by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 19, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Atto hovers at the end of the bar furthest from the dance floor. Under the harsh lights his skin seems translucent even to him. The revelers around him tipping bottles back and clinking glasses look right through him. He knows a kind of invisibility now he’s never felt so completely before.
The music slips between songs without apparent effort; the DJ has phase shifted something new so that the thumping of the bass tracks line up perfectly, one giving way to the other without missing a beat.
While he watches, Edie glides out from a crowd of dancers, hips swaying, arms pumping and wearing a smile that splits the room in two.
For a moment Atto loses his composure, hands shaking and head reeling he worries that his legs may not support him. He looks for something to lean against and realizes the futility of that. Instead he counts the bottles on the back bar until his anxiety passes.
On the dance floor Edie draws a crowd, young men with bulging muscles and unquestionable intent cycle in and out of her personal space, each trying to outdo the last in some form of tribal mating ritual.
She used to look at him like that, once.
Atto wasn’t bulging muscles and animal dance moves, he was stoic and intelligent, a pragmatist. He was project lead at his laboratory where people trusted him to create things no one imagined possible, trusted him with secrets no one else could know. Atto was known as the ‘Science Spook’, he knew more and was seen less than anyone else in the business. Why Edie had loved him he didn’t know, but she had always danced like that with him, for him. That was then.
Trembling, he stepped toward the lights, towards Edie. The bass rumbled in his chest, and he pictured for a moment the tissue samples they had blown apart with low frequency noise not entirely unlike these tones. A waitress passed by with a test tube rack filled with shooters, their bright colours fluorescing in the ultra violet lights and he reflexively flinched away.
Edie gyrated, sweat rolling off her body and soaking through her clothes. Her eyes almost met Atto’s as she pushed a lock of wet hair back behind her ear, only to shake it free again as she turned.
Atto squeezed his eyes shut, trying hopelessly to shut out the sights in the bar. The music assailed him from all sides, pounding away at his senses until he was sure the pain of it had reached his limit.
“Hey baby, come dance with me.” Her voice cut through the haze like a velvet blade, and for one incredible moment she was looking right at him. He stepped forward, reached out his hands towards her. For an instant he thought everything could be alright again.
The sensation of the younger man passing through him wasn’t nearly as gut wrenching as was watching him take Edie’s hand and slide back onto the dance floor, stealing his Edie right from his grasp.
Edie had looked right at Atto, looked right into his eyes but where there should have been recognition there was nothing. In an instant she was gone.
Atto stumbled towards the door, passing through crowds of people like damp breezes without them even knowing. The door came and went and he found himself out on the road, street lamps casting long shadows in the late night gloom, shadows of everything but him.
He imagined her smell on him, the taste of the sweat from her skin on his lips.
As a scientist he’d done what no one imagined he could do, shifted himself just enough to see but not be seen, neither touch nor be touched.
As a spy he was without equal, he could observe anything, be anywhere.
Except with her.
by submission | Jul 16, 2010 | Story
Author : Adam J Keeper
I swear there’s a curse on my spaceship.
As my vision returns I see the spiderweb of cracks in my visor, the now familiar sight of bodies spinning in zero g, the red pulse of the warning lights, the squeal of the proximity alarm.
I try to reach out, grab a rail, a console, but my body is too weak, I rotate helplessly suspended in mid air. I look at the oxygen gauge on my wrist… its running low. If I can just hold out long enough the distress beacon will be answered, I will live another day, more than I can say for the crew.
Ever since we refuelled on Riggs planet, my luck seems to have turned bad, this is the fifth crew I have lost, each time the circumstances more horrible, each time I am the only survivor.
I’m a man of science, an astronaut, rationally I know there is no such thing as bad luck, bad conditions maybe, poor decisions yes, but a curse, no, no it can’t be. As my air begins to run out I hear the heavy clang of the rescue shuttle, I will live another day, run another mission, lose another crew… its been the same ever since Riggs world…
I put a curse on your spaceship.
I put a hex on your engines.
When your black hole drive kicks in I wouldn’t want to be you.
I have no sympathy for you Mr. Spaceman, since you came to Riggs planet you have brought nothing but pain. Before you came I was happy, free, I hadn’t been planning on falling in love.
When you left you took everything from me, you stole my soul, so in return I demand yours.
