by submission | Dec 4, 2011 | Story |
Author : Donovan Pruitt
“It itches,” the soldier complained, scratching at the data socket on the back of his neck.
Seated across the table, the doctor offered a sympathetic smile. “That’s normal for a new download, Sergeant Jax. Just don’t think about it. Think about something else.”
“Like what? I wasn’t recruited for my thinking.” Jax continued to fidget.
“Why don’t you tell me the last thing you remember?”
Jax pondered briefly. “Inter-continental orbit hop between Houston and Moscow. Cargo transfer for the space program. I don’t remember the ship name.”
“The download is intermittent,” the doctor explained. “If we dropped everything in at once, your mind would, well, explode.” His eyes darted aside as he solemnly reflected on this concept with apparent regret. “The name will come to you.”
Jax’s face turned uneasy as more memories downloaded. “Did I crash?”
“You did.” The reply was hesitant. They didn’t tend to react favorably to the news.
“Well, shit,” Jax replied unexpectedly, chuckling after a few moments. “So how am I alive?”
It was a fair question. “Technically, you’re not, yet,” the doctor admitted, though he looked pleased. “We downloaded your brain and are attempting to parse it correctly so you can be re-appropriated.”
“Re-appropriated, huh?” Jax repeated the clinical term. “That would explain this tan,” he joked, raising his foreign arm into the light. His personality was returning. “So technically, I’m not alive?”
“Not exactly.”
“But I’m not dead?”
“Well, no.”
“So I guess, scientifically speaking, I’m undead.” Jax erupted with laughter.
Pursing his lips with subtle amusement, the doctor offered a nod. “I suppose so.”
Turning pale, Jax straightened his posture. “Sir, I have a question.”
“Go ahead,” the doctor replied, still distracted by the comedic nature of their exchange.
“Did the Zs take the Moon Base, or do we still have control?”
The doctor blinked, focusing on him with narrowed eyes. “The Zs?”
“The zombies, sir,” Jax clarified matter-of-factly.
Turning from the table, the doctor rubbed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes to release the tension. “Undead,” he said aloud, identifying the trigger word. Sighing, he reached into the folds of his lab coat as he turned back, producing a pistol that he easily leveled at the man’s head and fired. Gore splashed against the wall and the body collapsed forward on the table, lifeless. Tilting his head to the ceiling, the doctor stoically spoke his report, “Subject twenty-seven terminated due to faulty data transfer. Download incomplete.”
The main door opened into the room, giving way to an officer dressed in a formal uniform with numerous trinkets shining proudly on his chest. Casting a disapproving look at the fallen soldier, he redirected his disdain to the doctor. “What happened this time?”
“General,” the doctor offered a lackluster greeting. Replacing the pistol, he braced both hands atop the table with a heavy, weary push to his feet. “The system still isn’t able to separate actual events that the subject experienced from dream sequences that he perceived as real. He apparently remembered a dream fighting zombies on the Moon. The word undead must have caused the server context recognition to give him a packet of information that he thought was real.”
“Well, fix it,” the general demanded, turning around to exit. “We’ve got plenty of vegetables left for you to practice on, but let me know if you run out of bullets.”
Frowning after the general, the doctor took a moment to recuperate before looking up to the ceiling again. “Sally, send in someone to make arrangements for the body, please. Then contact the coma ward. We’re going to need another blank disc.”
by submission | Dec 3, 2011 | Story |
Author : Robert Vennell
I stumble down the road through the hazy tungsten half-light. Padded headphones suck out the ambient noise and replace it with the hum of distorted guitars.
An empty street, a dim coating of artificial light and the buzz of electric instruments.
I have to remind myself I’m really here. It feels like I’ve withdrawn into some back-room in my head, and am now watching my life play out through my eyes, as if it were happening to someone else.
From this vantage point i begin to speculate on what a bizarre and unnatural circumstance this is. That on a small planet orbiting a relatively small sun in an ordinary solar system on the outskirts of a galaxy like any other; a bipedal primate such as myself is walking down paved roads illuminated by synthetic lights listening to recordings of manufactured music.
In the light of these thoughts I can’t help but feel greatly pessimistic about humanity’s chances. Surely a species that no longer concerns itself with its own survival cannot exist indefinitely.
