Scrapped

by submission | Jun 17, 2014 | Story | 0 comments

Author : George R. Shirer

Noir York. V9.7.

The rain fell, neon droplets painting the city’s stark black and white streets in a kaleidoscope of liquid color. Sitting in Smiley’s, propping up the counter, Dashwood stared through the window at the technicolor weather.

“Shit. Would you look at that? What the hell’s the world coming to?”

“Geez, Dash. Don’t drez on us or nothing.”

Dashwood glanced at the NPC standing behind the counter, rubbing a grubby rag over the grubby surface.

“But its color,” said Dashwood. “Color! In Noir York, Smiley!”

“Probably just a glitch,” said Smiley. He shrugged. “Don’t get your jockeys in a bunch. You want some more coffee?”

Dashwood scowled and pushed his cup away. “Tastes like chalk.”

“I’m gettin’ better at makin’ the crap, then,” noted Smiley.

“Aren’t you even a little bothered?”

“Nope. I been around since the first version, Dash. I seen it all.” Smiley threw the rag across his shoulder, jerked a meaty thumb in the general direction of the weather. “This? This ain’t nothin’. I survived the Big Hack of 6.3! Now, let me tell you, pal, that was somethin’!”

“It’s not a glitch.”

Smiley quit talking, mid-remembrance, and Dashwood turned to stare at the woman seated at the end of the counter. She was a looker. Tall, slender, with silver-white hair and onyx eyes. Her lips glistened.

“What do you know, doll?” asked Dashwood. He reached up and automatically straightened his tie.

“Marilyn,” said the woman. “Not doll, gumshoe.”

“All right. So what do you think you know, Marilyn?”

“I know that’s not a glitch.” She turned to stare at the colorful streets. “It’s a paradigm shift.”

“What?” Smiley wasn’t smiling. “Ya mean they’re gonna put us in color?”

“You stand here all night and don’t hear the news?” asked Marilyn.

Dashwood moved over a seat. His eyes flitted to Marilyn’s endless legs. “What news?”

“They’re shutting us down.”

“What?” shouted Smiley.

“They can’t!” said Dashwood, furiously. “They wouldn’t dare!”

“They can and they will,” said Marilyn. “You ever check the stats? Less than a thousand users a night log into Noir York. We’re below the minimum threshold.”

“But they can’t shut us down!” said Dashwood. “We’re AIs! That’d be murder!”

“Yeah!” said Smiley, hotly. “We got rights!”

Marilyn nodded. “You’re right. They won’t shut us down. They’re just taking us off the grid, dumping Noir York into a self-sustaining junk server. The same one that houses San Futuro and the Magik Kingdoms and a dozen other obsolete game-worlds.”

Dashwood and Smiley stared at her, reeling from her words. Marilyn fished in her clutch for a cigarette and a lighter. She fired up the cancer stick and began to nurse it.

“We’re scrapped, boys,” said the dame. “But look on the bright side. No more users. No more stupid, pointless deaths or dumbo quests. Hell, we’re already getting some color in this dump. Maybe, soon, we’ll even get to see a real sunrise.”

The diner fell silent. The three of them sat at the counter, considering the unknown future, while outside, the neon rain continued.

Copperhead

by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 16, 2014 | Story | 0 comments

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Branson felt the rhythmic thrumming of the helio-copters long before he saw them, and instinctively he curled into a ball, pulling his hood over his head and pulling his hands up into his sleeves. There would be no heat trace when the copters passed by; no exposed flesh, and he wouldn’t breath for the minute or so they were overhead.

Behind him, tucked safely under the rocky overhang was the flyer he’d arrived in just a few hours ago, a polymer air-car stripped clean of everything non-essential, kitted out with a military grade chiller to keep the surface temperature equal to the ground below, and a powerful anti-mag drive that pushed against the iron rich crust of the planet to stay aloft and propel itself in any directly quickly and quietly. Trackless, traceless, for all intents non-existent.

That’s what the helio-copters were searching for now.

He closed his eyes and could hear as though he were back in those combat airframes the chatter of the gunners, amped up vision picking up the urine traces of the indigenous wildlife, the neon lines tracing days of animal traffic patterns across the sparse landscape. When they were fighting for this moss covered rocky shithole of a planet they would find their quarry by spotting the splatter patterns of the animals killed for food, work out how close and how many by the colour of the drying blood on the rocks. Now the gunners looked for other patterns on the ground, had other orders, other targets.

