by Jared Axelrod | Aug 10, 2005 | Story
I’ve been expecting you. You’re going to ask me if I’ve heard what the Fleet of Ages found on their return trip. I have. Wasn’t surprised when I heard it, either.
I never could wait. That was my problem. That was a failing we all shared.
I used to think that, more than any man, I understood the consequences of what those ships were supposed to bring back. When they launched I remember writing how I had a sense of apprehension; fear, but also pride. “Much the same way a lifelong gem miner must feel as he watches his sons go down that selfsame shaft.” Those were my words.
So I suppose I had no comprehension at all.
When I started mining the future, did I ever expect this? What could I have expected, if not this? You cannot take from the future and be ignorant of the past. We learned that now, too late. And we will pay the price of that lesson soon enough.
The Fleet of Ages, the Ships of Tomorrowall those other wondrous names your colleagues gave them. Not even when I brought back the technology that would allow such a colossal expedition into the future, did I imagine this. It’s just there were no signs. Not until it was too late.
Taking from the future seemed to be the one thing that defied the law of diminishing returns. Indeed, it seemed to flaunt it. Each time I traveled and looted, things would be different, though my destination time never changed. The future would always be brighter, more wondrous, filled more technological marvels for me to take back. We were able to progress without the work of it. After each trip, the present started further ahead.
Naturally, the Fleet of Ages was developed. It was the equivalent of strip-mining the future; we knew that. But we were certain that the advances we brought back would make the future more fertile. It always had before.
And such wonders the Fleet brought back! Such treasure! Such amazing advances! We were so proud of them, weren’t we? So proud. We were going to be gods before our time.
I never could wait. As soon as the Fleet came back, I had take another trip. I had to see, as soon as possible, what kind of fruit our actions had produced.
So I knew before everyone else the barren horror that is now the future.
We will not learn the lessons necessary for the proper use of what those ships have brought back. And we will misuse them. We are children playing with grenades; our destruction is inevitable
So concerned were we with what the future could give us, we lost sight of what we had to do in the present, to prepare. Because we couldn’t wait.
And now our time is past.
by J. Loseth | Aug 9, 2005 | Story
for my mother
Dan Huckabee was the type of guy that nobody liked at parties, unless it was a party filled with the same type of guy that Dan Huckabee happened to be. He talked too much. Some people talk too little at parties, and nobody likes them, but nobody liked a guy who went on and on like Dan Huckabee either. It wasn’t that he rambled; nobody liked a rambler, but that wasn’t what Dan Huckabee was. He was a man with a passion, and he would tell everyone he met about that passion for hours on end, whether they cared to hear it or not.
Dan Huckabee was an archivist. It was his job to collect the old, outdated forms of records that had been stored for ages in the silent halls of the Library of Congress and air them out; he scanned them, preserved them, and kept history straight. He turned books into memory chips, magazines into CDs, and audio tapes into soundsticks. He was a natural. Whatever form the information took, you could always count on Dan Huckabee to save everything that a less careful archivist might have discarded as useless. That was why he’d been hired. After the old Library of Congress had been unearthed from the decades-old rubble left over from the war, the New World Government had chosen Dan Huckabee to unearth and preserve its troubled past. The problem was getting him to shut up about it.
A favorite topic of Dan Huckabee’s was heroes. There were lots of heroes in the old times, he said. People used to stand out back then. People used to be noticed. That was real living. His sister remarked privately that Dan Huckabee was noticed frequently; it just wasn’t in a positive light. He didn’t seem to care. No, Dan Huckabee would persist in attending parties despite the declining cordiality of the invitations and tell people what it was like to live in ancient times, times when one man could change the world.
He told stories of wars, of conquests, of civil rights movements and stirring court cases. He told stories of political coups and new scientific breakthroughs. He told anyone who would listen (and even those who wouldn’t) about President Madison, who stood up to the War Hawks in Congress and prevented a disastrous conflict with Canada; about Wang Weilin, who single-handedly halted the progress of encroaching tanks and allowed thousands of political protesters to escape Tiananmen Square unharmed; and Alger Hiss, who stood up to his enemy McCarthy and proved triumphantly that he was not a red spy. Dan Huckabee told the stories of heroes. He never let the disinterested stares or blank looks he got stop him.
Late at night Dan Huckabee would go through the papers he was sent by the government, red pen always moving to cross out or underline or scribble a few notes. Other men would not have put so many hours into a government job, a dead-end labor with little pay and fewer benefits, but Dan Huckabee was a dedicated man. When he saw the readouts of the new history books with the great names of Madison and Wang and Hiss in big bold letters he felt a stir of pride in his heart. He was a man who stood up for his beliefs, a maker of heroes and a teller of truths. He had never called himself a hero, but when he gazed on his work with satisfaction he breathed to word under his breath for inspiration. Dan Huckabee was a hero. Dan Huckabee was a man who could change the world.
by B. York | Aug 8, 2005 | Story
“Damn, we’re in a tight spot!”
Simon had never seen a more troublesome mentor in all of his training. He just sat wide-eyed with two suitcases in his arms, stuffed behind a pile of debris from their bridge-port fight, his legs poking out. Simon’s maverick mentor Alabaster Jones was firing a X347 over the cover at the raining ion flames of the entire Solar Flare drug cartel of New San Diego. Simon began to wonder just how a simple trip to the baggage claim at the space-port had gotten him into this situation.
