by submission | Nov 12, 2008 | Story
Author : Elizabeth L. Brooks
Every morning after the war, Joshua went up to the roof to take care of the dovecote. The chore gave him an excuse to get away from the pounding resentment and fear that throbbed through the living spaces below.
He enjoyed it when they needed some care – when the whitewash on the box was peeling, or it required some attention more than simple feeding. After the war, idle hands were simply inexcusable, and every minute that Joshua spent caring for the ‘cote was a minute he didn’t have to be down in the noisy, cold dark below.
He had taken on the task almost two weeks after the war, when he realized everyone else was afraid: afraid to go out into the ever-light sky above and risk breathing the air; afraid to climb the rickety stairs to the roof of the crumbling building; and most of all — afraid of the dovecote itself.
Joshua had subtly encouraged their fears, afraid in his turn that this precious hour of solitude would be snatched away from him. To them, he was a sort of post-technological shaman, performing odious duties and speaking the magical incantations necessary to keep their cold, dark haven safe. They appreciated what he did, but they didn’t want to come any closer to him — or the dovecote — than they had to.
He had been a little afraid of it at first, himself. The innocuous wooden exterior hid a nightmare tangle of wires and lights, a tangled and blinking nest for the “dove” at its core — a disembodied brain floating in a thick soup of nutrients. But it had not changed for six years, and there was only so much fear a simple brain could engender. He had, in fact, begun to talk to it as if it was still a person.
For six long years, Joshua had climbed the stairs every morning, reveling in the searing light and scorching heat, knowing it would shorten his life, not caring. The dovecote was his escape, his only friend, and he wouldn’t abandon it, even to prolong his life. It wasn’t much worth prolonging, anyhow. Beth had been out shopping when the war happened.
Joshua didn’t understand the war, but in that, at least, he wasn’t alone. Once upon a time, men had fought wars themselves, and had known why: Land, resources, revenge, religion– There was always a cause that those fighting could comprehend. Each advancement in martial technology allowed the fighters to stand a little further apart and to do a little more damage, and the causes had become a little less immediate to the fighters, a little more abstract. This last war had been entirely unpredicted, and had been over in the space of a few heartbeats.
Only those lucky enough to be within the protective radius of a dovecote had been spared. Some days, Joshua thought perhaps the dead were the lucky ones.
Joshua had been talking to the dovecote ever since the war, six years ago. Never before had it answered.
by submission | Nov 8, 2008 | Story
Author : William Tracy
A woman sat in a surreal coffee shop. The floor was paved with rough slabs of hewn granite. The small, round chairs and small, round tables were solid oak. The walls were of the same stone as the floor, punctuated by ornate stained glass windows.
The space itself was what made the shop so strange. The floor only occupied a couple hundred square feet, yet the walls soared straight up out of sight. The ceiling was completely invisible from the ground. If one craned one’s neck, one could see, high above, ornate chandeliers. They hung from metal fixtures, cast with inscrutable Gothic figures, protruding horizontally from the walls.
The other strange thing was the lack of coffee. There wasn’t anything else to drink, for that matter. You can’t drink in virtual reality.
A man sat down next to the woman. “Hi, Mary.”
Mary’s face lit up. “Qaxiph! Where were you? I was so worried!”
Qaxiph sighed. “Can I not disconnect for a few days without you going crazy?”
Mary looked hurt. “Do you think you can just take off without telling me?”
Qaxiph stared at the floor. He seemed so sad. Mary scooted next to him, wrapped an arm around him, and buried her face in his shoulder. There was no smell. Mary decided that the virtual reality system must have been designed by a man. Men have no idea how important smell is.
Qaxiph pulled away. “Mary, I think that we need to talk.” Her eyes met his as he continued. “You have been setting your system to make my avatar look human, have you not?”
Now Mary pulled away. “Does it matter?”
“Yes it does.” He put his hand under her chin and forced her to meet his gaze again. “You are … sexually attracted to me, I can tell.”
She put her hand on his wrist. “I love you.”
“This can not work, Mary.”
“Yes! Yes it can.”
“Mary, how do I say this? I am not a human. I am on a planet five hundred light-years away from yours. We can not ever see each other. You know this.”
She pushed his hand away. Why did someone have to invent faster-than-light communication, but not faster-than-light travel? One could communicate across space, but not be there. It was information exchange without presence. It seemed like something a man would invent—it technically got the job done, but missed the point entirely.
“Mary. We have to separate. This can not go on.”
Mary wanted desperately to be with Qaxiph. She didn’t care what he really was. She wanted to hold him. She wanted to smell him, whatever that smell might be. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“I am doing this for your own good. Our species are not even physically–” Mary abruptly disconnected, cutting off his speech.
