by submission | Sep 26, 2009 | Story
Author : Steven Odhner
I’m weightless, then suddenly formless like the universe before God spoke to it.
I’m behind my desk, staring at a black screen. There are three bananas on the desk and no peels in the trash, so it’s probably a Wednesday morning. The desk is one at SureTech and I’m wearing a wedding ring, so it’s between May of 2004 and July of 2010. Everyone is standing up and looking around, surprised by the sudden power outage. I check the phone, but it’s dead so I just sit back and wait. I have all the time in the world.
“Tom?” It’s one of my coworkers. I haven’t spoken to him since he died of lung cancer two years ago. He looks healthy – so it’s probably not later than 2009. For a second I have trouble speaking for some reason, but then the words tumble out.
“Yeah Josh? What’s up?” I’m pleased with how casual I sound, but now I’m thinking that I should have sounded concerned. Healthy or not, Josh looks scared. Maybe he just found out about the cancer? Did he even tell me about it before it was obvious?
“Tom… does your cell phone work?” I pull it out knowing that it won’t, but I make a show of checking. Josh just nods.
“I need to step out. Maybe get a drink. I can’t get anything done with the power out anyway.”
I’m at the bar across the street, and I don’t remember going there. The feeling of disorientation passes and I realize that Josh is talking to me. He has an empty glass in front of him and is holding one that’s mostly melting ice.
“I… it was the strangest thing. Right when the power went out… I don’t know, I guess it was a kind of hallucination or something, but I… it’s like all of these memories. It has me confused, I remember my… it was just that I must have nodded off or something. It was a dream, but so vivid and so detailed. It was the next three years of my life, right up to my funeral.” I’m fidgeting with a cocktail napkin, trying not to react, trying to remember to breathe. This isn’t happening.
Josh and I are both back at my desk. I’m still holding the cocktail napkin, though I don’t remember coming back from the bar. I shouldn’t be blacking out. The power is still out, which is strange because it should only last fifteen minutes at the most. In the grand scheme of things that’s less important than Josh having displaced memories. He wasn’t there, he didn’t come back. He wasn’t even alive, and you can’t remember your own funeral in any case. Josh is still talking; I’ve missed part of what he said.
“So… are you coming?” We must have just gotten back, but he wants to go somewhere? I nod and stand up, and we both walk out of the suite and down the stairs into the lobby. Josh throws what looks like a full pack of cigarettes into the trash can as we walk past it.
“Let’s just hit the bar across the street,” Josh says, and my stomach is a bottomless pit. We haven’t gone to the bar yet. My fist tightens around the napkin that shouldn’t be there and I pray that I’ve just lost my mind, that the consciousness transfer failed and I’m in a coma somewhere.
God forgive me, I’ve broken something.
by submission | Sep 25, 2009 | Story
Author : William Tracy
She loved the Coin-Operated Boy.
None of the men in her life would really love her. Yes, they were strong, and handsome, and promised wealth and luxury. They were also full of hate, and lies.
The Coin-Operated Boy was none of these things. He was quiet, and had an almost effeminate sort of beauty. He promised her nothing, gave her nothing, but never hated, never lied. Her coins would go clink-clink, and the cogs inside him would go tick-tick-tick, that was all.
The men came and went at their own whims. They wanted attention when she was busy, and were busy when she wanted attention. They forgot her birthday, and she forgot theirs. They forgot that her favorite flower was a red, red rose.
The Coin-Operated Boy was always there. She could leave him for months. Every time when she came back, he was still waiting for her with a smile on his face. She only had to put in her coins, clink-clink, and he would love her.
He never asked her any questions. He never scolded her. He was never jealous, and he never hated. The springs and levers inside him just went tick-tick-tick.
She would ask him if he loved her. Every time, the Coin-Operated Boy would go tick-tick-tick, and then he would answer yes.
His love was deeper than the shining ocean. His love was brighter than the burning sun. His love was more beautiful than the pale moon.
She would ask the Coin-Operated Boy how he could love her with his clockwork heart that went tick-tick-tick.
He loved her more ways than there were stars in the dark sky. He loved her more ways than there were flowers in the green hills and cool valleys.
Always, she would put in her coins, clink-clink, and always the gears in his heart would go tick-tick-tick.
Her lover came back.
He had black, black hair that shone when the light was right. He had bronze skin that glistened with sweat, and deep eyes that shone like the ocean. He had long sideburns that framed his face like a picture. He had a dusting of stubble on his sharp chin. He wore a slick vest that wrapped over rolling muscles. He had a voice that was like poetry.
