by submission | Sep 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Rayne Adams
I stole a lightspeed cruiser today. Went flying.
Found Ancient Egypt.
You learn in school that time and space are the same interchangeable abstract, but no one really believes it. You walk three steps, you move forward in space and in time, but if you walk backward, you don’t go back in time. Do you? I didn’t think so.
I had to get as far away as possible—I’d stolen a very expensive, very advanced piece of machinery. I set the lightspeed engine to 2400, more than five hundred lightyears higher than is considered safe. I followed protocol—closed the airlock, strapped myself in, and inhaled the gas that would keep me in a stasis state during my trip. No one has ever traveled lightspeed while they were conscious.
I don’t know if the gas in that particular cruiser was bad, or if I just hadn’t taken it the right way, but I woke up long before I should have, nowhere near the end of my journey.
I wasn’t in space. At least, not any space I’d ever seen before. Space is black, so black it’s sickening to look at after awhile. But this was color, swirling lights and blinding color. Sounds too, which don’t belong in space. The cruiser was gone, and I seemed to be as well. I couldn’t move my arms or turn my head, I was just consciousness floating somewhere in this vast, fluctuating whirlpool.
I became aware that whatever was around me was growing very warm. This didn’t concern me—after they entered the academy, all Spacers had their epidermis upgraded to be able to withstand great heat and pressure. It was still very uncomfortable, but at least that meant my body was back.
When I swam into consciousness, I was lying on my back in something soft and pleasantly warm, not scalding. There were people standing over me, staring down and talking, arguing. Their words jumbled together as the translator in my brain wavered between several different languages. They weren’t speaking a tongue it recognized, so it had to spend a few moments cross-referencing.
It didn’t take too long.
“—Fell from the sky! How could she not be of the gods?”
“She doesn’t look like one of us.”
“Is she even alive? Gods do not die.”
“I’m not dead,” I said, sitting up, my mouth flawlessly forming the words of this strange new language.
The three people standing over me jumped back, frightened, until one of the men offered me a hand up. I was completely naked (my clothes hadn’t survived the heat) but one of my rescuers was a woman, and her loose white robe only covered one breast, so I decided not to worry too much.
“Where am I?” I asked, though I didn’t really need the answer. The white sand, wide, blue river, and clean, breathable air was enough evidence in itself.
“Welcome to the land of Kemat, great Isis.” One of the men said it, and they all bowed their heads.
“Thanks, I—.” I cleared my throat. “What did you just call me?”
“Isis,” the woman said, eyes still cast to the sand. “Goddess of the Nile. Every year you shed tears for your dead husband and the river floods.”
“I’m not a goddess,” I said, but they weren’t listening.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 3, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The test drill had gone horribly wrong.
The bipedal meat structure wasn’t breathing. Emergency!
There were specific instructions tattooed on the outside of the biological’s skin for repair procedures.
The yellow and black rectangles and hazard symbols on the shaved skull meant that no one except accredited programmed hardcases could operate on him there.
There was no time. The sensors in my fingertips read the sound vibrations coming from the cage of bone where most of his internals were kept warm and functional in their liquid bags.
No sound was coming out. According to manuals I’d read in these flight plan procedures, biologicals had to be brought back online within minutes or the shutdown would be permanent.
There were pictograms of the major organs tattooed on the outside of the body of the bio. Procedures with lightning bolts were stained there with dotted lines pointing to places to apply trodes and places to avoid stressing.
There were a lot of markings all over the body. It was complicated. I could feel my processor heating up.
It was hard to believe that beings so fragile had accomplished so much before the takeover. It was even harder still to think that we still needed their ability to deal with worst-case scenarios and lateral idea production.
I re-routed half of my battery power into the ship and funneled it to my fingertips.
The biological in my grasp danced at the end of my fingertips like a string puppet being shaken by an angry god. I stopped the charge. The meat was smoking a little bit.
Did I use too much energy?
I heard the biological’s main liquid oxygen pump and bellows start up for six beats before settling into arrhythmia again.
I looked at the tattoos. There were no shock hazard warnings around where I had my hands. The outer skin of was still intact. The seconds ticked away. I charged it again.
