by submission | Dec 27, 2009 | Story
Author : Gavin Raine
It’s ironic, but I’d been having having such a good day. The children all had their heads down, working on their numbers, and I even had a little time to daydream for once.
Then, I had that strange feeling that my chair had just sunk six inches into the floor – you know the one – and I knew it was real because the children reacted too. I was just about to reassure them that everything was OK when the gravity went off and all the lights went out and everybody started screaming.
The darkness only lasted a few seconds, of course, but it was terrifying for them – and for me too. If I hadn’t been shouting at them to be quiet, I think I would have been screaming myself.
Anyway, the emergency lighting came on and I started grabbing children out of the air and pushing them towards their lockers. They were all very good really and they remembered their drill perfectly, but it’s not easy getting into a pressure suit in zero gee. Most of them were crying and one of the boys was sick and Molly Davis got it in her hair and… well it was just a god awful mess.
We were just about getting organized when that idiot Lieutenant Birch started talking on the PA. “Wow that was a big one!” he said. “The engines have cut out because we’ve got a bit of spin,” he said. “We’re going to have a nice new crater after that one,” he said. He talks to us like were a bunch of kids on a fucking fairground ride! I’m sorry, but it’s just really inappropriate.
Listen, I know we’re inside an asteroid with a shell ten meters thick, but this is happening far too often. Inter-stellar space isn’t as empty as they told us it would be and traveling at 80% of the speed of light is just plain suicidal. We’re still six months from the turn-around and we can’t slow down, or we miss our target, so you know it can only get worse.
I’m sorry Captain, but you’re going to have to find yourself a new schoolteacher. I’ve made my decision and I’m going into the freezers tomorrow. All things considered, I’m not prepared to sit around and wait for the big one. I think it would be better to die in my sleep.
by submission | Dec 26, 2009 | Story
Author : Jim Wisniewski
She smiles and tilts her head to push a lock of brown hair behind her ear. I run the image back a few seconds and watch it again, entranced as always by the fluidity of the motion. The machines can show me any moment of her life, but this is the one I keep coming back to. Such grace, such elegance encompassed in so simple a gesture. Even so there is no sense of artifice in it. The beauty is simply a part of her, in everything she does.
I play the scene back in slow motion, studying every changing nuance of her face. The detail of the image is excellent, now. Resolution was low in the early days of the project, but at this point there’s enough holoscopes to sift even the tiniest detail from the shell of thirty-year-old photons. Before long we’ll push the cloud out to a hundred light-years and begin again. That much distance will be hard on the algorithms, but with enough patience we’ll see everything. Dirichlet will not be denied.
A changing shadow on the wall alerts me to one of my colleagues passing by in the hall. As casually as I can, I flip over to a different display until the coast is clear again. Everyone knows some bandwidth goes towards personal uses, but we’re not supposed to flaunt it.
Not that they’d understand anyway. This way I can be with her at every point in time, sharing in each completed perfect moment. Here I wince at the pain when she was twelve and broke her wrist. There I feel the stress when she has to decide which school to pick and which friends to leave behind. Laughing along with her and her classmates at the commencement party, worrying about her new job, right up until the accident–
I don’t watch that far ahead, usually.
It’s better this way, it really is. Unrequited love is the purest kind. Watching from out here we will never fight, never grow distant and drift apart. She will never age. Photons don’t experience time flying along their lightlike paths. I suppose they carry my own image outwards as well, to anybody who knows how to look closely enough.
But no matter how long I watch, I can’t seem to find myself in the picture with her.
by Patricia Stewart | Dec 25, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Kathryn opened the door to let her fiancée in. He brushed passed her and parked in front of the hall mirror. Carefully, he fluffed the snow off of his hair. Satisfied, he turned to kiss her, but stopped short when he noticed that she was still wearing her work overalls. “Kathryn, you’re not dressed yet? My parents are meeting us at Ducasse’s at eight.”
“I’m sorry Quincy, I was so busy that I lost track of the time.” Bouncing on the balls of her feet, she added, “I have a surprise for you. I activated my android this afternoon. Kris,” she yelled, “come out and say hello to Quincy.”
A plump android with a long white beard wearing cotton long johns walked out of the den. His cheeks and nose were a rosy red.”
“What? You’ve spent the last six months building a drunken old man?” exclaimed her fiancée without humor.
“Ho, ho, ho,” bellowed the android. “Don’t be silly, young man. I’m Santa Claus.”
Kathryn smiled. He was soooo perfect. “Kris,” she said, “go put on your red suit.” After the android returned to the den, she turned toward Quincy and put her index finger to her lips. “Shhhh. He doesn’t know he’s an android. I programmed him to think that he really is Santa Claus. I’m taking him to Macy’s tomorrow. The children will love him. He’s so full of joy, it’s contagious.”
“Kathryn!” Quincy snapped. “Have you lost your mind? You’re wasting your degree in cybernetics. You couldn’t think of anything practical to construct? That thing is worthless.”
Belittling her dream angered her. “Would you be happier if I created another pompous ass?” she retorted.
“You could do a lot worse than me, Kathryn. There are millions of eligible women who would kill to be in your shoes. Now, turn that damn thing off and get dressed.”
