by submission | Mar 18, 2012 | Story |
Author : Kyle Hubbard
Humans are remarkably ugly.
The kylhu child had never seen a real one before, so it stared with morbid fascination at the man on the stage. The human marched back and forth on two legs, bellowing and waving his bizarre limbs in grand, sweeping gestures. He was speaking a local kylhu dialect, but not very well; he did not meet the right vocal pitches, he paused frequently to suck in air, and his body language was all wrong.
“Come see aliens from all over galaxy!” he was shouting. The surrounding kylhu seemed confused and a little afraid as the human made his speech. The kylhu race rarely saw anything from off-world, as most space travelers felt that Kylh’on had little to offer them. It was a dry, desolate planet with harsh weather that spanned most of the solar rotation. The carnival had arrived on an optimal cycle, but it was unclear what they hoped to trade for the entertainment they provided.
The child began to wander the fair, marveling at the sights. Various alien life forms were on display inside metal cages, glass tanks, and fenced pens. As much as the child wanted to take its time looking at them, the carnival would be leaving soon, so it had to be quick if it was going to see them all.
Scurrying from display to display, the child stumbled blindly into the leg of a large creature. It looked up and up until it recognized the alien as the human it saw earlier.
“Greetings, young one,” the man said in the same barely-coherent kylhu dialect he used before. “You like fair?”
Nervous, the child said nothing.
“You like candy?” the human continued, though the final word was unfamiliar. He reached down and presented a pink, fluffy substance. “Cotton candy,” said the human in a language the child did not understand. “Human food. Try.”
Curious, the child took a small piece of the fluff and tasted it. The flavor was very strong, which the child disliked at first, yet it found itself ingesting a little more. Before long it was eagerly consuming the stuff, unable to stop itself. The child felt ill, yet it kept eating and eating until the pink fluff lost its color, and the world faded to black.
–
“You awake yet?”
It took the child a few moments to recognize the noises as words, but it could not decipher what they meant. Its vision returned slowly, and it let out a sickly gurgle, feeling queasy and disoriented.
“‘Bout time,” said the voice. The kylhu child peered around its surroundings and found itself trapped inside a metal cage. Everything nearby was grey and shiny, unlike the familiar orange sands of Kylh’on.
A figure approached the cage, causing the child to back into a corner. It recognized the figure at once: the human from the carnival.
“Have a nice nap, kiddo?” said the man, but the child did not understand him. The human crouched down and tapped lightly on a metal bar. “Sorry about this,” he said. “Your kind don’t have much in the way of currency. None we can use in the colonies, anyhow. But you… You’re something special. The colonies are just itching for a new display, and I think you’re it. You’re gonna put us on the map again, little guy.”
The young kylhu shrunk even further into the corner, its little body quivering. It wanted to go back home. It didn’t like this place.
The human exhaled and rose to his full height. “Buck up there, champ,” he said. “You’re in show business, now.”
by submission | Mar 17, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
I found her on my way home from a party. She was sitting in the middle of the park’s square in the four shadows of the four streetlights, and she was hugging her knees to her chest as if her life depended on it while her head was tucked in behind it. Her hair was short, dirty like her face and the nightgown that seemed to be all she was wearing.
She was pretty.
I sat down three feet in front of her, legs crossed. It was a little chilly out, and a storm was moving in, kicking up leaves and dust before it.
“You’re going to get cold,” I said. “Would you like my coat?”
She made a noise like a whimper and hugged her knees tighter. She whispered something, but it was lost in the wind.
I leaned forward. “What was that?”
“I have to stay in the center.”
I looked around. The city rose up all around us, towering over the trees. On each corner of the park was one of the four towers – two hundred stories each of pristine carbon, steel, and silicon and home to four million people a piece. She was sitting exactly in the middle of all four, at the center of sixteen million lives.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to be alone any more. I’m surrounding myself with people.”
I felt something catch in my throat. It’s so easy to be left behind and forgotten these days. I was like her once, sometimes I still am. There are some things that drugs can’t cure. I hadn’t imagined the tattoo on her wrist that marked her as broken, that read ‘Schz5-105014.’
