by submission | Jul 10, 2009 | Story
Author : Steven Odhner
I’m staring at the clock. Just staring at it, waiting for it to tick off a minute at which point I will have exactly one hour left of this hell. My brother the crazy artist says I’m not living my life. He says that I’ve sold my soul. If he knew my automator was broken he’d be ecstatic, he’d probably try to get me to go out and party with him as if I didn’t have to go to work anymore.
Actually, though, calling out tomorrow might not be a terrible idea. My productivity is shot anyway – I keep finding myself staring at the screen in front of me, drifting off and daydreaming. It’s the sound of everyone else working; it’s hypnotic. They’re all typing at full speed, seated thirty to a row, all the way down this massive room. It sounds like a thunderstorm pouring around me. I wandered down the aisles this morning for ten wasted minutes, just listening to the endless shower of keystrokes and looking at all of their blank faces… the only good thing was that I saw someone I went to school with. We’ve probably been working together for ten years. I should call her later.
I know my brother isn’t alone, there’s a very vocal minority that will talk your ear off about how terrible automators are. I can only assume none of them have office jobs, because I’ve only been here for four hours and I’m ready to murder someone. Don’t even get me started on my exercise routine! Do I really do that every morning? Why in god’s name would I want to be aware for that? I finished less than half of the workout before going back to bed. If they can’t fix my automator soon I’m going to get all pudgy.
If I tried to explain this to my brother he’d just suggest that I work somewhere more interesting, as if everyone in the world can be an artist for a living. He’d say having less money would be worth not going through life as a zombie, but every second that ticks by feels like an hour and every time I look at the pathetic amount of work I’ve gotten done I know exactly why a “work day” used to be eight hours – more for some people! Missing my life? If this is what my life is when I’m not looking then I’m happy to miss it. Only fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds to go. Please, let them fix me soon.
by Patricia Stewart | Jul 9, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“Are you telling me a spaceship really did crash in Roswell in 1947?” asked Dr. Ambien as he panned the badly damaged spaceship that had been laid out in the spacious hangar.
“Yes, Doctor. The spaceship contained three aliens, but they all died in the crash. However, there was a very sophisticated on-board computer that we managed to capture.”
“You mean ‘recover’.”
“No, Doctor, I mean capture. When we tried to load the spaceship onto a flatbed, it fired its engines and tried to escape. Fortunately, because it was badly damaged, the ship didn’t get far. The computer is that large glowing ball in the cockpit.” He indicated an eighteen inch diameter, translucent pale green sphere that had a geodesic metallic framework surrounding it. “It wasn’t easy in the beginning, but we were able to extract a lot of useful technology out of the computer by modulating its power intake. Of course, we couldn’t admit that it was alien technology, so we had to give credit to human scientists for all the new inventions. You know, William Shockley got credit for the transistor, Jack Kilby for the microchip, Al Gore for the internet,” he added with a smirk.
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Dr. Ambien. “What did you mean when you said you modulated its power intake?”
“Well, we needed to gain its cooperation. So when it wouldn’t give us information, we’d cut back its power, or change the frequency of the electric current. Sometimes we would place powerful magnets around the sphere to scramble its electrical pathways. Eventually, it shared its technology.”
“You mean you tortured it?”
“Come on professor, it’s a computer, not a person. Is it torture to cut the power to your PC?”
“It’s not the same thing. This is unethical behavior. I don’t think I can work for this Program.”
“Look Doctor. You’re here for one thing. You’re under contract to give us an independent assessment of that satellite,” he pointed to the automobile size contraption at the far side of the hangar. “We built it based on the designs given to us by the alien computer. It’s supposed to be able to detect fissionable levels of weapons grade uranium from orbit. But, to be frank, it has a lot of hardware that we don’t fully understand. We’re reluctant to activate it without the concurrence of industry’s top scientific minds. You either work with us, Doctor, or you’ll never do work for the government again.”