Kathryn’s eyes began to tear, but she didn’t move.
“Look Kathryn, you either do as I order, or I’m going to the restaurant without you.”
“I have a better idea. Why don’t you just go, for good.” She pulled the engagement ring off her finger and slammed it into his hand.
“You can’t be serious. Okay, forget it. I’m better off without you.” And he stormed out the door.
Kathryn sat on the couch, weeping. Suddenly, she felt a strong, reassuring arm reach around and hug her shoulder, as the android sat next to her. “There, there, Kathy, please don’t cry. Everything will be all right. Look,” he added, “I want to show you something.” He took a magazine from the coffee table and tore out a sheet. He deftly folded the page a dozen ways and produced a beautiful origami swan.
Kathryn managed a smile, although she was still sniffling. She wiped the tears from her eyes and said, “It’s beautiful. But, I didn’t progra… How did you know how to do that?”
“I’m Santa Claus, my dear, I can do anything.” And then he produced a red rose, as if from thin air.
She took the flower and sniffed it. “It’s real. But how?”
“Consider it Christmas Magic. You know,” he added thoughtfully, “Quincy is the world’s greatest fool. And on Christmas Eve, I think I’ll put a big lump of coal in his stocking.”
Kathryn laughed, something only a few minutes earlier she thought she’d never do again. She hugged the cuddly android. “Thank you, Santa.”
“Come,” he said, “let’s go to the kitchen for some milk and cookies?”
“I’d like that,” she replied. “I love milk and cookies.”
“Me too,” he said as his eyes literally twinkled.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 24, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The body was huge. Seven feet tall, at least, and heavy.
X-Rays had shown a delicate tracery of machinery throughout, strengthening the huge frame to allow it to move quickly.
Its bright, neon-blue hair glowed in the dark. It was the same colour as the lips, fingernails, and nipples.
It was the same colour as the glittering eyes.
It was dead now.
It stared out at the scientists, unblinking, and awkward.
It had been found, naked, stumbling through the snow up in Alaska close to a week ago. Its skin was as white as the snow.
We called it Codename Winter because of it.
In the week before its death, it had picked up a few words of our language and could respond to rudimentary questioning. It was a slow process as it seemed to be straining not only to find the words but also the concepts behind them. I hate to say it, but it seemed really stupid.
Its story, told through clumsy mime and pieced together as best we could, was that it had come here from space and had left its ship to explore the wilderness in Alaska. A passing human airplane had spooked Codename Winter’s ship. The ship bolted and the alien was left alone.
It insisted that it was the only one on the ship. It insisted that the ship was probably worried about it and was looking for it.
It had been dead for two hours and there had still been no contact with the ‘ship’ of its story. Planes that had passed in the region she was describing witnessed nothing.
While it was alive, a tennis-ball sized lump of what we took to be biocircuitry in the center of it had given off a steady stream of data that seemed to be directly tied to its sensory organs but we couldn’t decipher the data we collected from it. We were still trying to figure out what the densely packed stream of trinary data meant.
However, it had not issued any transmission that we could detect after the alien’s death. No homing beacon, no SOS message, nothing.
Its death had been immediately preceded by a burst of a data washing through the biocircuitry that burned it out. Codename Winter had looked at us, puzzled, and died that way.
We’d come up with a saddening hypothesis:
Its warranty was up and it had been switched off like a light.
Its ship had scanned our planet, looked at the dominant life-form and made a copy out of the material it had on board. The ship drank in all the information that skin, eyes, ears and nose could provide. Maybe it didn’t waste time on colour or maybe it just had no idea what colour was.
Maybe the next step would have been to make a better copy that could fool us and let it wander around downtown Los Angles or something.
The ship wasn’t coming back for this creature any more than we would return to the site of a picnic for a lost fork.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Dec 23, 2009 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
Purple waves gently lap at an azure beach. Our footprints quickly wash away in the encroaching tide. The setting twin suns of Rijos, the red giant aptly named Rojo, and her blue companion Danube cast an eerily beautiful violet light on the endless expanse of beach.
We walk hand in hand, her flowing red hair reflecting a dazzling colour for which I have no name.
“It’s so beautiful,” she whispers, almost too low to hear, “I wish we could stay here forever.”
“We can,” I replied, stroking her cheek, casually pushing back a loose strand of hair, “we will.”
We sit down to watch Danube make his death plunge into the smooth waters of the sea. We lay down to sleep
In a shabby, cramped yet somehow immaculate room the bodies of two elderly people lay on a cold, brushed stainless steel table. A technician in a coffee stained lab coat watches as his colleague removes the electrodes from their shaven pates and wipes away the conductive saline gel.
The bodies are those of a man and woman well into their centenary years, ravaged by time, hands locked tightly to one another, inseparable even in death.
As the technician carefully cleans and replaces the electrodes in their foam lined drawer and prepares the bodies for further processing, his companion stares intently at the flickering glow of the readouts on his iPadd.
“Marbling good, protein quality high, lipids fine…,” he mumbles as he checks off a box on his list.
“Hey Arnie,” he calls to his friend wheeling the bodies through battered double doors, “I’ll bet Edward G. Robinson would get one hell of a laugh out of this.”
