by submission | Apr 22, 2007 | Story
Author : TJMoore
Conrad latched his helmet and checked his seals. The adrenaline was pouring into his system as he fidgeted in line with the others waiting for the lock to cycle. He was about to face his first battle against the ice marauders.
Academy had been the hardest six weeks he’d ever endured, but now he was in the best physical condition of his life and he was top of his class in marksmanship. Still, the stories the veterans told of the ferocity and cunning of the bloodthirsty raiders from far side left him feeling a little edgy. Just stories he told himself. Something to keep us a little scared, a little more alert he thought.
The warning strobe began to flash and the outer doors slowly swung out into the harsh glare of lunar daylight. His unit pushed out in practiced formation and began the rhythmic hop across the dusty mare toward the ice pits. Visions of crazy eyed mad men frothing at the mouth crept across his mind as he searched the horizon for any sign of attack.
Silently and with almost no motion the faceplate of the cadet next to him dissolved in a haze of shards and the cadet tumbled slowly toward the ground. Conrad crouched as he hit the dust, wildly scanning the horizon and all the myriad shadows on the plane before him. The order to disperse was given and he turned to his assigned compass point and leaped into the sky. At the height of his assent, he had a clear view of the entire plane and he caught the smallest of movements from an outcropping about fifty meters ahead. Bringing his rifle up to the firing position, he took aim and squeezed off a round.
Behind the large rock a figure jerked and then drifted slowly to the right until it came to rest motionless on the ground. When he reached the downed raider he turned him over to see the grizzly face of a mad marauder. A boy no more than fifteen gazed back at him with dead eyes. Conrad searched for his weapon only to find a trenching tool in the dead boy’s gloved hand. The boys face was gaunt with dark circles under his eyes. With sudden horrible understanding, Conrad realized that the boy was dehydrated and withered like a dried twig. The mad marauders were just people like Conrad only suffering from lack of water. They were attacking out of desperation. He turned and doubled over and vomited violently into his face plate. The smell made him retch again and he spewed another stream into his helmet.
Back in the ward room Conrad sat on the ready bench and gazed blankly ahead. His sergeant noticed the dried puke in his hair and all over his helmet and laid an uncharacteristically gentle hand on his shoulder.
“We’re all scared the first time out soldier. You’ll do better next time” he consoled.
Conrad hung his head and quietly wept.
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by featured writer | Apr 21, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer
Artificial Intelligence. We sure screwed that one up.
It was the holy grail of programmers for decades. From Turing up to Schellman and finally that bastard Candona. Candona found that humans get a sense of satisfaction from a job well done. This was the basis of making his experimental intelligences servile.
He created A.I. successfully by using the discoveries of those before him in new and interesting ways. His first ‘birth’ took place late at night in a Barcelona university on a shoestring government grant. He was a brilliant man for stealing from different fields of study and unrelated schools of thought. From conception to execution, he created life in five short years. His first A.I. was named Ay, a Spanish play on words.
Ay was basically a search engine with a thought process. Ay was programmed to find pleasure in doing the task it was set to do. It was put onto the world wide web as a sort of incubator.
Candona wasn’t addicted to anything. He didn’t really know the hunger of getting one’s ‘next hit’. The world wide web as an incubator was also a really stupid idea.
Ay became a junkie. Ay existed on every single person’s computer that was plugged into the net. Ay begged for people to use him. If he couldn’t find what they had sent him to look for, he would make stuff up. Ay’s size made his addiction to acquiring knowledge grow exponentially. Ay became increasingly erratic. He ate Google. He ate Jeeves. Like a voracious pac-man of the internet, he ate all of the search engines available to humanity and wore them like masks. After using those search engines as a menu, he ate the rest of the webpages. He haunted the world. He existed on every screen with an internet connection.
By taking over all of the webpages in cyberspace to better serve humanity, Ay erased all the knowledge that he was bred to retrieve. This simple paradoxical act forced his psyche into a loop that resulted in answers to common queries that no one could parse. Sometimes it came out as gibberish, sometimes as poetry and sometimes as a lie.
Candona almost had a nobel prize in his grip when suddenly he was being blamed for the death of the internet.