She returned to her small, sterile room. The walls, ceiling and floor were white, as if the color had grown bored and gone away.
A bed, two chairs, and a desk occupied the room. She sat at the desk, her computer terminal flickering sadly in front of her. She released the VR cable from its socket at the back of her head, letting it drop. It hit the floor with a dull sound and lay without moving.
For a long time she stared blankly at the logoff display. Then she stood up, and shuffled across the room to her bed. She collapsed onto it without taking off her clothes or getting under the covers.
Mary cried herself to sleep.
by Patricia Stewart | Nov 5, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“So, that’s him?” asked Benjamin Goldberg, the reporter from the World Post that was assigned to cover the Berlin Massacre.
“Yes,” replied Doctor Ludwig. “That’s the scum that brought the Procyon Virus to Earth. It’s killed twenty million people already. The casualty count will no doubt double before it’s over.” The two humans stared in disgust at the large biped reptile lying unconscious on the hospital bed. The interstellar war had produced plenty of fatalities when the fighting was confined to space, but when the Procyon High Council decided that it was acceptable to use biological weapons against Earth’s civilian population, the escalation of causalities was devastating. “What do you think the government plans to do with it?” asked the Doctor.
Goldberg noted that the doctor selected the pronoun ‘it’ rather than ‘he’ when referring to the creature. “Assuming HE lives,” Goldberg replied, “there will be a trial. It will be broadcast live to the entire quadrant. The damn Procyons will no doubt pick it up, and make this bastard into a planetary hero. The ironic part is that he’s just a mule they grabbed from the slums. He has no intelligence or military value whatsoever. A trial just gives us the right to execute him. Unfortunately, it’ll be great propaganda for the Procyons. It would have been better for us if he had died.” The reporter turned to the guard standing next to the bed. “How come you guys captured him alive? Couldn’t you have put a phaser hole in his head?”
“Sorry,” said the soldier. “As much as we wanted to, the Centauri Convention specifies that we must see to it that the wounded are collected and cared for. The wording is very specific, we cannot ‘willfully kill a prisoner.’ That’s what makes us better than them. Frankly, I wish it were dead too. That bastard killed my sister and her two kids. How about you doctor, can’t you turn off its respirator?”
“Unfortunately, no,” replied Doctor Ludwig. “The Hippocratic Oath, which I swore to uphold, says that ‘above all, I must not play God.’ That applies to all sentient life forms, not just humans.”
“Too bad,” reflected the soldier. Then, changing the subject, “If you think it’s safe to leave it unguarded Doctor, I need a cup of coffee and a cigarette.”
“With 50 milligrams of Medetomidine in it, it’s not going anywhere. Come on, we’ll join you. My treat,” suggested the Doctor.
As the three humans walked down the hallway toward the cafeteria, Goldberg said, “Crap, I left my notes in the room. I’ll be right back.” Goldberg jogged back to the room and grabbed his notepad. He paused over the alien and thought about how he had hoped that this story would win him a Pulitzer Prize. However, upon reflection, Goldberg decided that he didn’t want to become famous on the graves of so many of his fellow Earthmen. Nor did he want his reporting to help this lousy lizard become a Procyon demigod. On the other hand, there was the Journalists’ Code of Professional Ethics that said he ‘should report the story, not become part of it.’ “Ah Hell,” Goldberg finally said after coming to terms with his moral conflict, “We’ve been violating that oath for centuries. Why start now?” He reached over and flipped the respirator’s toggle switch to the “off” position. He waited long enough to make sure it had stopped breathing. Interesting, he realized. He had changed pronouns too. Then, with an uplifted spirit that he hadn’t felt in months, he strutted out of the ward to rejoin the others.
by Sam Clough | Nov 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
The Shian are a spacefaring race. They are both reasonably telepathic and fairly omniscient: they are also our allies. We – that is, the human race, nothing to do with me personally – built a machine that taps the same frequencies as a Shian biological relay, the natural structure which grants them their telepathy. Apparently, this surprised them. Shian ships blinked into existence all around the earth. They batted away the missiles and the more exotic close-orbit defences that we’d set up, secure in the knowledge that we honestly didn’t know any better. They learnt the language, set up an embassy, and started paying attention to us, in much the same way a teacher pays especial attention to a particularly precocious child.
The Shian were obviously better than us. It wasn’t long before they set us up on the interstellar scene, putting us in touch with their other contacts.
This helped our growing racial inferiority complex no end.
