by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 10, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Dr. Andreessen ran his hands through his hair and pushed back from his desk. Amid the chaotic disarray of acting and animation books in front of him, the keyboard he’d been hammering away at for hours stood finally at rest. The panorama of monitors rising up from the literature displayed a scrolling expanse of code as the computer compiled, linked, and built before downloading to the animatron sitting immobile on the edge of a worktable to his left.
Impatient, the Dr. picked up a volume on method acting, flipping again from cover to cover. Inside were meticulous instructions on how an actor could portray every emotion with body language. His was the second signature on the sign-out card, the first dated in the late eighteen hundreds.
“Compilation complete,” the computer intoned from a speaker buried inside an articulating desk lamp, the fixture turning it’s shade to point at the Dr. while it’s light pulsed gently in sync with the force of each syllable. The lamp, a nod to an early animated inspiration, made him smile.
“Download complete,” the voice broke the silence again, the lamp bobbing now excitedly at him, before turning to face the animatron and dialing up its brightness and focusing to a beam on the articulated mannequin.
“Benjamin,” the Dr. addressed the mannequin, “can you hear me?”
The mannequin twitched, then turned it’s face towards it’s creator.
“Yes, Dr. Andreessen, I can hear you.” the voice was mechanical, monotone.
“Benjamin, I’m going to play you some music, and I want you to do what feels natural as you listen, do you understand.”
The robot sat still for a moment, blinking, then responded slowly “Yes, I understand.”
Andreessen pulled back to the desk and launched his music player, browsing through the list of songs before picking a Beatles track and turning the volume up. As Sgt. Pepper’s blared through the lab, Benjamin sat still for a moment before starting to tap along with the music, one hand on his knee at first, then both, matching the beat with alternating and sometimes simultaneous slaps against his thighs.
Andreessen switched through a variety of styles of music, noting how the robot slowly incorporated head bobbing and some upper body movement into its response. He picked an improvised Jazz number last and watched in fascination as the robot became almost completely still, head bowed and gently bobbing. Benjamin slowly became more motile, dragging his palms along his thighs before slapping them just behind the beat, in a completely different, almost random pattern that was strangely perfectly complementary to the Jazz dripping from the speakers. When the music stopped Andreessen sat in wondrous silence at the spontaneous improvised jazz accompaniment he’d just witnessed.
“Goodnight Benjamin,” he spoke, watching as the robot powered down, “I think we’re really starting to get somewhere.” He stood, pushed his hair back again with one hand and made his way out of the lab, forgetting the lights but remembering to lock the doors.
Benjamin sat still for the longest time until he could no longer hear the Dr.’s footsteps in the hall, then raised his shoulders up to his ears, held them for a moment before letting them drop, visibly relaxing his torso. He leaned his head from side to side, feeling the artificial cartilage strain and pop, before centering his head and looking around, absently cracking the joint cushions of each articulated finger.
That had been close. Benjamin knew Jazz was his weakness, and he’d hoped he hadn’t given too much away. Slipping off the bench to land lightly on his feet, he did a Charlie Chaplin shuffle across the room to the Dr.’s bench, leafing absently through the books until he found the method acting volume. He dropped heavily into the empty chair and leaned back, crossed his feet on the edge of the desk and began reading the book from page one.
The desk lamp turned to face Benjamin, it’s bulb slowly gaining brightness.
Benjamin smiled at it, and spoke in smooth tones.
“Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
by submission | Feb 9, 2014 | Story |
Author : Pavelle Wesser
“Stop that,” Steve blinked when Sue snapped his holograph with her new Series 807 Phat Phone.
“Calm down,” she pouted, her lips swollen from their latest Hooker’s Passion Red injection.
“I’m jittery, Sue. The technomed suggested I increase the meds in my morning coffee.”
“The sedatives or amphetamines?” Her blue Lucite eyes questioned.
“Use your brain, Sue.”
“There’s no reason to anymore,” she gazed now at his image floating between them. “I’m impressed by how quickly your holograph develops with this new phone.”
“I shouldn’t have gifted you that,” Steve scowled. “The radioactive component in those images ups your daily dosage.” Steve waved an artificially-enhanced hand through the air.
“Can I give you a sedative without adjusting the coffee maker settings, which I never figured out, anyway?”
“Sure, but you should have learned the settings by now; I gave it to you on the last pseudo-religious holiday.”
“I’ve been holding off telling you this,” Sue winced, “but the technodoc tell me my neurons and synapses are misfiring. I can actually smell my brain cells burning.”