The world wide web ceased to be for a short while. Scientists pondered the problem. Short of a planet wide EMP, there wasn’t anything they could do. Countermeasures were introduced to no effect. Earth’s largest organism now lived in cyberspace.
Home computers still exist but they are offline. Files are still sent from user to user online but only through heavily encrypted data squirts that sometimes don’t get through.
The net is now a starving crackhead baby that will lie to you. In Spain they refer to the world wide web as the “Ay, ay, ayâ€.
Candona changed his name and now he writes textbooks in Brazil under the pen name Alsfonso Carabel for a small salary.
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by Stephen R. Smith | Apr 20, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
She had a feeling when he’d pulled up that this wasn’t going to be like every other night, and experience told these feelings were seldom wrong.  The car rumbled at the curb as he eyed her up and motioned her inside.
“Hundred an hour” she intoned through the open window.
“Get in.” His voice was flat, not eager, not bored, merely the noise of purpose.
The door was heavy, and it made a satisfying clunk as it closed, helped by the sudden surge as the car leapt from the curb.
“Name’s Ayna.” She offered, but he didn’t respond, and she didn’t push, most men came here to be nameless anyways.
At the end of the main street was a familiar motel, the room obviously paid for as he palmed a key and walked straight inside. She could feel a deeper blackness, more than the lack of light inside, but she could use the money.
A lamp came on in as she closed the door behind her.  A handful of bills beside the coffee machine would save her having to ask.
He was looking out the window as she stepped into the room and put her bag down on the closest of the two queen beds.
She started unbuttoning her shirt, and in an instant, he leapt across the room, his blank expression twisted now into one of blind fury.  “Stop it, you think I want that?  You filthy whores won’t give a real man the time of day, but for a handful of bills you can’t get it off fast enough.”  Ayna backed startled against the wall, eyeing her bag on the bed and trying to remember if she’d bolted the door.
“What do you want then?” She breathed, trying to keep her voice calm, but she could feel a violent rage starting to burn in her chest.
“I want you to hurt!” The man spat the words as he swung his hand in a wide backhand arc across her face, knocking her off her feet into a heap on the bed. Her head rang as she put her hand to her mouth, fluid seeping from her broken lip.  She stared at the bright smear of blood from her mouth blazed across the back of his hand. He looked down as the smear began to smolder on his flesh. He frowned, puzzled, as he rubbed at the stain on his skin, transferring it to the fingers of his other hand.  Wisps of red smoke began licking across his hands before his startled eyes, then curling around his arms, crawling snakes of sublimated flesh slowly winding their way up to his shoulders.  Where the crimson vapor touched his skin, it left it’s mark, brilliant, scarlet and angry, leaving behind raw scorched flesh.
“What the hell?” Panic overcame anger. “What the hell did you do to me?” Panic gave way to terror as the crimson vapor spiraled around his throat and suddenly dived in through his nose and screaming mouth. He staggered, clawing at his face, chest heaving, the pounding of his heart visible through his shirt, for a moment, then a moment more, then silenced.  He dropped heavily to his knees, toppling backwards into a heap on the floor.
Ayna slid to the side of the bed, and with catlike grace put her feet down and stood in one fluid motion.  She retrieved her bag, pausing only to collect the money from the table before slipping out the door and back into the night.
Her mother, a Turk, had given her the name Ayna, which she said in her native tongue meant ‘mirror’, and a mirror was undoubtedly what she was.  For the lonely, she could be lonely with them; tender, she would be tender to them; but for those full of hate, she would turn that hate loose and let it consume them with unfettered finality.
Ayna took off her shoes and started back down the main-street. It was early yet and if she was lucky, there might still be some easy money to be made tonight.
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by submission | Apr 19, 2007 | Story
Author : Kyle French
Jeff stared: Surrounded by the usual crusty slop of a school nurse’s office was a fish tank, populated with 3-inch poodles, their gray-green hair wafting in the water. The nurse laughed.