Again it stiffened and twitched like a kite in a high wind. I dropped the charge to zero and listened. Silence. I listened closer.
I was focused entirely on it when it screamed and drew in breath again. I jumped back from it in alarm, my pads clanking on the metal of the deck.
It quickly rolled over and convulsed. Protein supplements spilled out of its main airway and food passage. Slowly, it got up to a sitting position. Its breathing and pump rate slowed.
It looked down at the sensor-shaped burn marks dotting its main torso and then up into my lenses. I could not read the expression there.
“How long was I out?” it asked me.
“Three minutes seventeen seconds. The insulator was worn through when you grabbed the controls. It shall be repaired. You need to get back to your containment pod and rest.” I replied through my speaker, resonating the air to create disruptions that the biological could pick up with the receivers on either side of its main sensor array.
“Yes.” Said the bio, and went off to bed. He’d be put back in deep sleep and woken up for another emergency or another drill when needed.
I set about re-insulating the control interface for the ship. I felt guilty and embarrassed that my slip up had nearly caused the death of my biological backup.
by submission | Sep 2, 2008 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
I met a girl the other night while hopping. It was in some bar somewhere, and she must have been a local, because she was fascinated by my bracelet. It must have been a relatively close hop, because she spoke english in an accent that wasn’t too weird, but I was drunk enough that the details didn’t register.
Hopping is a great way to have a no strings night of fun. If you can afford the bracelet you just dial up somewhere random and make the jump. You can set parameters if you like, so it will always pick out somewhere where your currency is valid or whatever, or you can freewheel. It has the advantage that whatever happens in that reality stays in that reality, the consequences don’t follow you home unless you’re really unfortunate and you catch a dose of something that doesn’t exist where you came from.
She had skin like coffee just as the cream goes in, a gradient from rich dark skin to the wonderful paleness of the palms of her hands. We drank something amazing that tasted like minty cinnamon but had the aftertaste of warm honey, and when we made love we both came until we screamed. As I fell asleep beside her I was more perfectly happy than I had ever been.
The morning came, as mornings have a habit of doing, and I woke up before her. I went through the pantomime everyone does the morning after, and pulled on shirt and shoes in the scratchy silence of a blistering headache. I was going to wake her with a kiss, maybe get a morning reminder of the night before, when my bracelet beeped. I had to be at work in five minutes, so I buttoned up what I could and sent myself home. Half a second after I hit send, I realized what I’ve done.
One of the reasons hopping is so popular is that it really is anonymous. When you dial random coordinates in the bracelet, it does exactly what it says. You get somewhere entirely random. And once you go, it forgets all about where you’ve been. When I left without a word that morning, I left entirely, with no way to go back. And it was only after I’d hit the button that I understood how much I wanted to go back.
I’ve been trying to find her ever since. Theoretically, there are an infinite number of realities out there, but I’ve been narrowing as well as my memory will let me. Each night I go to the same bar, or as close to it as I can get, and I watch the girls on the dancefloor, looking for the one with skin like coffee, eyes like sunrise. I thought I saw her a few nights ago, but when I spoke to this girl, she had no idea who I was.
One day I’ll see her again. Our eyes will meet and she’ll know me. We’ll share glasses of something that tastes like minty cinnamon, and in the morning I’ll hear my bracelet beep and I’ll turn it off and stay here forever.
One day.
by J.R. Blackwell | Sep 1, 2008 | Story
Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer
Unlike the rest of humanity, I had an intelligent designer. My designer had thought enough to make me compatible. I can attach myself to almost any machine; external computers, appliances and yes, even weapons. Today, I’ve attached myself to “Mercy” a weapon that fires high intensity focused beams of radiation. It’s patched into what I call my eyes, which aren’t exactly eyes but close enough. If I can see it, Mercy can hit it. She was expensive, but this is what I lived for after I was killed
A week after I died, along with twelve other children from the Happy Hands preschool, the preacher told my parents and a congregation of mourners that children have an infinite capacity to forgive. “In heaven, your children are looking down on us and they have forgiven those that harmed them, we must learn to be like them.”