You bastards, Ambien thought. Homeland Security is going to blacklist me. Then he noticed the translucent sphere pulsating. It was Morse Code. “Please help me,” it spelled out. After a few seconds thought, he made up his mind. “Yes,” Dr. Ambien said aloud while staring at the computer, “I will help you.” Almost instantly, the new satellite emitted an intense pulse that caused all of the humans in the hangar to collapse, except for Dr. Ambien. The satellite lifted from the ground and floated toward the alien spaceship. When it landed, a hatch opened, exposing an internal cavity about the size of the sphere. The compartment contained dozens of cables with unique connectors. Its function was obvious. Dr. Ambien quickly climbed into the damaged spaceship and disconnected the sphere and carried it to the satellite. It took him five minutes to connect all the cables. The sphere glowed bright yellow as the satellite drifted upward, where it hovered for several minutes. Then the public address system of the hangar transmitted a message, “Thank you, Dr. Ambien.”
The satellite rammed through the skylight, and disappeared into the clouds.
by submission | Jul 8, 2009 | Story
Author : M. Tyler Gillett
We should have known it was a foolish hope. None of us knew each other, but we recognized each other as members of the same faith. We had all signed up with various cryonics companies, preserving our bodies – or more often, just our post-mortem, surgically-severed heads – after we died, all in the expectation that a future society would possess the technology to cure death, clone bodies and bring us back to life.
We did not really think it through, though. We had speculated about various potential problems that might crop up with the future scenario we spun out in our (admittedly) sci-fi-informed minds. What if a disaster hit the cryo-bank, a fire, an earthquake, or simple corporate insolvency? Or a larger catastrophe, such as climate change or an asteroid strike eliminating human civilization entirely? The oldest among us, those pioneers who were the first preserved in tanks of liquid nitrogen, had carried the specter of global thermonuclear war with them into their icy sleep. But not freezing ourselves would mean succumbing to eternal death. Cryonic preservation gave us a chance, however slim, however fraught with potential calamity.
Perhaps the most prevalent worry, left unspoken, was: what if the future didn’t want us? The fear of our own insignificance, the fear that our leap of faith, throwing ourselves into an unknown, unseen future, would simply be ignored by our far-flung descendants, that fear gripped each and every one of us as we held the pen, poised to sign the cryonics contract. But we quickly dismissed it and signed anyway, confident that our belief in a future resurrection was on firmer ground than our religious forebears. As long as civilization survives, the arc of science and technology ineluctably leads to nigh-unlimited possibility. A future society, reaping the benefits of nanotechnology, zero-point energy, and other advances unfathomable to us cryonauts, could not help but be magnanimous and grant us our last and greatest wish.
If only we had paused longer, thought more about other possible consequences of an unfathomable future. We were blinded by our hopes and fears and by the very times in which we lived, times when few of our desires could be realized, times that shaped our morals in specific and limited ways.
We never considered the possibility that a society of unlimited and incomprehensible capabilities would resurrect us, not out of charity or nostalgia or even a sense of obligation to the past, but for their own sport. We never imagined – in many ways were incapable of imagining – the morals of a world where everything is possible. Now we, the once-dead, are endlessly reborn in bodies of hideous configuration, toys for the play of capricious gods, forever broken and remade. Because we could not imagine them, we did not understand that there are fates worse than death.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 7, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Aside from the “more-arms-than-us” thing and the blue colour of their skin, they weren’t as alien as they could have been. They didn’t look like insects or floating blobs, for instance.
At first contact, we all conceitedly thought it just chance that they looked somewhat human. I mean, we’re great, right? Why shouldn’t our form be on other planets as well? Sheer self-centered assumption.
The aliens were bred in tanks in giant arkships.
Remember the hype over the last fifteen years or so about rednecks being kidnapped by aliens and experimented on? All those anal probes and skin samples and implants and all that?
Well, it all happened. It was all true.
The aliens went from planet to planet and kidnapped intelligent life. They studied the inhabitants, bred their own genes into dominant splices and grew the results to maturity.
All of these blue-skinned creatures with black eyes, wide mouths and too many arms were grown from a half-human base.
The aliens’ “true” shape on their homeworld was like a cross between a centipede and an octopus and they were used to an atmosphere that would corrode a human in seconds. They needed our genes to survive here.
And to be ‘compatible’ with us.
Half a million aliens were put down in each capital city. They knew English, Mandarin, and were fluent in the language of the city into which they were dropped. They had food and clothing to last them six months.
Males and Females. There was an exactly equal number of each sex. For a full week, nothing happened. There was an uneasy peace.