I remember when you first came, a great metal bird from the sky, your body covered in pipes, a great glass dome where your head should be. When everyone else ran it was I who talked to you, befriended you, became your lover.
When you left you took everything, you mined our fields, stole our ore, our life’s blood, our soul food. When my people tried to stop you, you had them arrested, de-programmed, murdered, without conscience.
I tried to stop you, to stop you taking from us, from leaving me, you just laughed, our planet was just a fuel depot to you, me just a pitstop.
After you spurned me I crept aboard your ship, I used the sacred ore you took from us against you, made your fuel sources impure. I didn’t stop there, I re-programmed your navigation systems, I downloaded pieces of my mind into your shipboard computer; my thoughts are now its thoughts, its will is no longer its own.
So good luck to you Mr. Spaceman, your ship loaded with my dark magic, the odds stacked against you.
Don’t break the heart of a robot from Riggs world Mr. Spaceman; we are programmed to never forgive.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 12, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s one of those moments everyone dreads. You’re standing in front of an observation window looking out at open space and you see a crack silently trace its way up from the corner and across the glass.
Once when I was seven, I stayed with my mom on an Earth farm during the winter. The snow was deep and the air was cold. There was a small pond on the property that froze over in the winter.
I walked up to the pond and out across the ice. I was nearly at the center when I felt the ice crack. It was a crack I felt in my bowels, in my bones, in the very bottom of my soul. It wasn’t so much a sound as it was a muffled concussive force from beneath my feet. It became the subterranean creak of a door. I could feel very, very subtle changes in balance starting to fire up inside me as the vector of the surface I was standing on started to change.
I looked at the shore and in the clear cold air of winter panic, I calculated how long I had to get to the bank of the pond divided by how fast the ice was breaking and came up with a totally unknown quantity.
The spell broke and I dashed back to the shore. I never fell through the ice. If I had been older and heavier I never would have stepped through the ice on the shallow shore on my first step. If I was younger and lighter, I would have been safe on the ice.
I’m remembering that moment now looking at the flaw in the monocrystal of the spaceviewing window in front of me. It’s creaking its way across the glass with questing fingers that look like crystal tree branches growing in stuttering time lapse.
With a sharp intake of breath, I run. The alarm sounds on my first step towards the deck doors. I know the emergency shutter seals are going to come crashing down the millisecond they detect a drop in pressure.
I’m screaming like I didn’t know I could as I leap and dive through the doors into the hallway. The blast door comes down suddenly to cut off the doorway. There is a moment of silence. A second later, the blast door stiffens with a bang as the window on the other side blows out.
This is an old ship. I’m gasping and crying as I get to my feet and the emergency crews arrive. I swear if I see the engineer in next few hours, I won’t be legally responsible for the bodily harm I inflict on him. I cannot wait to dock and get off this ancient freighter.
by submission | Jul 11, 2010 | Story
Author : Thomas Desrochers
We’ve turned into such a peaceful race. We are so… So… Dull. We never fight any more, wars are a thing of the past. Even violent crime seems to have just disappeared. The typical city needs, maybe, one law enforcement officer per every million people.
Yes, violence has been replaced with communication, war with learning, militaries with space programs. Children listen and want to learn, science and math are favorites among them.
This is a problem. English and music have been usurped, and nobody cares about history any more. Culture is non-existent. Media is simply news. Radio is just an information exchange system. There is no music any more, except for what people play in their suits, and even then it’s mindless three- and four-note “techno,” a mockery of the music it was derived from.
I am not alone in my thoughts. There are others who agree with me – very few, but they are there. There’s Andrew, he writes music. He’s the only one out of all humanity who still does. Then there’s his wife, Anne. She paints. Her friend, Eilene, also paints. The three of them live together on The Subcontinent. I live on the west part of Continent B, with Marcus, Dominic, and Sheila. Marcus likes to work clay, Dominic makes sculptures. Sheila and I are just along for the ride.
See, none of us can get any inspiration from the blandness around us. There is no nature anymore, it was wiped out long ago in the name of humanity. The oceans are tamed, the weather under our control and as magical as a door. So we get our inspiration from people. We get people to show real, genuine emotion.
