by Duncan Shields | Dec 4, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The Ravaged Angel.
That’s what was painted in red nail polish on the nose of the three-person cryshuttle. It had docked on autopilot with good codes but wasn’t answering hails. The dock’s computer was talking to the shuttle’s compnav to ascertain where they’d come from and what their sitrep was when the hatches blew on the three ovals on the top of the Ravaged Angel’s hull.
It was a human ship, possibly an escape pod, but the decorations on the outside of the polished hull looked old and slightly archaic.
With a well-oiled creak, the vacuum pump kicked in and the ovals on the top of the ship swung up and back to reveal three capsule bays, each one holding a naked, blue, cryosleeping body.
The Ravaged Angel held three sleeping women.
The silence held for a few moments before noise amped up into procedure again and we got the three girls disembarked and taken to sick bay.
Cryosleep Restart was a fairly routine procedure but all the same, the doctor felt the need to ‘dust off’ some manuals from the backup banks. He also requested an emergency download from homeship for immediate protocol deniability with maximum instruction. Just to be sure.
None of us had seen a woman for our entire lives, you see. Neither had our grandfathers.
This must have been a capsule from one of the fabled ‘golden seed’ whoreships that had traveled from colony to colony hundreds of years ago.
It was too late to keep it a secret. As the bay commander, it was my duty to report what had happened to the captain and relay his decision on how to proceed.
I had no idea how I’d react in the presence of a woman. Something about the way I swear I could actually smell them from all the way across the cargo-lock floor while standing behind thick glass told me I should stay away from sick bay until I was fully ready for the briefing.
Three colours of hair haunted my dreams that night.
They’d be awake in eight hours. I wished there were flowers somewhere on board that I could bring them to make them feel safe.
I’m sure all sixteen thousand of us felt the same way. I’m sure at this very moment, every last person on the ship who wasn’t in the bay was downloading and reviewing those three pod-doors swinging up and back.
It was going to be a different ship in the morning.
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by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 3, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Jacob sat as he always did, cross legged on the coffee table in the middle of the room, making himself the center of attention.
“You really have to get over us and move on, you know that don’t you?” His voice carried to the corners of the room and back to its only other occupant, enveloping her in the warmth of his familiar tones.
“I’m not ready to give up. I know we can make this work,” her voice seemed small and fragile by comparison, “we just need more time.”
“What you’re holding onto isn’t real, it’s just a memory. You’ve got to get past this Holly, you’ve got to live your own life without me.”
The woman blinked back tears, tucking her knees to her chin and burrowed deeper into the corner of the couch.
“It’s not fair, Jacob. I can’t give up, you can’t give up either.”
Jacob shook his head, smoothing back the stray stands of hair that refused to stay tucked behind his ears. “I’m afraid I had to give up a long time ago, and I’m sorry, but we’ve talked about this Holly, you have to let go.”
Holly glared, her eyes burning through the space where he sat. “You said you’d stay with me forever Jacob, was that a lie? You left me with all this money and this house full of memories but it’s not you Jacob, it’s not you and it’s not enough.”
Jacob laced his fingers behind his head, pulling his elbows in and straining as he lowered his eyes to the floor. “I left you money so you could live your life, not to watch you waste it waiting for me.” His stoic expression faltered slightly, revealing its undercurrent of pain, his eyes swollen with imminent tears. “I always knew this was a one way trip for me Holly, you knew that too. You can imprint the essence of the flesh on the machine, but you can’t reconstitute that essence back into flesh. You’ll be long gone before that’s possible; do you want to live out what’s left of your life waiting for a miracle?”
“When the time comes, I’ll imprint too, then we can wait together in there until they can bring us both back.” Holly’s eyes streamed now, her body wracked with sobs.
“Holly, sweetheart, this isn’t all of me. You know that. The computer has enough memories and thoughts to make a convincing persona, but I’m just a projection, a shell. I’m not the man you lost. He’s gone. You and I both know that he wouldn’t have wanted you to stay here wasting away like this, and if you can’t move on with me here, then I’m going to have to purge myself from this system.”
“You wouldn’t. No. Please, Jacob, don’t leave me. Not like this. It is you in there, I know it. I feel it.”
“I’m just a program, Holly. If you can’t let me go, then I have no choice.”
“No, Jacob, a machine would never kill itself for me. If you were a machine, you wouldn’t care, but you do care, don’t you? I know you’ll never leave me Jacob. Tell me you’ll never leave me.”
As the afternoon sun stirred dust up through the cloud of light that was Jacob, she could see rainbows glistening on his wet cheeks.
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by submission | Dec 2, 2007 | Story
Author : Laura Bradford
He chased her even as her ship touched the stars.
At night he gazed through the glass of his telescope, feeling tiny compared to the evening sky, but his days were all routine: get up, go to work, watch the flying cars crisscross and block his chance to catch the faintest patch of gold in the sky. The streets of the city felt empty, even if a thousand people passed by him every day.
He waited in her favorite café, ignoring the news reports flashing on the screen behind the counter. The world continued on without her–how could it, and how could it not? Now he could only count the remaining days until she returned. She had blasted away in her golden ship during the first snow of October, as he stood in a sea of snowflakes for one last goodbye. How she loved the winter, always dressing in a hat and scarf to laugh at the face of frost and chill. What was happening now to amuse her in the dark and swirling expanse of space?