I turn the corner and press on, no particular destination in mind. A white cat stalks across the road, catches sight of me and then bolts off in the opposite direction. It occurs to me that there the other species that inhabit our planet are constantly engaged in a struggle for survival, and yet to we privileged homo sapiens born into developed nations surviving is easy. To meet the challenges of life the human brain underwent rapid expansion in brain capacity to the point where we have developed societies and structures that render the struggle for survival almost irrelevant. Now the hard part is trying to keep those advanced brains of ours constantly entertained and stimulated.
From the moment we wake up in the morning to when we go to sleep at night our minds are occupied not with things to aid our survival but things to keep us from boredom. Tasks and jobs we can do so that our lives can have purpose and meaning. Television, movies, music, literature; things we can consume to keep our brains active and ticking over.
I wonder if such an unnatural system can sustain itself.
A street light catches my eye. It is flickering and buzzing, and eventually it burns itself out and the street is cloaked in darkness.
Suddenly my brain feels stuffy, the constant pounding of music in my ears aggravating and i take my headphones off and revel in the cool breeze rushing against my ears. Reconnecting with the sounds of the world around me, i feel like I’ve slipped back into my body for a time.
My dreamy speculations about the fate of the world seem dramatic and unimportant now. I amble off towards a distant street light, reassuring myself i will go to bed earlier in future.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 2, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I am too old to enjoy the future. I am physically unable to.
People, like older trees and metal from the ground, could not be retro-engineered. Transporters were finally here but everyone who had dreamed of their existence could not use them. Anyone already born at the moment of their invention were forever denied the use of them.
It was a magic man-made molecule. A destabilizer, a cataloguer, and a quantum anchor pairing that, when activated, allowed for a temporal reversal field to happen to all particles attached to its field. Basically, one pressed ‘play’ and the object with these designer molecules took itself apart down to the base level. When the completion trigger was transmitted to a sister pad, it activated a ‘rewind’ function on the other half of the quantum anchor pairing, making the object build itself again by performing the actions backwards in time. The time debt repaid itself to the trillisecond and the universe remained in balance.
In effect, it made transporters a reality.
The only hitch was that transportable objects needed to be manufactured from the base up with the molecules embedded into their chains. This presented no problem to ferroplastics, ceramics and chemical compound agents which were the basis for most building materials and household utensils destined for the moons or the outer rim.
It was a simple operation to have the molecules chemically bonded into the DNA chains of an embryo but only in the first trimester. A new generation of people were being created with the ability to flit between transporters both on Earth and her fifteen colonies in the solar system. It worked for other biologicals as well. NuMeat and ReFish were plentiful among the planets.
The rest of us were planet-locked.
Cargo slingships pushed Gs that would crush a regular human, let alone an old one like me. Passenger ships were fewer and fewer in number with the new generation’s ability to transport instantly. It drove ticket prices into a cost bracket only the superrich could afford. And I was not rich. I could never leave Earth and even when traveling around my own world, I was restricted to fuel-burning planes and buses with the other old people.
I’ve read about getting old. How events around you seem to speed up. How life gets harder and faster while your ability to deal with it weakens. I feel that it must be more apparent now than ever before in the history of mankind.
I am not merely slow. I am going extinct. The other seniors and I are the last few remaining members of a pruned branch of the human race. Airports and bus stations are only for the aging and the already ancient.
We have an official classification now. While the rest of humanity is still referred to as homo sapien, we have been re-designated as homo tardus. Slow humans. The young ones simply call us ‘tards.
It is humiliating to have to move so slowly. I dearly wished to be a part of a future with transporters and now that it’s happened, I have my nose pressed against the glass with no ability to take part. Myself and the other science fiction fans who have lived to this moment are cursing our longevity, growing bitter.
We take trips together and huddle in our apartments, watching vintage science fiction shows using antique ‘DVD players’ and 2D ‘televisions’ with tears in our eyes as our numbers dwindle.
by Julian Miles | Dec 1, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Seventeen days to travel two kilometres through the most extreme security ever deployed. My rations are finished and I have drunk the last of my urine. The moon is bright yet anyone monitoring the meeting hall roof would find nothing. The scions of Iga have not been lax in their attention to the arts of the unseen.