Out of all the contacted species, humanity is physically the least imposing, the shortest lived, and has the dullest senses. We’re not especially bright. In our own sphere, we are a match for most of the minds out there. But as soon as the higher-order physics that the Shian dabble in are brought to the table, our best scientists are suddenly like mewling kittens: confused, worried and scared.
The only thing we seem to have going for us is a certain adaptability and a capacity for survival. Naturally, we wouldn’t need those traits if we could put a one of those automated nomad manufactories in orbit. Or if we had a functional Shian dark drive to reverse-engineer. Or even a working nanoforge. That’s the butt of a lot of jokes in the commercial sectors, I tell you – every damn species seems to get a kick out of our inability to create and stabilise nanomachines.
If you ever see a Nomad on a refuge base, watch them closely. They walk with a kind of jerking shudder. Now, you need to see them in a nonhuman environment to know that the jerk-shudder isn’t just the way they walk. I eventually figured it out. It’s the way they laugh. Our all-environments, everything-proof, top-of-the-line-in-every-field bases are a running joke.
And of course, every species is guaranteed a permanent patent on every one of their native technologies. Not that humanity has much that needs protecting. All the patents mean is that we can only afford to lease extraterrestrial techs, rather than licence them outright.
Anyway. I was making a regular cargo run between Asylum and Third Eye, both of which are human-administered refuge bases in the thin strip of space between the Ekkt and Shian polities. Now, I’m used to working with Shian lossless drives: they work, every time. The junker that I had been assigned was a retrofit. An old Shian Swifthull with a native terran jumpdrive.
Shian propulsion tech is of somewhat superior quality to ours. Shian drives tend to jump the whole ship, rather than just the drive section.
Drifting on my own, with the atmosphere slowly leaking from my capsule, I finally began to get the joke.
by Sam Clough | Oct 16, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
The best definition of ‘coincidence’ is ‘you weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was goin on.’ Related to this is the little-known fact that effect can predate cause. Me and Darien were an effect. The cause’s name was Milo.
“Time?” I shouted forward, struggling to match Darien’s pace. I saw him glance at his wrist.
“One minute twenty-six. Now shut up, and run!”
I redoubled my efforts, barely keeping my footing as I chased Dar around corners. He ducked through a gap in a broken chain-link fence. The sign on it read ‘Absolutely No Entry’. With fifty seconds to get into position, Darien certainly wasn’t bothered about trespassing, and so, neither was I. Darien shouldered his way past a flimsy door, and shuddered to a halt. I stepped after him.
“Six seconds. Hide.” Darien hissed, gesturing towards the stacked crates all around. I ducked between two particularly large boxes. Dar slipped behind the bulk of an offlined stacking robot.
Three.
Two.
One.
An access door at the far end of the warehouse began to roll up, letting light into the gloomy space. I glanced down towards the opening, and saw a double silhouette: one man and a general-purpose assistant-droid.
I was supposed to follow Darien’s lead: he would incapacitate the human target, I would take out the robot pet. Double footsteps, regular as clockwork, began to echo towards us. We were the self-styled magicians: agents of synchronicity. The subtle rearrangers of reality. A little nudge here and there so things happen…well, just so.
Milo and his robot stepped past my hiding place, apparently oblivious to my presence.
Darien moved. I covered the space between me and the pet in two steps. I hooked my foot around its ankles, and jerked it backwards. It toppled to the floor, and I slapped magnets to either side of it’s head, thoroughly disabling it. Darien had drawn a compact handgun, and was pressing it against the back of the Milo’s neck.
“We know what you’re thinking. And no, it wouldn’t work. Left pocket.” I obligingly reached into the target’s leftmost pocket, and drew out the small box. I worked the simplistic controls, and two barbed spikes slid out of one side. It buzzed gently as electricity arced across the gap.
“A little close defence? Nice, Milo.” I laughed, and carried on fiddling around with the device.
“Don’t chatter.” Dar hissed.
We held the tableau for another minute. I could see Darien counting the seconds. That’s the first thing they teach you – big events hinge on the smallest coincidences. One ‘disrupted schedule’ can throw the fate of nations one way or the other. Milo was on his knees, shaking violently. Obviously, and painfully afraid for his life.
“And, time.” Darien replaced his handgun in it’s hidden holster, grabbed the mark’s neck, and hauled him upright. I returned the shockbox to Milo’s pocket, and retrieved my magnets from the junked clanker.
“What the hell!” Milo growled, and scrambled to his feet.
“Veracity. You should go home, Milo. And don’t stop for anything.”
Just as Darien turned to walk away, the first of the klaxons sounded.
