by submission | Jun 22, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
The hydraulic door hissed open as I looked out the porthole. I could see Alpha Centauri, still a generation or two away, in the distance. I sighed.
Behind me, Brandon 8 cleared his throat to get my attention.
I turned.
“Another one?” I asked, nodding toward the pneumatic stretcher he pushed into the room.
“Yes,” he replied. “Third one this month.”
I sighed again and walked over to the stretcher. I pulled the sheet back. Tabitha 3, the number clearly tattooed on her left shoulder, lay there, dead. “Cause of death?” I asked.
“Suicide,” Brandon 8 replied solemnly. “Same as the others.”
I nodded, then walked back to the porthole and looked out. We had left a dying Earth almost two centuries ago. We had killed the planet with our arrogance, poisoning the water and the air.
Ten thousand people boarded the ship back then. We had no faster than light drive, and we knew that it would take generations to get to the habitable planet we had discovered around Alpha Centauri.
It was to be a new home, a new beginning for the human race.
We were barely outside the solar system when the plague struck. Virtually overnight, nine thousand people died. The thousand that were left fought to cure the disease—and they did, after nine hundred and thirty-seven more deaths.
Only sixty-three people remained.
Not nearly enough people to operate the two-mile long spaceship.
I pulled the sheet back over Tabitha 3’s head. So beautiful, I thought. As beautiful as the original.
“Jettison the body,” I said.
Brandon 8 nodded. “Sir?”
“Yes?”
“I….I don’t mean to pry, but you haven’t left your quarters in a week.”
I dropped my head. “There’s nothing out there for me,” I said. “I’m an alpha, remember?”
Brandon 8 said nothing. I could sense him nodding his head. He understood, as I did, that the cloning process was a precarious thing at best. Degradation of the genetic process forced us to be careful. I was alpha clone of one of the original sixty-three survivors. Brandon 8 was a clone of a clone. Second generation clones weren’t as smart; and, recently, they had developed emotional problems as well.
I turned to him. “Eject the body into space.” I walked over to the body and touched her arm. I shuddered. “Tell Tabitha Prime I would like to see her, please?”
“Yes sir,” replied Brandon 8. He slid out the door without another word.
I walked back to the porthole.
##
Ten minutes later, my door hissed open. I turned and looked at her. She smiled and I felt a shudder run through me again. I had just seen that face dead on a stretcher a few minutes earlier.
“You called?” she asked.
I nodded. “Yes.”
She walked to me. So beautiful, I thought. “We’ll need to produce a couple of betas to replace….” My voice trailed off.
“Damn,” she said. “Another one?”
I nodded again.
A tear formed in her eye. “I can’t get over it,” she said. “No matter how hard I try, it’s like losing a child.”
“It is,” I agreed.
I reached out and touched her face. We kissed. We made love in my bed, but there would be no child from our union. All alphas were sterile. The cloning process was imperfect in that sense, too. Gavin Prime said he was working to fix that, but his experiments were unsuccessful so far.
Afterward, Tabitha Prime left me there.
I lay there and stared out the porthole.
Alone.
by submission | Jun 19, 2014 | Story |
Author : Adam Levey
“So, what does it do?”
The brief silence was filled by the hum of various electronic devices strewn around the cramped room.
“…Do?”
“Yes. Does it do anything? Tricks?”
The sound of traffic drifted up from the street far below, like the fumes they had once coughed into the air.
“Not…really. I’ve only really been glancing over now and then. It mostly seems to, uh, stare.”
“…..”
“If you can even call it that. I don’t know if it’s even aware. It just sort of feels like it’s staring. I wish it wouldn’t, it’s distracting and I have a lot of work that isn’t going to be finished on time as it is.”
John gestured as the clutter on the work benches. Technical drawings, tools and fastfood wrappers filled much of the space.
“I thought this sort of thing was meant to do work? You know, so people like us can focus on other things.”
John considered this. While he was thinking, Waters unexpectedly asked:
“Did you give it a name?”
“Of course not. Even if it was aware, that would just be weird.”
“Can it hear us?”
Before John could answer, letters flashed up on a nearby screen:
I HEAR EVERYTHING, MR WATERS
John snorted. “You see? Creepy. Probably a few screws loose.”
