by J.R. Blackwell | Apr 24, 2008 | Story
Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer
He’s from the time before the bio-enhancements, before organs could be grown from a single cell. Age hollowed him out, and though his plastic face looks young, he’s just a shell. When I lean on his chest, I can hear what I imagine to be gremlins, moving around on the inside of his chest. Gremlins pumping streams of blood, moving his limbs and squeezing his heart.
His arms are hard and lumpy but he always sleeps with them around me, holding me to him at night. I used to slip out from under his embrace but let him embrace me. Bruises be damned.
He’s looked into bio-growth, but it’s expensive, and his system functions just fine. He’ll last for ages and the surgery, so simple for someone going from birth-wear to bio-wear, would be intense for him. He would have to replace his system, one part at a time, attaching bio-enhancements to clinking mechanical cogs. As soon as he would adjust, it would be time for another surgery, another hospital stay. Anyway, he’s not a man of the present he’s a man of our clattering, noisy past.
“They don’t make parts like they used to.” He tells me. He refuses to buy new parts. He searches instead for old parts and he fixes them up as he’s wearing down, rasping with the use of only one lung or hunched over an antique with a drill in his one working hand.
“What about when you run out of parts, when all the antiques are gone or broken?” I ask him, over and over.
He smiles his half metal smile and puts his one arm around me. “We’ll worry about that when we come to it.”
When his system needs fuel, his forehead glows orange with an unfamiliar mark. It’s the logo of the company that made him, long gone, absorbed, dispersed, back from the days of the big corporations, before the big crash. He’s old. I’ve said that. His fuel is rare and expensive. It is harder to find each time his light goes on.
“What about when all your fuel is gone” I ask him.
He cups my chin in his metal hands and brings his bronze forehead to my flesh one. “Our lights will all go out someday.” He tells me. “But my personal forever will be with you.”
His plastic and metal casing cools my flesh.
by Sam Clough | Apr 23, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
The Locus is the focal point of our operation. It exists for a period of one year, at the south pole of the nascent earth. That year is constantly recycled: we’ve been in operation for twenty-four years, subjective. Geologically speaking, we leave just before life shows up. After our first accident, and the creation of the beta timestream, we frameshifted to treating millenia as moments. Just to be safe.
We draw personnel from all six timestreams now, but back at the founding only the alpha stream existed. Well, that’s a lie, but a useful one. The other streams probably did exist, but we just didn’t know about them. We’ve got more scientists than field operatives here at the Locus, and arguements can get quite heated as everyone defends their pet theories.
The first accident was right when we set up here. We misjudged our recycling period and ended up leaving a crate of assorted garbage out in the cold. Almost immediately, our gear went nuts, claiming to have picked up an alternative set of destination co-ordinates.
Turns out that can of garbage was found at some point in the seventeenth century, and the broken electronics contained within were enough to accelerate development towards an information society by about eighty years. Naturally, we tried looping back on ourselves and cleaning up the garbage, but it made no difference. The beta stream was there to stay.
The gamma stream was created intentionally by one of our researchers, to see if it could be done in the lab. He didn’t have permission to do it. We looped back to stop him, and suceeded. But our gear still had access to a third timestream. Gamma is regressed: the scientist managed to stop the industrial revolution before it happened.
Delta and epsilon were all accidents of one sort or another, mostly made by gamma personnel during training.
Zeta was my doing. There’s a long-running joke that everyone kills Hitler on their first solo soujourn.
I did.
Delta’s Hitler was the worst. He succeeded where alpha’s Hitler failed, and ended up smashing both Russia and the United States.
So I killed him, and in doing so, I created Theta. Killing Hitler didn’t create a peaceful timestream. It didn’t stop the war. Killing Hitler killed everyone. Mutually Assured Destruction suddenly didn’t look all that mutual anymore, and the sky burned.
The Locus authorities threw me in a cell: one day, recycled forever.
They won’t kill me for it. They made that abundantly clear. I have to serve six billion life sentences, subjective.
