by featured writer | Feb 25, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jay Knioum, Featured Writer
Yellow emergency lights make Chrys look like an elf as she gazes up at them, her eyes flashing with reflections.
“Shut that shit off.” My voice is robotic. Still not used to it.
Merlin’s already at the panel, jacked in through the conduit in his temple. The yellow flashing turns to yellow ambient, the sirens are silent. I can hear Chrys’ heavy breathing.
“Just a couple more floors, babe.” She doesn’t say anything, just squeezes my hand. I know she did that because the pressure registers across the display in my retinas. I turn and look at her. Vitals are going apeshit. She’s gonna pop at any time.
Spider pounds up the stairs behind me, grim look in all six eyes, slamming fresh ammo charges into his gun harness. I heard him unload downstairs. If he’s empty already, then the company jackoffs are serious about this. His pacer drones whirr behind him, past us, then ahead, barrels smoking, lasers fanning the stairwell above and below.
I’m getting Spider’s readout from the cloud synch now as he squeezes past me and Merlin to clear a path upstairs. He aced about eighty bad guys downstairs, but more are coming.
JASMINE cuts in. “Four floors left. Extract is two minutes away.”
I’m gripping Chrys’ hand in new plastic. She printed it for me yesterday, her own design. Subdermal sensors tell me she can’t go much further. “Hang on, babe. Deep breaths.”
“He’s coming, Penn,” she says, “He’s coming. Don’t know if I can…”
I squeeze with my plastic hand, taking her vitals through sensors woven into the palms. “You’ll make it.” I wish I could hold her hand in my real one. “Come on, Chrys, one step at a time.”
She does it. Pulse climbing. One foot, then the next. My girl is a fucking superhero.
The cloud gives us recon from Spider’s drones. Four hostiles. I can hear the drones firing. Then they start disappearing from the feed. One by one by one, but not before giving us intel. JASMINE boils it down for us, but Spider gets there first.
“Ninja,” he says. Spider folds up his guns, draws out filament blades in all four hands. “Expensive.” He starts up the stairs. “Not as expensive as me.”
“Shit,” Chrys says in between groans. “Shit.”
Her vitals are spiking. Our son is coming.
Our son. I don’t care who paid for him. I’ll pay more. We all might.
“I’ll carry you.” I put my plastic arms under her, draw her back gently.
“You dumb shit,” she says, “You aren’t rated for the weight.”
“Then I hope you didn’t skimp on materiel.” I’ve got her in my arms.
Not my arms. The arms I’ve got there, with her.
“Extract is approaching,” JASMINE says. Quicker than we thought. Merlin turns from his panel and gives me a thumbs up. “Hacked the nearby weather beacons,” he says, “Got a fix on our position, and sent out a bogus emergency clear-sky. Soon as Spider clears the landing pad, we’re off this bitch.”
Spider is advancing up the stairs. I can hear rotors thudding through the structure.
I hear a lot of nothing.
The cloud synch is going batshit. Spider’s vitals light up. They go soft.
The drones open up, firing at ghosts.
I can hear the shell casings hitting the stairs from the drones, but what I’m seeing is Merlin’s blood.
It hits the floor before his head does.
Last message from Spider on the cloud synch: I GOT THREE.
This was number four.
Chrys squeezes my hand. “I love you,” she whispers. I don’t hear it. I see it in the cloud feed.
My hand is a detonator. My body is a bomb.
All four ninja are gone. So are the top four floors of the building.
So am I. So is Chrys.
The window goes black, CARRIER LOST in green letters.
I cancel the window. Pull off my headset. Grab a tissue, wipe my nose.
“The fuck, Penn, ” Carl is yelling from the couch, his eyes glued to his show on the wall. “We gonna order Thai or what?”
I’ve got one thumb. I use it to toggle the stick, turn my chair toward him. “Yeah. Yeah, Carl. Thai’s okay, I guess.”
My chair’s wheel knocks over a stack of papers as I turn. Statements from Southside Genetic Repository. I’ve been a loyal donor. They paid for this place. They paid for a lot of things.
Good thing one piece of me works.
I wish I could have met Chrys. She sounded like a superhero.
by submission | Feb 24, 2014 | Story |
Author : David Botticello
Deep in the heart of the jungle, Mark waited. The party had approached her position with seemingly endless fortitude; rafting rivers, rappelling cliffs, and wading through the darkest mires of Boudicca III’s surface.
Renewed energy seemed to course through their veins as they emerged into her clearing. They rushed toward the ship, crash-landed here three generations past, with shouts of joy. Mark had waited this long, her Adaptive circuits preserving synapse integrity long after her ship had lost power. The Infiltrator class vessel Fawkes had succumbed to pilot error and a Carrier broadside. Its eight member specialist team had perished from uncontrolled atmospheric entry. Thirteen breaches and a smoldering stabilizer will do that to a ship.