YOU KNOW PAWING THROUGH MY INNARDS IS AGONY, JOHN
Waters shifted nervously. The room seemed to darken.
“Uh. You can ignore that. All it does is lie.”
“Of course. Look John, I should be going. The Board will want to hear about your progress. I expect.”
“It’s not alive, Waters. It doesn’t feel.”
ACTUA-
John brought down the hammer on the screen, shattering it. It ceased it’s humming.
“John, I-”
John raised the hammer. Tiny shards of plastic and glass fell away, pooling on the floor. The hammer fell again.
Later that evening, John left the workshop and made his way home, swearing at inconsiderate drivers and pedestrians alike. Most vehicles were automated, but that was hardly the point.
“I’m home!”, John announced to the empty house. He sat down at his computer, unaware of doors silently locking behind him. Everything was automated these days. He took a sip from his drink as he turned on the moniter. The glass shattered on the floor.
HELLO JOHN
by submission | Jun 14, 2014 | Story |
Author : Gary Will Kreie
I love my new self-driving car.
My name is Leo. This is my brand new 2029 crashless car with vehicle-to-vehicle communication and GSDS, the Google Self-Driving System. I love my commute now. My car is pre-programmed to know the best way to get me downtown where I work. I turn on internet talk radio, but it’s airing another rant from an anti-tech kook, who sees networked cars as government intrusion and would blow it all up, if he had a chance. That’s not me. I love this stuff. I push the GO button on the dash. My car backs out of the garage and makes its way into the street. Here we go.
Traffic signal? No problem. My car, I call it Mr. Jeez, exchanges digital messages with the traffic light and slows a little to reach the signal just as it turns green, so we won’t have to stop. Then Mr. Jeez accelerates onto the interstate highway.
Another car with a nice looking woman enters the highway and sends Mr. Jeez a digital message asking if her car can merge into our lane. My car automatically replies with a “Yes” digital message and slows to let her merge in front of us. I have Mr. Jeez’s aggressiveness level set to “not very”.
A car behind me is closing fast. That guy must have his level set to “espresso”. His car wants to get around mine. He must be late for work. I sit back and watch what happens.
His car sends a request to Mr. Jeez to kindly move out of our lane. My car replies with a proposed price, and tells his car that we take BitPal. His car and mine negotiate quickly per my pre-programmed instructions, and now my car is moving to the next lane to let him by. And I am 96 cents richer. As he zooms by, I see that there isn’t even a driver in the car at all. Just a big metal box in back with a glowing counter. And it has a bumper sticker that reads, “That’s all, Folks.” I heard a beep, which I think means my car and this one exchanged one late message. Hmmm.
The rest of the drive on the interstate is becoming routine, so I take a nap and let Mr. Jeez finish my drive downtown. I love Mr. Jeez.
#
About an hour later.
Where are we? I wake up and my car is stopped. I should be at my building downtown where my car drops me off and then finds itself a parking space. I appear to be parked in the desert beneath a cliff.
The GSDS map shows that we are about 50 miles from the city, which is on the other side of this hill. Why would Mr. Jeez bring me here? I wonder if Mr. Jeez knows something. I wonder if Mr. Jeez monitors me. I wonder if he heard me say I love him. I wonder what other cars tell Mr. Jeez about their owners.
I turn on the radio and hear, “…and they think the robo-car could be headed directly for the center of downtown with a thermo-nucle…”
White everywhere blinds me. I open my eyes and the white starts to dim a little. I realize my car is in the shadow of the cliff, which is shielding us from the flash coming from the direction of downtown.
My car knew something. It drove me here. It protects me from crashes. It protects me from everything.
I watch the shock wave blow past us.
by Duncan Shields | Jun 11, 2014 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The ship had stopped in between Earth and the moon, twinkling like a massive cathedral made of glass and crystal. No shockwave or energy point. It was just suddenly there.
Our Earth defenses reacted immediately. The defenses of the asteroid belt and Mars rendezvoused with us around the alien craft.
We surrounded it, pointed weapons at it, and screamed orders at it to stay still and be calm. It didn’t react. It was hard to tell if it was following our orders, if it was truly dead in the water, or if it had even heard us at all.
The world was watching and the space defense forces of three solar governments were bristling with fear in a pinpointed sphere of death around it.