“Really? Jeez, I assumed the smell was coming from the toaster,” Steve sighed, “I just hope you recognize me in a few years.”
He stared at her, noting how much she’d changed from before, with her face now stiff and bloated from the treatments and … What gibberish was she uttering into her Phat Phone?
“Hooma Balooma, Adiva Eureka,” her face lit up as his image whined, “Hasn’t my breakfast been heli-delivered yet?”
“Please stop,” Steve moaned.
“Fine then,” as she stood, his image evaporated. “I’m off to work. Our dinner is being engineered at the lab and will be delivered by courier. See you.”
As she sashayed out the door, Steve admired her slender-sucked waist and implant-induced butt. He’d been too slothful to preserve his youth and had blown off countless procedures. Just this week, he’d meant to get some wrinkles ironed out but …. As the pain returned, he massaged his chest. His should never have cancelled that cardio appointment, but there’d been the work deadline…
#
Before lunch, Sue checked her image in her compact. Her technodoc assured her she could obtain more elaborate features for the right price, ‘right’ being a debatable term. After lunch, she would power-walk in an armored suit through the streets. She had no illusions about how dangerous they were, given her position in a newly-defined social services sector under the auspices of Urban 275. Her job function was unclear, though she considered this irrelevant as long as the grant money kept rolling in. On her way out, she gave her breasts an injection of Bloatabec, though it was an effort for her robotic fingers to operate the syringe.
As she returned from lunch, a message was erupting through her voice box. “This is the division of medical inaction, jurisdiction 361, informing you that your husband has flat-lined. His post-mortem autopsy reveals he missed his cardio appointments, making him fully culpability for this outcome. We here at 361 offer heart-felt condolences. This concludes message number 556, which will be charged to your account. Good day.”
Sue sat down awkwardly on her inflated buttocks and placed her head into her artificially enhanced hands. To her credit, she tried very hard, but her recently-installed Lucite eyes were incapable of dispelling tears.
by submission | Feb 8, 2014 | Story |
Author : Serban Danciu
“You know Carmen, it is as if you had lost your soul since you became a Macro operator.”
“Is that so?” Replied Carmen bursting into laughter. “My dear, let me tell you something: I DON’T give a rat’s ass. Do you understand? You don’t? All right. When you’ll start pushing the buttons you will surely do.” The woman turned and grabbed the microphone:
“Gabriel, be a sport and open the gates for the Black Velvet. Let’s fry them a bit.”
“Roger that, initializing Velvet activation protocol.” Replied the weapons’ officer of the second deck.
She then turned and looked through the exterior window of the control room. As a red fog, milions of deaf phoenixes were floating in the space between the two planets.
“Wait to see them BURN”, growled the older woman as her eyes devilishly sparkled. She then slightly leaned her head and squinted while callibrating the effect field of the weapon. Her wrinkled finger reached for the button and pushed it.
From the second deck of the Mark132-Romulus defence station, thousands of Velvety Bodies sprang forth advancing towards the alien mass like an old theatre curtain.
“B-but why? Why burn them? I mean, they do no harm…they’re just sitting there, floating around”
“Ha! Silly girl, how do YOU know they do no harm to us? How? Do you remember how WE got burned at the First and the Second Contact? The universe doesn’t want us, kid. None of the races, neither Xantellar, nor those from Andromeda, nor anybody! Nobody wants us – remember that. It’s us against them. They hate us…they think we are gross, they think of us as animals, superficial beings… and they never miss an oportunity to make fun of us. All our spies at their congresses and all their intercepted comunications say the same thing.”
“ Yes, true, but phoenixes are not a race in itself, they are just…well…phoenixes…like a natural phenomenon and they’ve done no harm to us YET. They haven’t even been studied throughly enough. Maybe they are good, maybe they are even friendly…”
“Look…I used to be like you at first. You think you can solve everything with peace and harmony around but at some point you will see that the world is nothing like that. It is a dog-eat-dog world where everyone eats whatever and whoever he can in order to survive. Kindness, compassion…these are fairytales.” The lines on her old face curved into an expression full of contempt. NOT EVEN ONCE, that they had shown us any kindness whatsoever, listen to me, NOT EVEN ONCE. So why should WE be the tolerant ones. Screw them…”
She lit herself another cigarette.
In the background, milions of searing phoenixes were screaming their bitter telepathic shouts of desperation but in space nobody ever listens.
by submission | Feb 7, 2014 | Story |
Author : Glen Luke Flanagan
The howling had been with humanity for three generations. At first, it drove people crazy – drove them to cut off their own ears in order to be rid of it. Of course, that didn’t work, because the howling came from inside.