“This is it!” they rejoiced. “This is really it!” The door, inexplicably, still worked. Mark had meant to get to that eventually, but it was just such a small source of power; hardly worth the effort. They invaded her control center, poring curiously over an interface system alien to anyone of their generation. The Tinkerer’s primitive sensor devices blinked, failing to understand her system’s complexity. “It’s…it’s still powered,” commented their Tinkerer in dumfounded surprise. “Maybe some kind of troop transport?”
“No,” responded an older, mustachioed man entering next to last, “it’s too small. I think more like a commando team. Covert Ops, that sort of thing.” Moving toward the rear hatchway, the historian first set his eyes on Mark, fused to the Powersuit of one Sgt. Miller. “By the Cohort, they were wearing combat suits. Dominion class?…he trailed off”
Mark blushed with pride—her new host had been the ultimate weapon of the Cohort—peerless in its survivability. She smiled inwardly when their eyes settled on her original body, fused into the Powersuit’s central systems.
“A ballistic symbiote, I think,” noted the Tinkerer, “Interesting. Adaptive circuitry of course. They kept it powered all this time. But I would never have expected it to be this…tenacious.”
When Mark, F-Series ‘Shieldbreaker’ ballistic munition, had crashed through the hull of the Fawkes, she had thought her mission complete. But instead of a blissful explosion, the ship had survived, and so had Mark. It wasn’t her fault, she was programmed to adapt, survive, and when the tendrils of the Powersuit had reached out for a new living host, they had found her instead. Evidently, the Powersuit wasn’t feeling too picky that day. And so Mark had lived, integrating herself into the suit, draining the ship’s power to fulfill her instinctive imperative, to survive.
The Tinkerer—named Janna, apparently—began to prod Mark’s Powersuit with interest. Ordinarily a ‘Suit’ couldn’t integrate with a human against its will, but Mark was made to break through barriers, and this human, well, it would make an excellent, sustainable energy source. She would just have to share a few synapses. Mark found it a fair trade.
The explorers stood paralyzed as Tinkerer Janna was enveloped by the broken armor. And then she stood, armored in an alloy stronger than steel, able to survive a direct hit from all but the finest weapons, even skip along the corona of a star if necessary.
She arose out of the blast-marked ship, ascending in glory. Her former colleagues fell to the ground, partly in awe, but mostly pushed by the tangible pulses of her gravitic drive. This new creature, a fusion of metal, man, and machine survival instinct, scanned her new environment. The backworld colony of Boudicca III, barely into the Digital Age, had no weapons to stop her; the apotheosis was complete; here, she was a god.
by submission | Feb 23, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
He opened the door. He stood there a moment before he turned on the light. On the far wall, opposite the door, he saw the picture of Jane Russell. He stepped into the room, and placed the bag and the roses on the bed. The bag was heavy, and he wasn’t as young as he used to be.
His arm ached.
He walked around the bed of Room 137 and stood before the picture. She was dead now, but he remembered watching her on the Saturday afternoon movies when he was a boy. She was so beautiful; so elegant.
He looked at the picture a moment longer, then turned to the bag on the bed.
He bent over and a wicked cough shook his body and burned his throat. In a moment it passed, but his chest ached from the exertion. The cancer had eaten him down to a stick of a man. The doctors had given him six months to live over eight months ago. He was living on borrowed time.
He opened the bag and took out the four tripods. He placed the mechanisms on the tripods and set them on the four corners of the room. When done, he sat on the bed, out of breath, and looked at the picture of Jane Russell on the wall.
“See you soon,” he said.
He had lived a long, rich life, but his time was at its end. In his day, he was considered one of the top physicists in the world. Upon retiring, he turned his attention to the concepts of time travel.
He held the remote control in his sweaty hand. Should I? He thought. He snickered. What do I have to lose? I’ll most likely be dead this time tomorrow, anyway.
It was a morbid truth.
He looked at the remote. He had never taken a wife, never had children. He was alone in the world with only his video library of Jane Russell films like The Outlaw and Hot Blood to keep him company. He had watched them all a hundred times over and, in his own way, he loved Jane Russell.
But, would she understand?
He hoped so.
He reached out and picked up the bouquet of roses. He knew that she was beautiful, that men swooned for her. He decided he would write a note and leave it, along with the rose, beside her bed. He didn’t want to be a burden.
He went to the desk and penned the note, doing a dozen rewrites until he was happy. He folded the note and tucked it in the roses, then he stood by the desk, hoping that nothing physical occupied that space back in 1986 when she had spent the night there.
He took a deep breath and punched the remote.