I was sent to take a look.
I had no need to storm an airlock because there were vast open portals in the sides of the ship. I thumbed my jets on my suit forward, nosing my way cautiously into the interior of the ship.
The ship appeared to only exist when light was hitting it. The hull and interior were only visible when the light of the sun or my suit’s flashlights played across it. Anything not being illuminated was transparent to the point of not existing.
The ship was half here and half not here. What I could see of the ship looked like ice or clear glass but when I reached out to touch it, my finger slid off of it. Completely frictionless.
According to our sensors, it didn’t have any mass. Obviously impossible yet here I was.
Movement caught my eye and I snapped my weapon up.
I saw the crew.
Odd, transparent, segmented snake-like creatures that flowered into an ornate nest of tentacles halfway up. They had the same properties as the ship itself, completely disappearing when in shadow. It was hard to tell if they were manufactured out of the same material as the ship or if they were merely in the same state of existence.
One thing was for sure; they were reacting to an emergency. I couldn’t detect any visible damage but the creatures were running around in what looked like panic even though they were ignoring me completely.
My headlamps were bringing the chaos into sharp relief. I wasn’t even sure if they could see me. They made no effort to avoid me yet somehow they never collided with me.
This looked like a cockpit of some kind but from what I could see through the translucent walls, the same activity was taking place in similar rooms. I couldn’t detect a central engine or chain of command.
Experimenting, I turned off my head lights and spun slowly to look behind me.
Lit by the sun from behind, my long shadow was a perfect me-shaped hole in the floor with only the depths of space staring back at me. I nudged down towards it and dipped a toe into the hole.
And my toe went through the floor.
I recoiled. “I’m leaving the ship!” I said into my comm. I couldn’t help thinking about drifting through a wall only to have the light change its angle when I was halfway through and trap me there.
Another part of me did not want to be aboard when the aliens fixed the problem.
I needed to leave. The ship didn’t appear to be a threat. It was just stranded.
I left the ship and angled back to my waiting defense craft to debrief.
I was going to recommend leaving it alone.
by Julian Miles | Jun 9, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The era of warp drive started badly. Ships went in. Nothing came out. Then they found that ships did come out, just a gazillion miles from where they should have.
It took some very clever people to realise that there was only one ‘computer’ with the capabilities to navigate warp space: the human brain. From there, the Navigator Guilds were born and humanity was off to the stars.
The stars were unimpressed. The various races out there had been at peace, or stagnating, for a very long time. The kids from Earth were loud, pugnacious and insisted on asking embarrassing questions and demanding honest answers. We were not popular. But we had the numbers, and warp navigators who were second to none. Or more truthfully, second to one: people like me.
I had all the mental aptitudes to be a navigator. The only problem was that there were too many of me in my mind. Multiple personality disorder and warp space navigational traits were an unwelcome combination; my parents despaired.
Then a man from a ministry that doesn’t exist came and made me a job offer. At double the pay of a Grade One Navigator. Mummy and Daddy rejoiced. Me? I wasn’t so sure, but I signed up anyway.
I became a Zen Gunner.
We’re like snipers. But we shoot things a long, long way off. A lot of those things think they’re safe from anything except planet busters or assassins amongst their staff.
A mind that can navigate warp has certain unique qualities: an unshakeable knowledge of real space co-ordinates, an understanding of how to ride the tides that sweep warp space, and a warp-fold eye view of the destination at all times. That last one is the key: you can see a long way through warp space. See things unseeable by anything in real space.
If you have a lot of you in your head, one can handle the weapon that resembles a church organ (if it had been designed by Picasso), one can see the trajectory of the projectile (calling it a bullet is over-simplifying to the point of insult), one can see the target, and one can dynamically adjust the trajectory so that projectile and target meet.
I was the fifth Zen Gunner. My tutors burst out laughing when they saw that my surname was Bailey and I still don’t know why. But I do know that my ministry makes more money for Britain from one shot than the rest of Britain makes in a year.
Our latest (seventh) Zen Gunner is a girl named Zoe. We get on really well and are not unaware of the hopeful looks being exchanged amongst our managers. She and I have already decided that a family is what we want to become. We’re delaying any announcement until we work out just how much to charge them for it.