He loved her, had never stopped loving her. He was sorry he had left her, so sorry. He wanted her to come with him, to come back with him to live with his family.
He brought her a red, red rose.
She took his hand, and looked into his eyes, and she saw her face reflected in them. They kissed, and the passion ran hot and wild in her veins.
The Coin-Operated Boy looked at them, and tilted his head to one side as though he had never seen this before. His mechanical soul of gears and springs and chains and levers went tick-tick-tick. Then, the Coin-Operated Boy asked a question.
“Do you love me?”
by submission | Sep 24, 2009 | Story
Author : Rob Burton
He lifts the stained snow to his visor. Tiny mechanisms sample the stuff and, after sterilizing it (though that was hardly necessary at such low temperatures), sprays it as an aerosol into his nose and mouth. A tiny readout in his visor confirms his suspicions. ‘Waste dump’, he informs the others over the communicator. ‘They are lazy or foolish. Perhaps both.’
One of the others intentionally lets ‘Disgusting animal’ slip over the comms. He tries not care. Still, they live in the filth of cities, hoarded together like rats their very air a stinking fume. He’s had to share the tight, closed systems of a planetary transport with them and their sweat and filth for weeks. Sanitised urine was nothing.
He’d been brought as a guide to dark, icy Ganymede. Over-equipped as the folly of the rich men who employed him would have it, he knows he could survive indefinitely in this suit and on the life seeded onto this once sterile orb – though the others hardly recognise its existence. They all could, if they weren’t such fools, live by the life that, like him, loves the ice and the cold that is retreating so fast from their own world. Cold and ice these men treat as an enemy to be conquered.
They love their little wars. They use their murderous potential for nothing. They crave the opportunity to unleash it. They mutter discontentedly as they progress, doubtful of his ability to read the signs that to him, though subtle, are everywhere. They joke about kicking him into a crevasse.
In the dim starlight the entrance to the base is indistinct, covered with re-frozen ice that only he can tell apart from its immediate surroundings. The base itself clings to the underneath of the ice sheet, at the border with the water layer. Its location could not be found from space, so many miles beneath the ice, and the vehicle that had brought the relief crew was itself sunken far below the surface.
On Ganymede, in order to hide something you merely have to heat it up and let it melt into the ice for a while. An energy–expensive process, but warfare seems to ignore the energy rationing that has made so many lives a misery. People seem to believe that it is more important to cause human misery than prevent it, for a reason he could not understand. With a little waste of power, smaller things – like personal transports – might disappear forever into the ice to the eyes of those unused to it. He has to throw a snowball onto the area above the entrance to mark it for the soldiers.
They click their weapons into firing positions. Their leader uses an electronic eye that he trusts more than his own senses to look for its kin about the entrance. Finding none, he sends two of his command forward to set the melters. They should uncover the entrance in a matter of hours.
Their guide turns to go.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Away’, he simply states.
‘What? Don’t; you want to go home?’
‘My contract pays out to my family at the point that I deliver you to your target.’
‘But you are our guide…’
‘…and I have guided you. You are the paid killers, not I.’ He doesn’t add that he considers them ill-prepared and unlikely to survive.
‘Where will you go?’
‘Do you care?’
‘Let’s pretend for a moment that I do.’
‘This is a world. I intend to get to know it before you ruin it too.’
by Patricia Stewart | Sep 21, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Three aliens floated a few dozen meters beyond the ship’s forward observation viewport. They were formless blobs approximately two meter in diameter. The center creature was glowing a faint orange-red, with numerous concentric yellow circles forming and disappearing every few seconds. The two outside creatures displayed counter rotating fluorescent red spirals on predominately blue bodies. “They’re obviously trying to communicate with us,” concluded the science officer. “I’ve been studying them for hours, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what they’re trying to say.”
“They appear to be semitransparent,” the captain observed.
The science officer grimaced.
“You have something to report, Lieutenant?” probed the captain.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I was holding off on speculation until I had a better understanding of the physics. It appears, sir, uh, that the aliens are composed of… damn… stationary photons.”
Despite the apparent absurdity of the statement, the captain managed to maintain his professional demeanor. “You’ve got my attention, Lieutenant. Feel free to speculate. Off the record, of course.”
“Aye, sir. Thank you. As you know, in our universe all electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. The instant a photon comes into existence, its traveling at the speed of light. Never faster, never slower. However, our sensors indicate that those creatures are composed of photons that are not moving relative to us, which according to quantum chromodynamics, is impossible. They appear to have a cohesive structure composed of light ‘particles,’ rather than condensed matter. It’s like their wave-particle duality is all particle and no wave.”
“How is that possible?”