But we never got to heaven. We were in cold storage while our case was being prosecuted, keeping the evidence fresh, keeping us on ice. It was fortunate the case went as long as it did, mistrials, retrials and death penalty appeals, because in the six years after, they were able to wake us up again in new, plastic bodies. They woke us up so that we could tell our story and go home to our parents.
When we went home, we were appliances, and even our testimony, the testimony of machines with human brains, didn’t stand up against the court. We were already considered dead, and if not dead, children, and if not children, insane. Some of us did go insane in the new bodies, unable to cope. Some families turned the support off.
I cannot imagine what that’s like, to be turned off, would it be like going to sleep. Slowly fading? Or would it be darkness and pain and disconnection all in the dark until death. Would we see shadows there? I cannot imagine it. I did not go insane. I lived to see my killer walk free.
I was supposed to be adjusting to my new life, but now, being part machine, I can remember with perfect clarity, I can see every moment of that day when the man broke into our classroom and started shooting. I can see it and I cannot forgive.
Children never forgive. We are innocent in our hatred. Pure. I remember everything. And I have no forgiveness. But I have Mercy, oh yes, I do have Mercy.
by submission | Aug 31, 2008 | Story
Author : W. Kevin Christian
A monotone, bureaucratic female voice shot through the hearing centers of Felicity’s brain: “Free-form imagination, courtesy of The Sensation Station. Free-form imagination, courtesy of The Sensation Station.” On and on it went until the computer had fully mapped the physical structure of her brain. Suddenly Felicity was walking through a wheat field where she grew up. The moon was full and orange. Hundreds of shooting stars rocketed across the night sky. One came down and slowly cruised by Felicity’s head, its tail leaving a trail of floating diamonds, glittering like fireworks.
The last and greatest vehicle of human creativity was a manually controlled artificial reality on the only entertainment device anyone cared about: The Sensation Station. All other entertainment had become obsolete seven years earlier.
In free-form imagination, what one thought became one’s reality. The possibilities were endless. Not even God himself knew the limits of the unbridled infinity of human creativity channeled through The Sensation Station. Of course most people just used it to have sex in a hot tub with movie star A. But Felicity was different.
Before The Sensation Station, Felicity had been a real book worm. She loved to escape to the vivid worlds she could manifest in her mind. She painted, too. She made sad, silly and fantastic paintings, full of vibrant, burning colors.
Felicity’s first artificial pleasure was imagining herself as the coldest she had ever been, naked and alone on the North Pole. She waited until she could bear it no more and then dumped herself into a hot shower. Felicity had saved the first five seconds of that shower and put it on repeat for hours. The computer daydreams were indescribable pleasure. Divine. Perfect. Satisfying. They had cost Felicity her job.
And her family, kids, home, and car. Right now she was sitting next to a dumpster behind a Denny’s where she had found an unguarded electrical socket to plug in. Her rail thin frame sat hunched against a filth-covered fence. She was dying. Two golf-ball-sized electrodes were attached to her temples with wires running down to a wallet-sized receiver that lay limply in her half-open palm. Drool ran down her chin. Blood trickled out her ears.
Something the creators of The Sensation Station had never anticipated was the ability of the technology to intensify consciousness. Felicity’s imagination was expanding at a frightening rate. Where once she had been satisfied to focus and repeat one good sensation, Felicity now combined hundreds, thousands, millions – the ecstasy of gods. There was no limit.
Felicity set her imagination for the heart of the universe. If God didn’t exist, she was about to create him. She flew up into the sky, into space, out of the solar system. Her perspective increased to a galactic level. The whole universe unfolded at the limitless command of her creativity. Somewhere inside she knew—she had always known—what it was to be a star, an ocean, a banker, a pulsar, a honey bee, a fry cook, a sonic boom, a mountain, a crying baby, a falling leaf, a cloud, a proton, an orgasm, a primal scream. Matter ended. Energy became infinite. Time was reformed. Somewhere in some fold of some reality a force of ten billion supernovas was released. A new universe was born.