But humans are humans. There were attacks on the aliens. A worldwide panic started to build. It looked like a mass genocide was about to take place but immediately, their leader talked to us. I say ‘talked’ but it was more of a telepathic shout that brought every human to a quivering standstill.
The leader of the aliens made us an offer that we couldn’t refuse: let them breed with us and become part of our society or face certain extinction.
He made an example of Paris.
We took the offer.
That was over a decade ago.
There are nearly a billion children now with eyes that have no whites. Their skin has a bluish cast and they have smaller sets of arms poking out at random around their ribcage.
They are polite. They study. They word hard. They are creative.
Their race has shared their knowledge with us.
The entire planet is now on a schedule of the aliens’ devising. We are overcrowded but we’ve been assured that we will be a space-faring race within the decade. This is a plan that has worked hundreds of times before, they say.
There is an even split between us who are repulsed by what they see as invaders and people that have welcomed them and volunteered for marriage and babies.
Religion is taking a beating and a lot of politicians seem to be pretty depressed. The aliens have let us keep our elections and our money-based economy but there’s a general feeling on Earth that we’re children eating at the adult’s table.
Children that have been allowed to keep their toys so that they’ll be quiet.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 6, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Tucker went through the drills with the rest of the squad in a state of meditative indifference. It took focused effort to keep his mech and chem systems in check while still performing well enough to earn one of the dozen seats on the Mars shuttle. These freelance lifts were rare, and he couldn’t miss this opportunity.
What little attention he could spare he directed to monitoring the other’s level of performance. He deliberately maintained a slightly-better-than-middle spot in the ten kilometer run and obstacle course. He kept that position as they commando-crawled five hundred meters through a muddy creek bed while a machine-gunner fired a steady stream of live rounds over their heads, the gun’s belt drive screaming above the clatter of shell casings piling up at her feet.
Several of the men curled up fetal under fire, disqualifying themselves involuntarily, and Tucker downgraded his speed accordingly.
It wouldn’t take a genius to recognize his Special Ops rigging if he slipped here, and that would bring a rapid and painful end to Tucker’s unauthorized excursion.
Pulling himself out of the muck, Tucker loped the last hundred meters downhill to the gun range, joining the dozen or so already there. Several sported bloody stripes across their backs where they’d been grazed by the gunfire.
Tucker wiped the mud from his hands on the back of his pants, before unracking and loading an M4 Carbine and stepping into an empty slot on the range. There were only two perfect shoots ahead of him that he could see, and he squeezed off an evenly spaced volley of shells at his target, carefully distributing them across the red of the bulls-eye, and deliberately putting one just outside the bull, kissing the colour.
Making safe the weapon, he re-racked it and followed the others along a short trail and into another clearing. Here a handful of uniformed men stood reading incoming performance data on hand held pads while they waited for the stragglers to filter in.
“Sten, Rourke, Burke and Trillo, you’re in Red Quad. Clean up, suit up and be on the apron at sixteen hundred.” The shortest of the uniformed men barked the orders.
“Abrahms, Booker, Suez and Styne, Blue Quad. Clean and suited, on the apron. Sixteen hundred.”
“Jope, Minerez, Minsk and Parker, Green Quad. Clean, suited, sixteen hundred.
For a moment Tucker felt panic well up, and nearly lost his grip. Parker had finished behind him in all the exercises, but must have impressed on the range. As Parker elbowed his way through the crowd, Tucker sidled up and, unnoticed, drove two rigid fingers into the base of his spine as he passed. The movement was so swift and the contact so brief that the man barely noticed. It wasn’t until he’d taken another dozen steps through the crowd that his legs folded up neatly beneath him, and he dropped silently to the dirt.
There was quick discussion amongst the uniforms as a medic made his way through the confused crowd to the fallen man.
“Tucker, take Parkers place in Green, looks like this is your lucky day.”
Tucker knew that it was Parker who’d gotten the lucky break. He still had to kill the rest of them once they cleared orbit and that was unlikely to be as painless.
The thought of imminent violence brought the chem bubbling to the surface, and he pushed it back down. Not here, not now. He’d stay near comatose through liftoff, but before the zero hour there’d be no reason left to hide, and they’d have nowhere to run.