“Frag! I’m out of juice! This fight needs to get dirtier. Hey, Squire! Squire!” A beefy hand slapped poor Simon on the back of his head, making him blink.
“Yes?” He narrowed his eyes up at the flamboyant eye of the storm.
“Pay attention, kid!” he said as another ion blast disintegrated dust just beyond them on another pillar of concrete. “I need that Microsoft Assault 4 from the blue case. And on the double!” Simon hurriedly unsnapped the case and tugged out the green-hued sleek, rifle-like weapon and handed it up to Jones. Jones snagged the gun and began blasting. A flare of red issued from the muzzle of the plasma weapon, shading them both.
“Jesus!” Jones ducked back behind the cover and shoved the gun at Simon, “I said A4! Not P1! I just sank a hole the size of a football field in the bridge!” Simon began to apologize but Jones just grabbed the blue steel weapon from the case and loaded it, his back hugging the rubble.
“Hm. Wonder if that bridge will hold. Kid, better grab the Smith and Wesson Auto-Fletch. We might be making a run.”
Simon had the balls to slam the blue case shut and tug the gray one up on top. “What in God’s name did you do to piss these guys off?” He tugged the dull gray weapon, relatively small in comparison, from the case. Easily gripped in one hand, the multi-barreled flchette would serve him well while Jones continued to lay waste to armies with the A4.
“What?” Jones winced as the loud roar of the Assault 4 plugged them good. The smart-shells were doing their job: getting rid of the cars they were using for cover. He yelled down at Simon. “Oh, well suffice to say, kid, you shouldn’t sleep with any woman you meet at a smuggling bar! Well, that and steal cargo.” More rumbling from the weapon of choice, and Jones looked satisfied, “Yeah, that should buy us some time.”
He switched out the smart-shell with a concentrated ray-beam complete with microwave sequencing. Sneaking a peak back over the cover, he grumbled and looked to Simon. He was sitting with a gun in his lap and a look of complete frustration and comedic anger on his face. “Kid… I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but… looks like they brought a Sony Atomizer, ’75 model. And, well… they’re aiming it at the structure.”
Simon sneered and mockingly aimed the flchette at Jones before his shaky hand fell back to his lap. Jones only poured salt onto the wound.
“I hope you can swim, kid.”
by Jared Axelrod | Aug 7, 2005 | Story
A professor of mine once said that creativity was the last resort of losers.
That it was an evolutionary quirk, of no more merit than a giraffe’s elongated neck or a platypus’s duckbill. That from an evolutionary standpoint, creativity was not worth mentioning, and worth even less compared to something like flight.
Speaking of which, here. Take this. Remember to breathe deep.
You’ve imagined what it would be like, right? Sure, we all have. What it would feel like to be up there. Unencumbered by some claustrophobic airplane. To be actually flying.
Yeah, no, man. That’s perfectly normal. Just breathe deep. It’ll pass.
But, yeah. We’ve all thought that. Like we belong up there. Like the fall from the Garden of Eden is more literal than we ever thought. That flight is really just an evolutionary step away.
You’re feeling it now, aren’t you? Move your arms. Isn’t that amazing?
What my professor never understood is that evolution is slow and random. That its approval is not something we should strive for.
Not when creativity can grab evolution by the balls.
Your system should have adjusted by now. Welcome to a whole new point of view.
Ready for lift-off?
by Kathy Kachelries | Aug 6, 2005 | Story
On rainy days, on days when the air smelled like ozone and soot and water fell swollen with chronoradiation, Anton climbed to the roof of the tallest building in Pripyat to watch the sun peel the clouds from the horizon at sunset. The first nine blocks were easy: he pushed the girl ahead of him in a rusted shopping cart. The stairs were more difficult, but he’d fashioned a sling out of an old backpack to secure the girl to his back. The whole ordeal took nearly three hours, so he always started early. Unfortunately, because the stairwell was windowless and he had no way to measure time, sometimes the sky was already dark when he opened the door to the roof.
Anton thought of the girl as Antonina, though he’d never learned her name. Like most of the shadow children, her metabolism had slowed after the incident, and any physical aging in the last decade was negligible. Her body was eighteen months old, he estimated. There was no way to know if her brain grew in body time or thought time, but he fancied that she was nearly eleven behind those dark eyes. That was how old his daughter had been.
The front left wheel of the cart screeched with every revolution. Anton used it to keep his footsteps in rhythm. Every three shrieks, he leaned hard against the plastic rail to shift his weight from his leg. It was two thousand and twenty six steps to the building, but only one thousand and thirteen of them were painful. The injury was relatively minor—a ligament torn during a game of tag with his daughter—but, like Antonina, his body moved in Pripyat time and it could take decades for the tissue to knit.
Above them, the dim patch of light inched towards the horizon and the first shade of smog-soaked red spilled over the empty village. Anton estimated it would take another hour to make it to the roof, which put them perfectly on schedule with the darkening sky.
As he walked, Anton hummed a song he’d picked up in the university pubs of Moscow back when his wife had been his girlfriend and his daughter had been a laughable impossibility. When Antonina’s chubby face opened into a broad grin, Anton tried to sing the chorus. Most of the words had been forgotten, and his syllables washed ahead like echoes swirling over the sooty streets.