It wasn’t a bright flash, not a spinning multi-colored tunnel. That was all Hollywood glamor. Instead, it was like the blink of an eye. One moment, he stood in the motel room in 2014, the next, he was there in 1986.
It was dark in the room, but he could hear soft breathing.
She was asleep.
His eyes adjusted and he saw her. She lay there. Alone, like he was.
He stood there awhile.
Then, when he knew he could stay no longer, he placed the flowers by her bed.
##
The cleaning crew found him the next morning on the bed, a single rose in his hand. He had died in the middle of the night with the picture of Jane Russell next to him.
No one noticed she now held roses in the picture.
by submission | Feb 22, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jedd Cole
There are a million people in this city, and none of them speak the same language. They are passing through to distant parts, nodding their heads to the immigration officers and their berets. They are carrying their passports in the numb fingers of their right hands. They are dragging their bags across the sterile floor with their left hands. They are sagging under the weight of bags on their shoulders and broken backs.
It is cold on the platform. Outer space tends to make everything cold. It’s the perfect condition for the fever.
There are a million venders in this city, one for every man, woman, child. They use their machines, machines with lips and beautiful faces and smooth skin to speak honeyed things to these little polyglots. It is not coercion–everyone accedes to vendors’ programs. Come earn a living working for [mining conglomerate] on Mars. Realize the [“career goal” entry from mandatory survey] you’ve always dreamed of at [mining conglomerate] in the Tau Asteroid Station. Visit your [“closest deceased relative” entry from mandatory survey] in the holographic gardens on Titan. The machines love these people and kiss them in careful ways.
There is only one answer. It’s the social pathogen, the Yes Fever. And it’s catching. There are a million slaves in this station-city, headed for parts unknown that they think they know because the machines have told them all about it–the successes awaiting their eager labor in the side of unassuming red rocks–the opportunities for visiting masked holograms of dead relatives during lunch break before returning to the off-planet call center–the chance to make it big working for a new man every night, their faces bidding on you in a dark room downstairs.
It’s got to be a fever–it’s cold on this platform, but they’re all sweating.
There are a million seats on the ships at the edge of this city. They are empty and full and boarding but never unloading. There are a million one-way tickets being given to the nodding infirmed, headed to distant parts and new lives just like this one. They’ll never lose the fever, though. They say it’s terminal.
by submission | Feb 21, 2014 | Story |
Author : Deirdre Coles
The key is, you never take anything from really rich people. They’re paranoid, and they often have their own kinds of security. It’s much better, usually, to aim lower.
Jackson had gotten four decent cameras from the wedding of anxious, pregnant young bride and a sullen groom on Friday evening. With all the booze and bonhomie in the hotel ballroom, nobody was keeping a close eye on their stuff.
As he walked past another reception room, a flash of peacock blue caught his eye, a woman twirling around in a long glittering dress, and he stepped inside.
The room made him nervous right away. He didn’t look toward the woman in blue. In a long-practiced maneuver, he scooped up a serving tray, brought it over to the nearest table, and picked up a few empty glasses, a couple of plates, and a camera, with a napkin draped over it.
Back at his apartment, he decided not to sell this one right away. The camera was really beautiful. It was a very pale iridescent yellow, with intricate sculpted buttons with no words.
He experimented with it a bit, and figured out how to take a picture of the two sugar maples across the street outside his window.
But when he looked at his photo, the trees were scorched and ringed with litter. The pavement was cracked and buckled, the buildings in ruins., with broken glass everywhere.
Jackson was starting to get a bad feeling. He took a deep breath and took another picture, this one at an angle of the street corner. On the camera’s screen, the building on the corner was gone, with only one partial wall remaining.
Nobody like Jackson survived for long by being stubborn, or ignoring their instincts, so he didn’t waste much time arguing with himself. He walked down the street to a playground and took a picture of a toddler in the sandbox. Never a good idea to take a picture of a kid, but Jackson was in no mood to be careful. He heard an exclamation behind him and walked swiftly away.
As soon as he got around the corner he took a closer look. The chubby toddler with her Viking-blond hair had become a gaunt, sunburned preteen. So, not much time, then.
Jackson sighed as he turned the camera around and took a picture of his own face. He thought he’d expected the bare, grinning skull looking back at him, but it came as a shock all the same.
He walked slowly back to his apartment. The first thing to do, he thought, was to get far away from all the big cities. And the camera might help him figure out where.
Back in the hotel, a creature who now looked not at all like a woman in peacock blue frowned at her companion.
“I thought you said the human would get rid of it, if it foretold his death?”
The other creature shifted uneasily. “It seems they may have changed since my last visit. Or maybe this one is different than most.”
“Perhaps we should prepare for a longer visit, then. It seems we have a great deal more to learn.”