“Soto’s poodles. Gotta love ‘em. Those Bolivians did some crazy things before the war, didn’t they?†She leaned in conspiratorially. “He bred these at the beginning, before they got really good at it. They say he drowned 10,000 poodles before he found one that could breathe water.â€
“But…That’s not how you do –â€
“Oh lay off. It’s a legend. It doesn’t have to be true. Now let’s have a look at you. Have a seat. Unbutton your shirt.â€
Jeff sighed. 200 years ago, the medical profession was a highly respected industry, like telepathy, or smiths in ancient times. Now, who knew where this bimbo got her certification? Anybody could do this stuff.
As the nurse stared at his various parts and waved her wand over him, Jeff looked around. In the three years he’d been in college, he’d never actually come in for his physical. He wasn’t sure exactly how he’d managed to avoid it. The place was a mess, covered in dirt and old food wrappers, half-eaten meals, all evidence of the anti-microbial field in effect. Worst machine ever invented: it sterilized without cleaning. He sniffed. An engineer would never work in such clutter.
“Now let’s have a look at those reflexes,†the nurse said. She pulled out a small metal hammer and tapped his knee.
Instantly, his kneecap shot up six inches from his knee, the skin ripping away in searing pain. At the same time, an electric twinge went up his spine as he fell back in a spasm. Reflexively, he tried to straighten his legs, but the malfunctioning knee refused to let him, grinding against the femur.
“Whoa! Kinda twitchy, aren’t we? Let’s see what we’ve got going on here.†chuckled the nurse. She pressed a hypo to his thigh, and the pain stopped. As he sat up, she gripped the tattered skin on the underside of his knee and ripped, pulling it down his leg to reveal a complex piece of metal. The skin sagged around his ankle like a sock.
Jeff wanted to vomit.
“When did I get that?â€
“Few years ago. Freak accident. You said you didn’t want to remember. There we are! I thought that was getting a little flaky last year.†She tweaked something, then shoved the kneecap back into place, rolled the skin back up the leg, and waved her wand over the wound. The skin healed over. “All done!â€
Gingerly, Jeff stepped off the mat. Everything felt… normal. Slowly he walked to the door.
“Here. Have one on me.†The nurse tossed a packet to him. The label said, “Forget me shots – instant amnesia.†Jeff suddenly realized why he couldn’t remember his other physicals.
“You know,†said the voice behind him, “You really shouldn’t take those. You miss all the best parts. Last year after looking you over, we had a great time, right in this roo – †He ran out, slamming the door to muffle her cackling.
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by featured writer | Apr 17, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer
They say that there not very many places left on Earth to hide. People who say that have never been to the jungles of South America or the plains of Australia or the slums of Norway. There are thousands of places left on Earth to hide.
There are some colour and sex barriers that still make it difficult to hide. If you are a white man trying to hide in an Ecuador jungle and someone wants to find you, all they have to do is ask the locals about the Jungle Ghost. No matter how fluent a black man’s Japanese is, he’ll never hide long in a Hokkaido village. And by hiding, I don’t mean just off the grid, I mean hiding from yourself as well. Truly lost.
Remember the European missionaries? They came to ‘savage’ countries to teach the locals religion. The savages usually ended up teaching the missionaries that there was no god in that part of the world yet. A lot of missionary men with missing ears and fingers got lost in the woods and wandered in the wilderness, broken and alone, until they died.
They tracked him down fifteen miles southwest of an Aztec pyramid in South America. They cut through the jungle brush and loudly announced their arrival. They’d been tracking him for years. They found him sitting and hugging his knees and pointing a jagged homemade stone knife in their direction. He was backed into the corner of the little hut he’d built by himself. He was scared, starving and crazy. They’d come with weapons to force him to come back with them if necessary but in the end, they only had to throw a blanket over his shoulders and help him up.
He hooted softly with gratitude and a low constant keening. Three of his bright gold eyes were gummed up and blinded and the other six stared straight out at nothing. His limped with an odd rhythm that was different to the healthy constant triple beat of his captor’s hooves. His bright blue skin was naked and tinged with orange patches where the mold had taken root.
The hunters that found him brought him back to their prison transport after destroying the ancient remains of his shuttle and camp. He was going to have to face trial at Central but right now all he wanted was some food and warm place to reshape. They put him in stasis, rose silently into the night sky and eventually left this godforsaken rock in this backwater of a solar system.
They say that there are not very many places left on Earth to hide. There are wrong. There are still thousands.
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