by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 17, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
“It’s a pure stroke of genius that I was able to downsize the stabilizer assembly in time for the conference.” Stuart fiddled with his bowtie with his free hand while piloting the sedan with the other. “Does this look alright?”
His wife leaned forward and reached to straighten her husband’s tie as he cut her off. “Of course it’s alright, you need to make sure not to answer any technical questions tonight, I want complete control over the disclosure.”
It was her work that allowed them to pack the stabilizer assembly into one of the containers that took up most of the back seat. She bit her tongue and focused her attention instead on the passing trees just beyond the cone of their headlights.
“There’s going to be a lot more of this, they’re going to want me on the conference circuit, that’s for certain.” He adjusted the rearview mirror to fuss with his hair, gone awry with the mid-summer humidity. “Publication and talk shows, I’ll be gone a lot.”
Julia mused that even sharing a bed and most of their waking moments together, he was seldom entirely present.
“We should be able to push a minute or two on the battery charge, and longer if we get power to the backup, but we’re still not stable on the grid, are we?” He paused and looked right at her, was the man she’d once loved still in there somewhere? “You could have put a little more effort into that, a couple of minutes back isn’t nearly as dramatic as I was hoping for.”
No. That man was gone.
Stuart checked his phone again and read the few new congratulatory texts and emails.
“Stuart, please, pay attention.” Julia tensed in her seat as the car drifted over the centerline. He looked up and corrected, a pair of headlights sliding by punctuated by a long angry horn blast.
“Don’t backseat drive Julia, I am paying attention.” He put his phone upside down in the cupholder and fished for the charging cable to attach to it. “And don’t correct me during my speech tonight either, I hate it when you do that.”
Because you’re usually wrong when you’re talking about my part of the project, Julia thought to herself. She shook her head and looked from the road ahead to where he fumbled one handed with his phone.
“Here, let me do that, you drive.” She picked up the phone and he snatched it back.
“Leave that alone–” The glare of headlights caught the words in his throat, and he jerked back into his lane seconds before they both felt the tires lose their grip on the asphalt. The car began a slow rotation until the oncoming vehicle hammered them where their trunk encroached on its lane, spinning them violently in the opposite direction before stopping abruptly, the ragged end of an already damaged guardrail skewering the passenger door and Julia’s right side.
For a moment there was silence, Julia in complete shock as blood pooled in her lap.
“Jesus Christ, why didn’t you leave it alone?” Stuart was screaming at her, but the words seemed muffled in her ears.
She had a hazy awareness of him climbing in the back seat of the car, opening the cases and wiring up their demonstration equipment, and then in a flash of white light–
–he jerked back into the lane, then immediately over corrected, losing control and catching the passenger wheels on the gravel shoulder, putting the car into a long skid that he couldn’t correct before–
–he pulled back into the lane slowly, but the oncoming car had already swerved, losing control on the far shoulder and hitting them fender to fender head-on, sending them into a violent sideways slide before they hit–
–he hammered the brakes, the tires losing grip on the wet pavement putting the car into a slow-motion sliding turn until the–
“Stuart!” Julia screamed at him as he climbed into the back seat for the fifth or fiftieth time. He hesitated. “Stuart stop, please stop.”
“Julia, I almost got it last time, if I can–”
She cut him off for once. “Stuart, stop. You keep killing me, just let me die.”
She held his arm until she was sure the few minutes had passed, and then they both let go.
by submission | Dec 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Ryan Swiers
“My beard, son,” Ivus Hadler said to Heather Brantley, Solipsister correspondent. The old man rocked back in his chair, tapping one weather-bulged knee with his pipe’s stem. “That’s how I know so much.”
“Your beard?” Heather asked, ignoring his mistake. She was familiar with her androgyny.
“You betcha. All wise men have beards for a reason.”
“There’s certainly wisdom in not having to shave every day.”
“Exactly! It ain’t no crop o’ corn. Why would you cut what you can’t eat?”
This she also had to ignore. This was her interview. “Mr. Hadler, what I’m most curious about is how your beard allows you to know so much. It’s said you never forget a conversation or a date or any fact you’ve heard and even some you shouldn’t. Skeptics say–,”
“I’m an old man done too many turns at the coffee grinder, son.”
“I…,” She flipped through a notebook on her lap, “I’ve never heard a skeptic say that.”
Ivus chuckled. He scooted and leaned his chair closer to her. “Mr. Brantley, why don’t you tell me what you think? I know all that hubbaloo. Let’s not waste words that they already have. Say what you’re gonna say.”
“Okay. Mr. Hadler–,”
“Ivus, son. Call me Ivus.”
“Ivus, I don’t think you’re any more special than the next wise, old man,” Heather leaned in closer herself, his tobacco strong and persuasive to his habit, “You just have something they don’t.”
“Yup, they don’t get as many hemorrhoids as I do.”
Heather gave that a hearty grin. What a coot, the grin said. “No, I think that you never actually grew that beard.” And then she tugged it off for proof.