They tell me that they’ll keep me alive for as long as they can.
by Duncan Shields | Apr 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
â€Say what you wantâ€, said Shane to the house A.I., “ever since the war, this part of the world has spectacular sunsets.†He was on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean.
“Incoming. Three sigs.†stated the house A.I.
The airhounds had caught up to Shane just as he was starting to relax.
The house defenses sent up lift-tickets to confuse the semi-sentient missiles. One of the airhounds cranked left with an angry twist of its rudder and stabbed into his neighbour’s house, crunching centuries-old stucco. Napalm gushed forth in an almost sexual explosion from its black nozzle before blooming flesh-rending fire across the inside of the building. Luckily his neighbours were on vacation.
“I’m going to miss this locationâ€, Shane thought to himself as he dropped his drink and jumped over the railing. There were other safe houses around the world being dummied up but this one had been Shane’s favourite.
Had been. Already he was thinking of it in the past tense. The training goes deep.
Running as fast as his muscled form would allow, he dashed down the courtyard towards the water. His terrycloth robe hung open and flapped behind him like a flag of surrender. He was getting close to the pier when he felt the force of the blast.
Shane was built for strength, not agility. It was a contest between the armoured plating on his back and the shrapnel of his exploding mansion before he leapt off the edge of his pier. The concussion wave picked him up and kicked him forward.
His robe blackened and shriveled in the flame before he thudded into the waves.
He dove deep into the pale green water. Twisting around and looking up, his government-supplied eyes saw nothing but flames. He registered the ambient temperature of the water going up a few degrees.
Shane’s hair had been burnt off and the salt water was doing nothing to make his back wounds feel better. He was bleeding a lot. He could take a lot of bullets but a shark could probably still take his leg off.
He had a few tanks of air stashed around with beacons on them. With a few head nods, he called them up. The closest was fifteen feet away. He started swimming.
Jackie had gone out to get groceries and wasn’t due back for an hour. Shane hoped that she would believe him killed in the blast.
Incoming had said three airhounds. It was possible that a third was still above the fire scanning for him.
Shane had to swim as far as his augmented legs could carry him before surfacing.
Grabbing one tank and heading for another, he devised a route up the coast in his head that would get him closest to a populated beach where he could steal a few tourist identity cards and bail up to Europe.
â€What the hell,†though Shane, “it’s been a while since I’ve seen Denmark.â€
by Stephen R. Smith | Apr 21, 2008 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Two hours ago, Pete had been pulled gasping from a tank of jelly. Now he sat in an immaculate office, wearing borrowed clothes with his employer staring him down from the far side of a granite slab desk top.
“Welcome back, Pete.” Terrence Carter, syndicate heavyweight and the man Pete ran data packets for. “I must say, you look better than you did the last time I saw you.”
Pete sat straight in his chair, tentatively rolling and flexing muscle that remembered thirty eight years of abusive mileage, but didn’t feel a days wear and tear. “What happened Terry, what’s going on?”
“You were running a very special package for me Pete, one we couldn’t copy, one we had to risk transporting as original data.” Terry paused, pulling at each of his white shirt cuffs in turn, evening their length against the dark fabric of his suit. “You had an incident Pete, for some reason you seem to have hidden my package from me. I don’t know exactly what went wrong in your head, Pete, but when we finally… recovered you, what remained of you no longer had my package installed. We want it back, Pete, I want it back.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t remember that, I’m not on an assignment yet.” Pete shook his head, his face a puzzled frown. Sometimes he had episodes if he stored data too long, there could be cross talk, and data fragments without context drifting in his head caused all sorts of unpredictable things, some unpleasant, but he couldn’t remember anything about this.
“Of course you don’t remember, you’re not the Pete that carried. We just finished growing you from the backup sample we took before we briefed the original you.” Terry pushed himself back from his desk, steepling his fingers. “We keep insurance in case things like this happen, in case we lose a good carrier, especially one with a package installed.
“So I’m a snapshot of myself, from before I left?”