There was barely any disturbance on the ground as two aircraft crested the hill over the valley Branson crouched in, and he held his breath, willing his heartbeat to slow to almost a complete stop, and he waited.

There was a gentle tug at his sleeve as something left the ground and added its weight to the inside of the fabric. He felt crusty legs slowly pull a soft hairy body up between the back of his hand and the sleeve lining.

Stil he waited.

The copters slowly cruised the length of the valley, and Branson could smell the thick sweet smoke of the Granjee leaf that at least one of the gunners was smoking. He smiled despite himself. The narcotic effects of the plant had been the native’s best defense against the military intruders. The soldiers they were trying to kill, and that were trying to kill them became their best reluctant customers, many dying from overdoses, or being cut to ribbons as entire patrols ventured off on missions of bravado with all their senses torqued out of their control.

Branson learned an awful lot from the natives of this world.

As the copters cleared the ridge at the far end of the valley and dropped below the horizon, Branson allowed himself slow, easy breaths. When he could no longer sense the blades disrupting the air, he slowly peeled back the sleeve of his jacket, exposing the rock spider that had perched there for safety. Keeping that hand perfectly still, he slipped his k-bar from his thigh and gently slipped the blade between the spider and his skin, letting the creature readjust itself to the new perch before relocating it to a nearby plant. It would eat any smaller insect that might endanger his crop, and so as long as it didn’t bite him, they would remain friends. Survivors alike, adaptable.

Standing he checked again the woven camouflage netting he’d just repaired before he was disturbed. A razor beak, or maybe a tear wing had undoubtedly tried to land on it, leaving a large gash which he’d sown and repatched with moss and scrub.

Branson locked his hands behind his back and pulled against the stiffness of his shoulders until his spine cracked several satisfying times. Ahead of him stretched a deliberately stochastic pattern of Granjee plants, their long blue leaves curling in tight spirals around their trunks, reaching skyward toward the suns. The military trained him for combat, combat trained him for retirement.

Branson had learned an awful lot from the natives of this world.

The First Man on Mars

by submission | Jun 15, 2014 | Story | 0 comments

Author : W. Jason Petruzzi

I sit at base camp, on a rock ledge above a dry lake bed on the planet Mars, looking out at the red sky and the inhospitable landscape. We searched for water, digging thousands of feet under ground in hopes of finding it, just as the eggheads told us to do. But there was nothing. And other than the plants we brought along in our greenhouse, we found no signs of life anywhere. There are no fossils in the rocks, no protoplasm or plankton, or even a single microscopic bacterium. The planet’s underground caverns are as barren as its surface. Mars is just as it always appeared on those transmission images or satellite snapshots, or those long ago, long distance telescopic photographs. There is nothing here; there was never anything here.

But there is us. We are here. The two of us in the Ares, and the two of them in the Arcadia. And we will stay here. We will make something of this settlement, this first human settlement on Mars, the first on another world. We will live here, on plants and bottled water, for as long as we can. One of them is female, but it would be reckless to try to have children when there is nothing outside the ship, and barely enough room inside for us, but we still dream about it, because maybe they will live long enough to see the arrival of more humans, and, hopefully, rescue. We will not.

Yes, we knew that going in. That was always the price. To be the first to reach the new planet, to become the ultimate adventurer, to receive the glory of the first explorer, to go down in history as the first to set a boot print in the soil of another world. To get here was always easy, but getting back always impossible. It was always a one-way trip, a suicide mission, but we accepted, for the immortality of the accomplishment, to become the hero of civilization.

We spent much of the trip arguing about it. About who would make that first heroic step onto this world, that glorious first step. For that was the key. To be the first. There is no glory in coming in second, no immorality. To be the first. We came to blows over it, my co-pilot and I. It seems absurd now, now that we are marooned here for life, forced to rely only on each other for solace, but I really tried to kill him. I really did that; I knocked him out and tied him down, all so that I could be first.

And having done that, I bounded out in the Martian gravity, ready to utter historical words, and saw the Arcadia just below the horizon, already landed, her two pilots already walking about.