I reach down to crush the vials filled with a cocktail of combat drugs that replaced my testes. With a rush of false invincibility they bring me to a state of readiness alien to any except followers of my ryu. Even in these times of star-spanning technological dominance, there is still a need for men of dedication and purpose.
Below me, ‘Mad Mike’ Santori hosts a gathering of his elite: officers and brutal men of less honour than garbage collectors. I see him step out in front of them and it is time for the pretenders to realise their unworthiness. I roll forward to smash through the crystal panes, showering those below in razor-sharp shards as I drop twenty metres to the floor and kill twelve men on the way down. Graphene tipped caseless deforming rounds cut through their expensive ballistic armour as if it were cheap cloth. I land and roll, continuing to pick off those with range weapons.
Another thirty-eight shots and they are a further thirty-four men down. The door guard enters to deal with me. He looks like a monstrous mechanical samurai in his powered armour. I wait until he fires his pulse cannon before running in an arc that curves in front of the greatest concentrations of my opponents. He fires in bursts with deflection for where I should be for someone with only enhanced speed. He succeeds admirably in wreaking havoc amongst those he tries to protect before I leap six metres to descend on him; my sword screaming as air molecules part before its single-use molecularly aligned edge. I bisect him from crown to right knee before rolling and coming up in a leap that lands me in the remaining cluster. They grin and ready their weapons, then die as I execute a flawless ‘Eight Gates’: a movement created centuries ago to kill an octet of surrounding opponents. It has not lost its efficacy.
I am kicked five metres into a pillar by an absolute brute. My reinforced bones dissipate the point of impact damage and my sealed backpack takes the blow from the pillar on its shock fields. I use the rebound to speed shurikens through his eyes.
As I return to the centre of the hall, the doors crash open and troops pour in. Mad Mike laughs as I use every weapon and technique. In the end, I only kill a hundred and seventy-three of them. He has thousands. They surround me, crowding the hall and the grounds outside to see the lunatic who dared to strike at their leader. He steps forward, katana held lazily.
“You fool. Did you think to kill me here, in my stronghold?”
“Never. I am assured that you will kill yourself.”
He sneers and with a passable flourish runs me through five times, wrenching the last so my intestines spill onto the floor, the intricate webbing of polymer reinforcing grey against the crimson.
I feel dizzy as my blood deserts me and I take a breath before my heart stops. Heightened awareness feels the coupling release in my backpack as the system detects my lack of heartbeat. I look up at the moon through the shattered panes and whisper “Iga” as the six kiloton S-nuke detonates.
by submission | Nov 30, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Jopek
A man lies gripping a slowly tumbling boulder of ice and stares into the distance of space.
His broken femur pokes sharply into the material of his white skinsuit threatening to rupture it. His foot and leg are numb, his boot full of thickening blood. Here, deep in the planetary rings, the light is weak and the shifting ice unnerves him. In his concussed state waves of vertigo sweep over him, making orientation painful.
His spaceship will be crossing the planet’s terminus soon, allowing him perhaps one more chance at rendezvousing with it. An explosion has ripped the jetpack from his back and shredded the sample bags he was towing. Now he can only improvise a method of propulsion by cannibalizing his remaining suit pressure.
He’d been trailing Sharon back to the ship when the explosion flung them apart. She had nearly reached the airlock. Twice already he has glimpsed her body for scant seconds before she is eclipsed by the drifting ice fragments.
He can make one last effort to try and reach the ship when it comes about its orbit again, although he has no idea how badly damaged it is. He sights the blue corona of the ship’s tail flare and tracks it unsteadily.
Her body appears then in his peripheral vision, emerging from the ice field, floating amidst mangled metal and accretion stones. As he gapes, suddenly a pocket opens, a random confluence of space with her at its center. The scarlet bloom splashed across her torso is punctuated by the bright yellow lumishaft protruding obscenely from her chest. The lumishaft has activated upon impact and splays morose yellow light in all directions.
He finds the ship again, now arcing towards its closest approach. Through blurred eyes he watches her broken body drifting closer. He feels like he is falling, falling, falling, but the ship is nearly there. Nearly. The ship is coming for him — she is coming for him. The watery reflection of red and yellow in his eyes is joined by the shocking blue of plasma thrusters.
A man lies gripping a slowly tumbling boulder of ice and stares into the distance of space.