At some point people stopped trying to even pretend to care about the schizophrenics, the manic-depressives and psychotic depressives, the hallucinators and day-time dreamers and the happily mad men and women of the world. Bag them, tag them, drug them, and if they cause trouble, neutralize them. That was the way society dealt with them any more. Cures are for the healthy, after all. Homelessness and poverty was easy to fix, but other problems? Too much work.
I hugged my knees to my chest, rested my chin on them, mirroring her. “It’s bad right now, isn’t it.”
She nodded her head, an almost imperceptible movement in the half-dark.
I wanted to tell her she wasn’t alone any more, I wanted to tell her that I would help her through this and help her through life and, if she wanted, through death. I wanted to hold her and run my fingers through her hair and whisper to her that everything would be alright.
I ran my hand over the rough scar on my wrist where I had burned my mark off and melted the electronic tag. MD5-103331. Manic-Depressive, fifth order. Most severe. Dangerous.
I couldn’t tell her that she wasn’t alone, I couldn’t help her or hold her or whisper in her ear. She was dangerous, like me, like all of us. She would draw attention, have me found out. I would be evicted back to one of the homes, I would lose my job and my friends. I just couldn’t do it. I stood up and left her sitting there in the middle of nothing, fat drops of rain beginning to fall like so many empty tears.
I saw in the news reports that they found her body after the storm, wet and cold and limp and empty.
They burned it with the rest of the ones that always turn up after bad weather.
by Patricia Stewart | Mar 16, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The Judge yawned as he seated himself at the bench. “What are we doing here, Mike?” he asked the bailiff.
“Your Honor, we are hearing the civil case of ‘Captain Taylor versus Solar System Transportation, Inc.’, a dispute over wages due for a cargo run from Earth Station Tango to Alpha Centauri base.”
“Fine,” replied the Judge as he turned to address the plaintiff. “What’s your claim, son?”
“Your Honor, I left Earth in 2248. It was SST’s first interstellar commercial payload, and because of the hardships, they agreed to pay me a bonus of 100,000 credits per year. I returned eleven years later, in 2259. Therefore, they owe me an extra 1,100,000 credits.”
“Sounds straightforward,” noted the Judge. “So,” he continued as he addressed the defendant, “why haven’t you paid the man?”
“Simple relativity, Your Honor. Due to time dilation during the 0.95c portion of the trip, Captain Taylor only aged three years. Therefore, we are only obligated to pay him an extra 300,000 credits.”
Damn, thought the Judge to himself, time dilation makes my head ache. Why can’t these lawyers foresee these types of issues and make provisions up front. All this ambiguity was begging for litigation. “Okay,” he lamented, “let me see the contract. Court is adjourned until this time tomorrow.”
The following day, the Judge resumed his position at the bench. Without preamble, he announced, “I find for the plaintiff. However, the award will not be 1.1 million credits. It seems that in section 102, paragraph 22, the contract stipulated the adherence to the Space Transportation Act of 2203. Apparently, it’s one of the older Acts written to protect non-union pilots from disreputable transportation companies. It states that pilots must be compensated 60 credits per shift hour, or 0.2 credits per Earth diameter traveled, whichever is higher. Therefore, at the hourly rate, the six month, or 1244 shift hours, round trip to Titan would pay 74,640 credits. On the other hand, based on the distance traveled rate, the 1.486 billion miles round trip would pay only 37,480 credits. For decades, the hourly rate was the only one that mattered, since the spaceships of the era traveled so slowly. However, when star ships were developed, no one at SST thought about updating the terms of their standard contract.” The Judge grinned as he looked the CEO of Solar System Transportation, Inc. and his panel of high paid attorneys. “You see where this is going, I suppose?”
The CEO became pale and his eyes rolled upward as he fainted, toppling over his chair.
“Ah, I see you do,” remarked the Judge with a smile. “At the rate of 0.2 credits per Earth diameter traveled, I rule for the plaintiff the sum of 1.32 billion credits for the 52.5 trillion mile round trip to Alpha Centauri. ”
by Duncan Shields | Mar 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The thing about the planet Kuroshka was that it had seventeen centers all orbiting each other. It was several times the size of Jupiter but had managed to create a mantle. The centers had formed their own molten-core solar system deep under the crust. All these different cores spinning around each other inside the planet created gravity storms above. This made the crust into the hardest naturally-occurring substance discovered in the universe so far. If it had any elasticity at all, it would have been reduced to sand by the variable gravity continually attacking it.