“You’re a cleaned up version of the old you, rechipped and hot-wired to carry. You were the best we had Pete, so I was a little disappointed when you betrayed me.”
Pete ran a hand across the fresh stubble on his head. “What do you want from me now?”
Terry’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I want you to figure out where you put my package Pete, I want it delivered.”
“Wait a minute, if I’m a snapshot from before the briefing, I don’t have any memory of what happened later. That knowledge died with the original Pete,” he shuddered involuntarily, “I mean the original me.”
“True. You don’t know exactly what you did, but you can figure it out. Situational familiarity, behavioral predispositions, pattern predicability. Faced with the same objective, and in the same circumstances, you’ll know what you would have done, where you would have gone. Quite frankly, you’re the only one who can figure out what the hell you’ve done with my package, and I suggest you put some effort into doing just that if you want to get another day older.”
Pete regarded his employer as he weighed his options. He couldn’t help but wonder what bled out of the package he’d been carrying to make him want to risk crossing the syndicate. He also wondered whether he’d been dead when they’d found him, or if death had come later.
One thing was certain, he was being given a second chance, and a short leash. He’d better be very careful not to slip up again, one way or the other.
by submission | Apr 20, 2008 | Story
Author : Grady Hendrix
Fear gripped his guts! Fear turned his spine to water! Fear packed his bowels with ice and made his fingers tremble! That’s what Jim thought he should be feeling, but instead his mind was a blank white eternity with a billboard in the middle and written on the billboard in mile high letters:
I’m scared.
I’m scared.
I’m scared.
“You scared?” the grizzled grunt next to him asked.
Jim nodded weakly.
“Good man. First thing, don’t hold yer assault cannon like that. S’not a crotch warmer. Second, just think about the mission. Clears yer head.”
“Is it true that when the landing ramp drops the first 20 soldiers get their heads blown off?”
A mechanical voice sang out.
“Attention: negotiated settlement talks have closed inconclusively. Prepare for full military deployment.”
“That’ll be us, then,” the grizzled grunt grinned.
Jim threw up in his mouth and let it run down his chin. Didn’t matter. He’d be dead soon, anyways.
“There, there, son,” the grunt said. “Focus on the mission. We’re here because we have to be. Earth needs resources she don’t have, so we go to our friends and ask them to share, and when they don’t share we don’t got a choice. We have to take.”
“But why?”
“Take or die, son. It’s the way of the universe. Survival of the fittest.”
“Pardon me,” a grunt on the other side of Jim said. “I think applying social Darwinism to our situation is entirely uncalled for.”
“What? Yew advocating some kind of Ricardian system of comparative advantage?”
“I’m merely suggesting that rather than fulfilling a pre-existing survival instinct, our species is demonstrating choice.”
“Naw, naw, naw. You’re saying that we’ve become predators. S’what I’m saying too.”
“No, I’m suggesting we’re practicing a style of economic expansionism rather than pure species survival.”
“Yeah, but ultimately it doesn’t matter does it? As the great Mr. D said, “˜It’s the most adaptable to change that survives.’ They got it, we need it, they won’t give it, so we take it. Economics is personal.”
“Touche’. A bit reductionist but I yield to your aggressive reasoning.”
“Aw, think nothing of it. Incidentally, yer point of view is interestin’ but simply not appropriate to the field of battle.”
Jim’s head was spinning. The drop ship hit the dirt.
“Why thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
The warning klaxon went off and the grunt grabbed Jim by the combat armor.
“Come on, kid. Up and at “˜em.”
The landing ramp warning light started flashing. Outside, the sound of multiple missile impacts.
“Think of the mission,” the grunt shouted.
The landing ramp crashed down, the sound of a planet at war rushed in, and they came out shooting in the middle of the Ablixian town square, burning office towers falling before their eyes.
Jim heard them give the Marine warcry and he screamed it too as he blasted away in all directions and prayed that his head wouldn’t get blown off. It was a warcry, a mission statement, it was everything the Earth needed now that it had exhausted its own supply.
“Give us your celebrities!” he screamed.