The beard slid off with a slight, electric discharge, like unplugging a television. Ivus’ chin emerged bruised and blackened but otherwise normal. No slots, no ports, only face and follicles.
Before the old man could start an objection—his bare mouth slack, his expression stunned, a glazed looked to his eyes—Heather placed the beard to her own chin. At first she felt only the coarseness of the thick hair. Then, slowly, like a sleeping limb, a prickling sensation started near her ears, along the top of what would be the side-burns. This sensation travelled along the mutton chops, through Lincoln’s curtain, and then pooled around the goatee, the fu-man chu, the soul patch, the handlebars, and the moustache. Her skin tightened and burned. Finally, an agonizing pain flared to life inside her skull, as if her sinus cavity had been filled with gasoline, the beard a brand, consuming all fuel of thought for frantic arm-flapping.
Despite the pain, Heather began to understand. Information was a scratchy, grey weight through which an old man’s memories ran perpetual: spilled scotch over paper, one sheet scarred with formulas; hot, sweaty nights; the first fiber he’d attached, light-spun; cold, shaking mornings; a woman, too many turns at the coffee grinder, she had said before she shut the door behind her for the last time; and his obsession, growing one strand, one data drive at a time.
It was too much. Heather slumped low in her chair. Many years from now it would be more than her knees that ached in the weather.
“Son, any idiot can tell you, you can’t swallow the ocean in one gulp.” Ivus peeled the smoking beard away. “The trick is to do it one sip at a time.” He settled the beard slowly, tip-tapping it snug with his pipe.
When he had snugged the last hair, he gave a startled blush. “Apologies, ma’am. Don’t know everything yet.”
by submission | Dec 15, 2014 | Story |
Author : Lawrence Buentello
Five billion years ago, two members of the Fraca species stood staring at the stars from the balcony of their laboratory.
They had worked ceaselessly, along with thousands of other scientists and technicians, to formalize the seeding project many thought impossible. On the following morning all the orbiting engines would release their rocky projectiles into space toward precisely determined celestial targets. A thousand projectiles would travel untold light years toward a thousand other stars, and the planets orbiting these stars.
The two astronomers had been discussing the philosophical implications of such an endeavor.
“If even a few succeed,” the one called Jangus said, holding his long arms before him like a priest from their ancient past, “we will be the creator of these species.”
“A millions years,” the one called Zoris said, “or a billion years hence.”
“We will have created all these beings.”
“Yes.”
“I hope our people are still alive when these others are capable of contacting us.”
The Fraca were the single intelligent species on their planet; and they had never, in the course of their twenty thousand year-old civilization, found evidence of another intelligent species in the universe. Their science was highly refined, but the stars remained silent.
And so it became imperative to the Fraca that they not remain the solitary intelligent species in their galaxy, or perhaps even the universe. Once their biological sciences had refined the means by which to manipulate their genetic material masterfully, a great plan was drawn to deliver carefully coded amino acids and other chemical combinations to other planetary systems suspended in the corpus of comets.
If their extensive calculations were correct, the introduction of the coded sequences would initiate the creation of complex organic forms, leading to a long, slow evolution of increasingly complex organisms, culminating in a subtly programmed intelligence.
When the galaxy was filled with new species, and sentient beings, the Fraca would no longer be alone.
“Do you ever wonder,” Jangus asked his colleague, “if this was the manner in which our species was created?”
“Wouldn’t we have found others like ourselves by now?” Zoris replied.
“That’s a logical assumption. But perhaps the equations are not in our favor.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps,” Jangus said, nodding at the stars, “time is a barrier a sentient species simply cannot surpass.”
“Time is an illusion.”
“But entropy is not.”
“If you’re correct,” Zoris said, considering the stars, “then we’ll never know, will we?”
“I very much hope that we do.”
The next morning, the mission proceeded as planned. The launch was a magnificent success, and the Fraca waited a hundred thousand years to receive even a primitive communication from another species.
But the Fraca never did; they died alone, never knowing if they had brought light or darkness to the universe, and never realizing that they had brought both.
by submission | Dec 14, 2014 | Story |
Author : EL Conrad
Temps pour out of slots, lining the windows and tapping the chipspecs implanted in their skulls. All that platform switching — everyone going from database to real time data simultaneously — causes a sysglitch that forecloses production until a tekfix.
A maximan admonishes the workers, “Don’t negi on storm, platform up shortly. Yay!”
“And if we need to go?” Outside, snow is falling fast and furious.
Maximan’s face stretches as she smiles double wide. “U can go. Who says no? UR all expendable. But we heart U and we plus U so if U go, don’t come back.” Her expression is distracted as nows play on her brain screen. “Reduction is production!” she finishes with forced cheer and the company motto.
No one reminds her that they aren’t reducing shit until she gets a tekfix. So young, so beautiful, and so brimming with nowpow, or maybe tompow, in any case just 24 and already a maximan at Midcorp — who would dare disturb her with fact?
It’s efficiency that eventually encumbers.Managers gotta keep it rolling or heads roll. Later has already been planned and predicted, workflowed, whiteboarded, and graphed, every aspect quantified and then spiced with a dose of chaos math. There are objectives and known results (OKRs). Metrics exist on what was and is and will be.