The crust was a dark uniform jade green that didn’t reflect much light. It was flawless and smooth all the way to the horizon. It warped all sense of perspective.
We’d been placed here to find out how to mine it. A naturally occurring material like this could change the course of any war. But how does one cut such a material? Hell, the only way we could anchor our colonies here was with giant mile-wide suction cups.
Some colonies get pretty planets that are easy to live on. Some colonies get planets like Kuroshka.
As I suited up for another walkabout, I made sure to check the backup juice in my grav retardants and the sealant in my exolegs. The readouts said no gravity storms but they were only correct about half the time.
“How’s it lookin’ out there?” I asked Brent, our resident gravity mapper. The kid was twenty-three years old non-coldsleep if he was a day. This was the only posting he could get straight out of school. ‘First job is the worst job’ as they say.
“Not bad, Angie. 7.6 R.O.I., maybe arcing to 8 here and there. As long as you stay within two clicks that should be accurate.” He answered without a smile. Ever since Marcus had been crushed before he could activate his failsafes in a freak gravity squall that Brent didn’t see coming, he hadn’t been getting much sleep. Too obsessive can be just as bad as inattentive, I thought, and reminded myself to get him good and drunk tonight to help him relax.
I snicked my helmet into place and got into the elevator.
The theory we were working on was that the structural integrity around the entirety of the planet couldn’t be uniform. Which is a university way of saying that we were looking for cracks.
If we could find a place where the crust had a small split or crevasse, we could analyze the cross-section and maybe detect a weakness that would let our engineers create a cutting tool.
Long-range and orbital scans had revealed nothing. Now it was down to the ground teams to cover spots deemed by the experts ‘most likely to reveal answers’.
Might as well have chosen search points for us at random, we thought. Hell, maybe they did choose at random. Didn’t change the job.
I got out of the elevator surface ‘lock and started walking. The legs of my suit fought the variable Gs while my anti-grav accelerator worked against them to give me a smooth ride. Worked great on any planet with stable gravity but the calibration is what took the longest and out here, a few seconds calibrating after a wave of G’s came in could mean death. The chaos of the inner orbits made it dicey. Good pay.
My shift was eight hours. I took slow steps, looking at the boring, smooth, unchanging ground for cracks through my faceplate’s HUD display and remembered a rhyme about breaking mother’s backs.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Mar 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Alumnus
I stood over him. His blood made a growing pool as it exited the wound in his back. The ounce slug of lead had gone all the way through. He looked up at me with crazed eyes. He raised his hands to me. He tried to speak, but choked on pink, foamy slime, evidence that his lungs were shredded. For one brief moment he achieved clarity. His eyes steadied. I think he smiled before he died.
When he woke up that morning, he didn’t know he was going to die. He probably had plans for the day. Perhaps a dinner date. Maybe he still had a father somewhere that used to take him fishing. A father that would mourn him. Someone who loved him.
I guess I should have felt something. Something at the death of a fellow human being. I felt nothing but revulsion. He knew the law. He knew the penalty for his actions. For his disgusting behaviour. For his loathsome ways. There were no innocent parties. I slipped the Mossberg back into the sheath strapped to my thigh and climbed back in the growler.
As we left the scene I called for a meat wagon to pick up what was left of the human flotsam. Before I closed the door, I took one last look down at the black and white caricature of a human being below me. The tragic figure seemed to spin slowly as we spiraled up into the traffic pattern. I must have been looking down longer than I thought. My partner, Sergeant Ray Chavez, tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at his throat mike. I tapped my temple and activated my earwig. His voice came through loud and strong despite the rush of air from the open door.
“Hey buddy, what’s up? You seem a little quiet today.”
I had to put all my weight against the door to pull it down and shut. I sat for a moment thinking about his seemingly innocuous question. “Just thinking,” I said.
“Yeah? What about?”
I considered his question. I thought of the body lying there on the pavement a thousand feet below. The curled lips caught in the gruesome rictus of death. The twisted body. The face and features contorted, resembling a bizarre, nightmarish image caught in the black and white photograph of a bygone era.
“I was just thinking,” I said when I finally spoke, “how much I fucking hate mimes.”
