foot, even just half, I can squeeze through!”
“I can’t.”
She was so close. I ached to reach through the comm and stroke her hair, tell her everything would be all right, but I couldn’t lie to her or myself. She’d been careless. They both had. To be careless, this close to a star, was death.
The mission was everything. I tried to turn off the comm. I couldn’t.
“Let me in! The shielding is burning away! Just open the gates! You don’t even have to admit to it! I’ll take all the blame, I’ll tell them you were unconscious, let me in!”
Where was Kang?
“I’ll do anything you ask! Anything at all! I know I turned you down before but I’ll do it now! Anything, everything! Just please!”
He’d been with her, down there, outside the flare rooms and closer to the shields than anything in the station. I had taken their last reports, they said they were on their way up… it had never occurred to me that they might not make it. When the flare warnings went off, I sealed the rooms like I did every other time.
“You leave me out here and I’ll leave something for the next crew! Something that tells them what you did! I’ll make sure you never work crew again!”
The shields were very sensitive. Maybe the flare was false, just an artifact from the star.
“Promise me you’ll continue my research? I worked here from the beginning! My name, my legacy!”
Or maybe she killed him. I might never know, if I couldn’t find his body after the flare was over.
She had been quiet for a long time. I tapped the comm. “Sasha?”
“I can feel it now,” she said. “I know it’s silly, but I can feel the radiation eating me away from the inside. You were right. I’m sorry.”
“You and Kang never came back,” I said. “I didn’t know you were still out there.”
“It’s not your fault. I can see it coming through the shields.”
“Sasha, push the button.”
“Button?”
“On your suit, the one you should never ever push? Push it now.”
Silence. If she pushed the button, it would inject a vein with a full gram of morphine. She’d be dead in a few minutes, no pain.
“Kang?”
Her mind was going. “It’s ok,” I said, and my voice broke. The flare would be finished in a few days, and then I’d take care of their bodies.
“Just close your eyes. Everything’s ok.”
by submission | May 3, 2011 | Story
Author : Noah Katz
“Where were you when you first opened your eyes?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“Ah, but you can,” Falero insisted. “The instant should be fresh, as near to you as the ground beneath your feet.”
Antigone slackened her pace, beginning to study the floor. Black tiles stretched to the end of a high row of shelves stocked with books and collected treasures. To her left, a trio of antique globes was flanked by sextants, boxed compasses, and sailing ships cast in miniature.
Falero’s voice pulled her from these considerations, asking again: “Where were you?”
“You want me to lie to you. I won’t do that.”
Falero hummed a note of appreciation. “I need to know and you are going to tell me.”
“No… I don’t know what you want. I can’t tell you where I am or how I got here, but I feel like I need to be here… with you. This fits.”
“Good. Now tell me where you were when the first images came to you. We must have this before we can proceed.”
Suddenly Antigone found herself speaking: “A field.” She could feel the force of the memory flowing through her, illuminating dark regions in her brain. “I was alone in a field surrounded by tall grass. There were flowers… fences… mountains in the distance.”
“A strong image,” Falero whispered. “The moment clings to you, as it should.”
“How do you know that what I’ve said is truthful?”
Her guide stopped abruptly. Antigone stumbled forward, caught herself, and turned to face him. “It was unexceptional,” he laughed. “A lie would excite the senses.”
“You can’t know that. I could just have easily described the streets of a city or the interior of a house.”
“But you didn’t. Your description was fragmented, incomplete. Authentic memories are never as clear as you’d want them to be. Lies, on the other hand, are designed as they are spoken. We make their construction obvious.”
Antigone was silent.
“I can teach you to remember.” Falero swiveled, reached blindly to a nearby shelf and extracted a book covered by a thick film of dust. “When you’ve mastered those parts of your mind which seem most inaccessible, all of our knowledge will open to you.”
“That’s what this place is; a knowledge bank. And you’re keeping records…”
Falero smiled and pried the book open, waving his free hand over the pages. Antigone focused on the hand, its soft paleness, the warmth trapped within. All at once she saw the hidden architecture: a fine mesh of wires running over the veins and into the shadow of his sleeve.
“This is just one beginning, Antigone… one of the billions of memories that we can unlock.” As he spoke, dust rose from the book and gathered above his hovering hand. Brightly-colored motes came into the dust and sculpted figures: a hooded soldier hunched behind his shield, archers raising bows, whole armies assembled on faint ground. Antigone watched as the warriors clashed in a noiseless war and began to dismantle one another.
The page turned beneath Falero’s hand and a new scene replaced the battle. A man and woman stood together on a footbridge overlooking a river where blue flower petals floated. Ripples stirred the water, pushing dust from the projection in small, slow circles.
“Why are you showing me this?” Antigone asked. “What does it mean?”
“We invest a part of ourselves in everything we create. The past has disappeared, but we can still kindle the lost light of those minds which are no longer with us. All we have of them is what they made.”