It’s very easy to draw them out of all that contrived peacefulness. After all, their suits connect directly to their brains. With some simple hacking we have direct control of their thoughts, emotions, and senses – most of which we don’t even need.
Our latest kill was a wonderful example of how we work. It was a young girl named Ana near here who is much like all of her peers, striving to excel in mathematics and science, her suit doing its job and regulating hormones quite well. The seven of us, myself, Marcus, Andrew, we all connect our systems together. Then Marcus sends out a feeler to make contact with the girl’s system.
Once we have a connection the seven of us mentally destroy her firewalls and silence any warning systems, in the space of about a second. Then we start pumping her full of hormones, and she very quickly becomes unstable. After that it’s simple. We just plant thoughts that she wouldn’t normally think, and she thinks she’s the one thinking them. Before long Ana decides she shouldn’t be alive any more.
Ana was quite creative. Instead of the usual “Jumping off a building” or “Forcing suit shutdown” she opened up a transformer and shoved her head inside it.
And God, that was so good, feeling the abrupt end when she did it. Andrew wrote a symphony that night, Dominic matched DaVinci – It was a wonderful night for their creativity.
And me? I rode that lovely buzz and philosophized. I thought about Secular Humanism that night, pondered the idea that all people are fundamentally good. I don’t believe it. If people were good they would have let the violence continue.
Luckily for them there’s still a few of us right-minded people left.
God, I do love that rush.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Walter had felt cold before, but nothing like this. In the hours since sundown the temperature had dropped steadily, but in the last hundred yards it had been dropping twice as fast.
He had to find shelter quickly or risk freezing to death.
Cresting a small hill, Walter came upon a door stuck as if by accident in the side of a tall snow drift. A smooth metal oval was clearly cut into the side of a wall buried in the ice. Walter, too cold and desperate to be cautious simply pushed on it, and when it retracted out of his way, he fell in a heap to the floor inside.
Walter struggled to regain his footing, and with difficulty managed to stand. Turning, he realized the oval shape had closed behind him, sealing him off from the cold and the wind outside.
Before him a round tunnel stretched away, smooth walled and featureless.
Walter cleared his throat noisily and was startled by a voice.
“Come, come, bring it to us please.”
The sound was nothing if not unnerving.
Realizing there was nowhere to go but on, he walked slowly down the passageway until it emptied out into a large squashed spherical chamber. This space, unlike the stark emptiness of the hall was filled with clutter. Quilts of earth toned fabric hung in sheets from the walls and ceiling, thrown over climbing rope that was looped through pitons hammered haphazardly around the room. Carefully sorted piles of canned goods, glass and other equipment decorated the floor. In the shadows of the perimeter he could make out what looked like long bolts of cotton.
Something moved, and Walter’s attention snapped to it, heart pounding.
“Warm, warm, it comes to us warm.”
The speaking shape resolved into that of an old woman, only the sagging skin of her head and hands were visible from a cavernous patchwork gown. Her hair was filthy and drawn back in a long ponytail, her forehead expansive above brow-less eyes.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Walter spoke slowly, “but it’s bloody cold outside and I was afraid I might freeze to death.”
The strange woman tugged at her forearms through her sleeves, the skin of her hands pulling taught and then falling slack again as she let go.
“Cold outside, cold inside, we takes the heat from where we can, far away and far below,” the woman smiled, her mouth a black toothless gash in her face, “we’re so happy you’ve come.”
Walter felt his stomach turn, empty though it was.
Walter began to back towards the mouth of the tunnel as the woman dropped her arms to her sides. One of her hands fell away, and Walter realized they weren’t hands, but rather gloves made of skin. Turning to run, he tripped over one of the bundles on the floor, falling hard and hearing the sound of breaking bone. When pain didn’t follow, he looked to see broken bone protruding not from his leg, but from the white mass on the floor.
“All the warm stays with us.” Walter whipped around to find the creature standing over him, the braided wig slipped sideways now at an impossible angle. The face was that of a woman, but pulled over something else as a mask. It moved impossibly fast as he tried to scramble for the tunnel, the arms clamped onto him, pulling him toward it. He screamed as it reared up on it’s hind six legs and spun him round and round into a long bundle of sticky silk. By the time it bound his face, his voice had left him.
Walter could feel it drop him and skitter away across the floor. He only hoped he could freeze to death before it got hungry.