To distract himself he kept busy, tinkering on gadgets or mapping the stars. She would have taken him if she could, he knew that, but his land-locked heart couldn’t survive the journey. Besides, he had a job, clients, commitments. The world had roped him in while she sprang free, not even halted by gravity. So he waited, one fixed point in a shuffling world.
One day nearing spring, a crackly message sounded on his inter-stellar radio, bringing a sentence that gave him an unsafe amount of hope and longing: “I wish you could see the sunset on Mars.â€
So she’d be home soon. He collected every scrap of paper he could find and added detail to his navigational charts: color, texture, a red planet, a path with a yellow dot reaching home. A tiny hologram of the ship spun over his desk, and he sighed and slipped a sky-blue map beneath it, the ship’s shadow quivering over the surface of the world.
Her ship touched down as the last of the snows melted, and the first buds twinkled under half-frozen dew. The hatch opened and there stood his pilot, all honey-colored hair and blue eyes.
“You won’t believe what I’ve found,†she said. “The contributions this mission made to science–â€
He swept her in his arms and kissed her. “I’ve missed you.â€
She smiled. “I brought a photo. Now you can see it.â€
It showed a dusty red sky with light filtering through, the sunset on Mars: an image he had guessed at in his dreams, a souvenir from space. He hugged her and said, “It’s lovely, Zoe, but how long are you staying?â€
“Forever.†But even as she said it, she raised her eyes to the sky.
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by submission | Dec 1, 2007 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala
Okay, I have to admit the first skywriting advertisement I ever saw was pretty nifty. I was in boot camp in San Diego, and a plane was writing a “Bartle’s and Jame’s†advertisement thousands of feet above the ground and just barely within my peripheral vision. I didn’t dare to turn my head for a better look, or I would have been doing pushups until my arms fell off. Still I thought it was pretty cool stuff. Especially for a country boy
When I was even younger still, I saw the old “Burma Shave†signs out in the sticks. You might not remember them, there were seven of them, six each had a piece of a jingle written on it, and the last sign read “Burma Shaveâ€. It was shaving cream, if you didn’t know. They hadn’t put them up for years, but some of those signs were still there. Not to mention the “Chew Mail Pouchâ€, and “See Rock City†signs that adorned the barns in my Rural Texas.
This was classic advertising. Passive, it didn’t annoy you, it didn’t shout at you. It didn’t wake you rudely like it does when you fall asleep in front of the TV. It was part of the scenery, the ambiance, a classic piece of Americana.
This time though, I think it’s been overdone. At first people sort of liked the new advertising. It was wired, it was tech. It’s a damned invasion if you ask me. When the FCC licensed new frequencies to be opened to broadcasters, and advertisers, somebody should have known better than to include the psionic bandwidths as well.
I guess it was just assumed that the advertisers would have the common decency to stay out of peoples dreams. Yeah right, in the pursuit of the almighty dollar, all’s fair.
This morning I woke up with the Blakelys Bakery jingle in my head;
“If you want a better burger,
Buy a better bun,
Blakelys Bakery fresh baked buns…â€
Oh well, I guess you can’t fight progress. It’s time for breakfast, anyway. Think I’ll go to McDonald’s.
“I’m loving it!â€
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by submission | Nov 30, 2007 | Story
Author : Moebius
There are six of us huddled together in the pallid, bluish light of the spacious galley. Tense, wiry and sallow. We sit together in a disjointed approximation of camaraderie. I don’t know any of the faces around me and I am afraid to make any connections. Our eyes shift nervously around the room. Not a pair makes contact with any of the others.
The baggy sleeves of my deflated dream suit drags across the scratched steel surface. Chamomile does nothing to calm my nerves. I focus involuntarily on a dent in the table top. It creases and becomes a grimaced snarl. The surface splits viciously open into cruel steel maw that leaps up at me.
She sounds like a very pleasant woman. The synthesized voice over the annunciator instructs us to return to our posts and re-commence our attack. I blink down at my thin, bony fingers on the table, covering up the dent. A face reflects back and it takes a moment to recognize the gaunt, horrified stare as my own.
After you push in and turn the umbilicus connector, the entire socket retracts and the bio-gel starts pumping into the body suit. The others are already in their skeletal frame seats. I prefer to have the serous fluid half inflate before I lock down. A spasm shakes through the woman on my right as she inhales the fluid into her lungs. The hiss of the noise cancellation device mutes all other sounds and the hexagonal room imperceptibly fades into dusk. The floatation properties of the dream suit offer only a brief sanctuary.
My eye balls dissolve into their cranial sockets from the insides of my skull, eaten away by a thousand maggots spewing acid. Flesh dries and cracks, burning puss oozes out, peeling the muscles off my blackened frame, exposing the charred hardened viscera entombed in my rib cage. A gurgling disembodied scream explodes, sending a shockwave of horror through the system.
Infinitesimal pin pricks make biochemical connections that convert the neuro-electrical signals of my nightmares into psychic images that can be broadcast down to the planet’s surface as an aggressive form of gamma waves. Our ship, Namtar, maintains a geosynchronous orbit with the dark side of their world. We have been here for almost a year.
In another year the biological agents will be released to destroy the staple crops and food supplies, and then the economic embargo will start. Only after the third year can the High Command determine if military action is a necessary recourse.
We are merely the first wave of the invasion.
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