“If I were to guess, sir, I’d say that they exist on a separate membrane where the fundamental relationships between elementary particles are reversed. In other words, photons move slowly, and matter must move at 300,000,000 meters per second.”
“Fascinating,” replied the captain. “I was thinking, what if… Now what’s going on?” The brightness of the creatures suddenly intensified, and their color patters began to reverse and pulsate. “Boy, they certainly seem to be pretty animated about something. Do you think they’re threatening us?”
“Unsure, sir. Look, they’re backing away.” Suddenly, the interior of the ship began to glow a bright red, which quickly changed to orange, then yellow, green, blue, and finally violet. Nausea overtook the crew, and one by one, they collapsed to the deck and lost consciousness. When they finally came to, the view outside the observation port had changed dramatically. More than half the sky was occupied by a giant spiral galaxy. “Damn,” the science officer muttered. “That’s Andromeda. It’s supposed to be 2.5 million light years away. It’s probably only a few hundred thousand now. I guess those guys were trying to warn us not to get to close. We must have temporarily entered their universe. I suspect that we traveled more than two million light years while we were unconscious.”
“Can we get home?” asked the captain.
“That may be a moot point, sir. Unless I’m mistaken, we didn’t get here by distorting space-time in the conventional sense. Most likely, we temporarily acquired the properties of the alien’s universe and our physical matter has been moving through space at the speed of light. If true, that means that although we didn’t experience the passage of time, we’ve been traveling for more than two million years. Even if we could get back ‘home,’ we’d be the equivalent of australopithecines to our descendents.”
by submission | Sep 20, 2009 | Story
Author : E.S Wynn
“The 882 looks cool.” Cylea glanced up, grinned. “How much for the 882?”
The old man gave her a quick glance, eyes wary over spectacles that stood out like antique flair garnered from a bygone age. His reply came solidly. “I can’t sell you the 882.”
“Why not?” She cocked her hip, let her eyes wander to the thing again. It was the next step up from the tungsten knuckle reinforcements she’d been looking at, a total arm rebuild that would replace flesh and bone with nanocarbon alloys and memory plastics– a near human approximation of an arm with a central cavity that was packed tight with the razor-edges of a collapsible, spring-loaded blade. “It’s better than a switchblade.”
“You don’t want the 882.” He said gruffly, turning away to busy himself with a collection of parts, optics and tiny cylinders packed with nanogenic goo that lay spread across the tool bench. He quivered, hands taken by tremors for an instant.
Curiosity flickered across her face. “Is there something wrong with it?”
“No, It’s a good product, solid design.” He sighed, his own eyes drifted up to meet the dusty overhead display and the flickering advertisement for the rebuild. “Great deal for the money.”
“Then why?” She asked pointedly. “It’s just an arm.”
The old man nodded silently, tiredly. “Just an arm.” He repeated. His hands touched the tools, glanced off the handle of a modified bone-saw that lay with its harsh circular blade submerged in sterile solution. “Just an arm.”
“Daniel?” She tried. He turned back, regarded her with bespectacled eyes.
“It’s a prosthetic, Cylea. I’d have to remove your forearm to install it.” He laid two greasy fingers on his wrinkled skin to illustrate, smeared grubby lines just a few inches short of the elbow, looked at her pointedly. “Think about it. You don’t want the 882.”
“I know what it is, Dan.” She looked away, crossed her arms. “Why should I care how much flesh it takes? The 882 is better than the stock I was born with. It’s Techware.”
“It’s an illegal streetmod is what it is. Black market,” He shook his head. “From Hong Kong.”
“So?” She shot back. “It’s not like I’m going to join the military or anything. Who’ll know?”
Dan sighed again, watching her for a long moment as his old hands settled on the table between them.
“How old are you, Cylea?”
“Nineteen.”
“And you want to spend the next eighty years of your life with a techware arm that would show up on any weapon-scanner or metal detector you’re likely to run into? You know what that means, right? No more college, no access to government buildings, no air-travel.” He paused. “All because it ‘looks cool’ and you think it handles better than a switch blade.”
Cylea swallowed.
“Buy the knuckle reinforcements, kid.” He turned his back on her, busied himself at the bench again. “Lots of people get those, respectable people. Trust me. The 882’s for punks and amputees with nothing to live for. People with no future.” She looked away as he paused, unable to even meet the stare his back seemed capable of reaching into her soul with.
After a moment, he turned back to her again, wiping his hands on a rag, and offered her a slight smile that was oddly comforting before his lips parted, words bringing her eyes back to his again.
“We both know you have some kind of future waiting for you out there.”
Cylea nodded, forced her own smile