Output — production or reduction, whichever — has already been measured. Deficiencies are intolerable, and maximan changes her tune soon enough, expelling the temps right after transport is halted, “Secu’s #1 so go home! Grow balance. Have it all. Plus yes 2 checking 4 txts. U rule!”
Ellipsis and Wolf trek downcenter. Everything is lovely. Center is still, storm active, a reversal of biz as usual.
It’s late when they cross into the Point, fringe territory. Across the river, Metropolis is invisible, the perpetual glow of its mammoth structures dimmed to dark. But the Point is always powered. Corp’s most valuable pop shops are here. Liquid gold is the biggest biz, so there’s always juice to process piss.
At the factory where the couple rents a cube, the vidgard’s on the fritz. They take the prohibited fire escape to the roof, use of which is forbidden. Wolf lowers himself over the edge one flight to their window ledge, kicks the plastiglass out.
Ellipsis uses a system she devised and that Wolf strongly advises against, a superfine cord of woven space string, the kind they put in Secucorp laser shields. It works but does not look very secure.
When they first met, El’s daring thrilled Wolf — he never encountered a creature as alive in all the universe. But a decade plus can wear on any duo and now he wonders if the alien’s dangerous streak is dull, just a death wish. All life forms have defective creatures that get those when knowledge infects.
Wolf knows — as a boy he spotted his grandfather’s body hanging from the rafters of his forest cabin, a rope wrapped round his neck. It happened on the day the nows announced that corp was gov and gov was corp and that the twain had met at last in the name of efficiency and the single system system.
Still, despite her mate’s suspicions, Ellipsis is the one with hope. She doesn’t articulate this to Wolf because his magical realism involves a higher proportion of real to magic than hers; he disdains hope as a kind of corrupt, delusional philo for the consolation of morons. “That shit’s totally passe,” he like to say. “Went out with the separation of corp and state.”
by submission | Dec 13, 2014 | Story |
Author : Keith Sheridan
They were deep in the forest when the sky began to scream. Above the snowy shoulder of the mountain the orange and navy penumbra of dawn was shattered by the intrusion of a black behemoth; long and sleek, like a dagger slicing through clouds. Tay dropped to his knees, his hands went to his ears to block out the shrieking.
Okor shook him from his crouch. He shouted something but Tay couldn’t hear through the ringing in his ears. Okor’s black eyes were wide and his finger stabbed Inwards, towards where the intruder was falling towards the valley.
They began to run. Through gaps in the canopy Tay glimpsed the intruder barrelling towards the Water. The earth shook as it crashed.
The intruder had shorn through the banks of the Water, blocking the channel and sending streamers of crimson water flooding across narrow plain; scarred with smoking craters and pieces of the intruder’s carapace.
They stopped at the tree line and watched. In the thing’s flank they saw a ragged hole, from the edges of which hung ropes that crackled with light. Okor stepped out of the trees, spear in hand and began picking his way across the ground to the hole. Tay followed, careful not to put his feet in the smoking craters or step on the pieces of jagged metal. Was it a metal beast? A hudun from the stories?
Tay could feel the heat of the thing, and Okor stepped alongside it and felt the hull; raising a hiss. “Hot.” He said, stepping alongside the hole, careful to avoid the crackling ropes. His slit-nostrils perforated. “Death.” He announced.
Tay made the sign of the Channel on his forehead.
A creature tumbled from the hole, its skin black and its smooth head dominated by one giant eye. Okor stepped back, raising his spear. His large head tipped to one side to study the thing. Tay guessed it stood no higher than his waist. The creature’s legs flapped about as if only half under control, like a child.
The Sky’s Child turned towards Okor and jumped. An object appeared in its hand, pointed at Okor. His kinsmen reached forward to take the offering. The Child shouted. The thing in its hand cracked, echoing across the Valley.
Okor wailed, falling as black blood spurted from his chest. Tay roared and lunged at the Child. it spotted him and aimed its weapon at him. Tay flinched as it cracked but it seemed not to affect him. He caught the Child in his long arms, raising him towards the sky. It thrashed and wriggled, trying to escape his grip, but he held on. Tay grasped its legs and head and both pulled and squeezed. Its shiny head crumpled beneath his fingers, sending red blood splashing against the inner side of its eye. Its black skin ripped, revealing a pale inner skin that tore; leaking yet more blood. The Child screamed as it died. Tay threw it towards the trees so it could not contaminate the sacred Water.
Okor was sitting up, his ashen skin bathed in a sheen of perspiration. In his torso his flesh was fighting the wound, forcing a smoking chunk of metal from his narrow chest. Okor’s fingers trembled but he did not cry. He would live.
His kinsmen smiled, but it faltered. His luminescent eyes widened.
Then the sky began screaming again.
Tay turned. The sky, only now mending after the intruder’s assault, was tearing again. A dozen more intruders slipped down through the azure plane, descending like vultures on a corpse.
Tay watched and clutched his spear.