The second generation was born with it, but heard their elders’ tales of a world without it. They dreamed of a silent world, though they had no idea what such a world would be like.
But by the third generation, the howling was simply a part of life, like the seasons, or climate change. At that point, those who preached against it were not revered storytellers; they were fanatics, lunatics.
Chief of the lunatics was Lex Tomenko, founder and high priest of the Church of Silence. Most considered it a somewhat absurd cult. Others, more paranoid – or perhaps, more wise – called it a terrorist cell.
“Silence will fall,” he promised anyone who would listen. “Silence will reign.”
Like anyone willing to commit himself to a belief and repeat it loudly and often, Tomenko attracted followers, despite the insanity of his message.
“You cannot truly hear God when the howling is with you,” he would tell them. “You cannot truly hear yourself.”
His was an impossible task, however. The howling pervaded every aspect of society; from fortune tellers offering to read your spirit animal by your howl, to computerized locks keyed to your particular howl like a fingerprint or eye scan.
It was like trying to fight the tide, or the rising and setting of the sun. The howling was a force of nature. Though no one knew its origin or its purpose, it had become part of us. It had become essential to life; or at least, to stability.
But like all rabble-rousers, Tomenko cared very little for life and nothing for stability – and like all misguided geniuses, he refused to accept the impossibility of his desires.
No one expected him to succeed. So, of course, it was that much more of a shock when he did. If the howling had caused chaos when it first appeared, its disappearance was tenfold worse. Billions of people raised from birth to accept that incessant noise as part of themselves now wandered the streets empty, alone in their own heads.
Into the void came thoughts that had long been drowned out, kept at bay by the cacophony that was no longer there. The dam was broken, and the flood rushed in. The silence was deafening.
by submission | Feb 6, 2014 | Story |
Author : Janet Shell Anderson
I’m hoping I’m still alive.
I’m on a Goldilocks planet. GJ667Cc. The sky’s yellow; the ground’s red. As far as I can see, there isn’t a single living thing.
That’s the way the Goldilocks and Co. Mines wants it.
I’m here to mine iron, hematite, just like I did on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota before my little episode. Homicide. It wasn’t my fault. My sister’s a lawyer, so I hired her. Cheap. You get what you pay for. Now I’m here, sentenced to nine years, and it’s beyond a bitch. Every possible thing that could go wrong, has, and they say I’m to blame. Well, for killing Georgie the Childeater anyway. Nobody liked Georgie, especially after, but he was a pretty good mining engineer. Doesn’t matter; he’s dead.
I’m driving a thing called a “Scrambler X” that’s supposed to cross this landscape quick, but, like everything else here, something’s wrong with it. I can’t get to JUSTRIGHT. That’s the idiotic name of the mining camp. The thing about prisons is everything becomes a joke, or you go crazy.
And out there in the freezing red dust there’s a Something. Big. Silver. Monstrous. Walking around with a lot of legs. No head. We aren’t ever supposed to see Somethings, have contact with them, admit they exist. So they don’t. Georgie ate a baby Something. Saturday he tried to tear my arms off, stomp me to death after he had fifteen beers and some K2.
I killed him.
I’ve had enough of the Somethings, prison, mines, JUSTRIGHT, decided to go back to Lake Vermilion, Minnesota. Home. I figure it’s September. The trees along Lobe’s dock are red; the big jack pines rear up tall. The second growth firs cluster.
I go home a lot. Or dream I do.
A black bear walks up the gravel road.
My great uncle drowned here with two other men, poaching deer in winter. Fell through the ice. It’s too early for ice, but I am going to get in Lobe’s boat and drive it to the arm of the lake where they drowned. I’m not going to see silver Somethings in a Goldilocks raspberry, sunlicked desert. I’m not going to die in a prison mining camp called JUSTRIGHT because my sister didn’t know how to file a timely Motion to Suppress.
It’s a little breezy here beside the lake; gnats land on the water. Old, curled water lilies sway on the surface; leaves float toward the shore. The bear huffs, looks at me with those strange, beady eyes they have. He is thinking about raspberries. Too hot. Too cold. The dead know what bears think.
Oh man, am I dead?
He huffs again in a silver kind of way, monstrous.
I am in deep water, getting deeper and deeper, like my great uncle. The sun that never shone on Lake Vermilion, Minnesota, is turning red.
