by Duncan Shields | Oct 20, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I hope I like her. I hope I like her.
The Truemate service is just one of the programs. There’s Perfectjob and Opti-health as well.
It’s no utopia but people the world over agree that this system is the best so far. There isn’t much in the way of rebellion. The computer employs the world. The computer divides the resources equally. The computer encourages creativity. The computer has made money obsolete. And the computer gives us true love.
The main thing that defuses potential revolt and allays fears is this: the computer is fair. The creator had the computer write its own security software. No human has been able to crack it or co-opt it so far.
It’s neither communist nor democratic nor totalitarian. It’s something new.
In ten minutes, I’ll be meeting my future wife for the first time.
She was selected for me by the computer based on our likes, dislikes, age, race, family history and biological capability. All of the footage of my life that has been captured on the security cameras was cross referenced with all of my purchases. A record of my PIN-chip movements was plotted. All of my emails were weighed and psychoanalyzed. My productivity was predicted.
A mate was chosen that I would be crazy about and who would be crazy about me.
This process is not enforced but with the plummeting divorce rates and the rise of a new age of stable family units, everyone I know uses the service. It’s an optional part of the basic package we’re all born with. There’s no punishment for refusing the service but after a generation of good results, no one turns it down.
The central computer has become something like a parent to the whole human race.
I am waiting in my apartment for a woman that I have been assured will be a woman I will immediately like and will continue to like for the rest of my life. I drink water nervously and my attention span is very short.
My trust in the process is complete. I keep telling myself that.
I am so nervous.
Her taxi pulls up outside.
The door opens and she steps out. I open my front door and look at her.
She looks at me from beneath the brim of her hat and smiles. Not the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen but I already know that I never would have been comfortable with that. I feel a subtle shift in my soul.
My glass of water slips from my hand. She laughs.
The computer was right.
by Julian Miles | Oct 19, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The room is dim as I seal the doors and windows against the polluted mist that descends most nights. I wave the low-lights on as I pass to check on Linda. She’s sleeping peacefully so I wander back to the den, collecting a can of coffee on the way.
Closing the door gently I open the drawer and lift the strange device out once again. Purple lenses twinkle as I spin the counterweight and brace myself.
*write*
I shake my head. This has to be good.
“No. I can’t send more people to their death.”
*write*
“No. You’ve had twenty years of my feeding you.”
*write or I come to you*
“Do it. Losing this place so you are trapped would be a triumph.”
*write or I take her back*
That stopped me. Linda dying had started this. In my grief I’d bought some very odd, supposedly alien detritus from the local flea markets. Everybody wanted a bit of the archaeological treasures coming in from a universe that only had us in it now.
Three of those bits had fitted together.
When I spun the counterweight for the first time, the voice had said I could have her back. I was one of those who could write the real. What I wrote became an alternate reality somewhere. So the deal was that I wrote of a place where Linda was alive and it would retrieve her for me. Then I could write of anything I liked and it would use those realities to feed itself. When I lost my job it started dropping off valuables from the realities it ate. Life became easy. But over the years, I have started to contemplate my bargain. I have been playing God in the worst way. My devil has to be sent down.
*write*
“Very well.”
I started to type, my fingers flying across the keyboard as the story and place were so familiar yet the opening gave nothing away. After a page or so I felt the ‘loosening’ in my mind. I typed on, guilt buried under purpose at last.
*delightful*
I smiled and typed on. After a further two pages I felt the vibration and heard a distant predatory wail in my mind as it fell upon that new reality. The counterweight stopped. This was usually where I stopped too, wandering off in self-loathing to drown my guilt in vodka.
Tonight I carried on. I wrote of a world much like this one, where a man with my name had become a genius scientist only to lose his childhood sweetheart to a strange thing that stole her away leaving no trace. He battled years of scepticism until he proved that multiple realities existed and that they were preyed upon. He prepared his world against such an eventuality. Such genius, driven by loss, backed by the resources of a world, would not miss a single opportunity.
*!*
That made me pause. Then I smiled as I saw the lenses crumble and the counterweight rust in seconds. I poured myself a drink before a thought struck me. I ran to the bedroom and lunged through the door to confront another me with Linda supine in his arms. He looked at me in shock and then with compassion that I did not deserve. He put Linda back on the bed.
“Look after her.”
With that, he was gone leaving only a faint purple ripple fading in the air.
I cried for hours, Linda hugging me but unaware of the cause: I had written a better me.
by Stephen R. Smith | Oct 18, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The police bulletins all called him ‘Pretty Boy’, but those that preferred their atoms in the form they were currently coalesced called him ‘Mr. Floyd’, or simply ‘Sir’.
His reputation had followed him from planet to planet, system to system, but out here, out on the rim, the frontier, only the greedy interested themselves with his capture. Perhaps he couldn’t report a crime, but he could order breakfast, have a suit tailored and share a drink without fear.
On this evening he was hidden in the shadows across the street from the gated mansion of Marco Fitzsimmons, the owner of the only bank on this backwater rock. Floyd was looking to make a withdrawal.
At ten thirty, right on schedule, a police cruiser glided past on a skirted cushion of air. Floyd waited until the whine receded into the distance before crossing the street and striding up to the gatehouse.
Two men stood on the far side of the gate, weapons holstered, and one more perched on a high chair in the guardhouse itself, scattergun laid across his lap. None of them spoke, and none spared Floyd a second glance as the gate opened and he walked past them towards the main house.
This scenario repeated several times as guards at the house entrance, in the foyer and again in the hall outside the bank manager’s study stared ahead with disinterest as the criminal passed by them all on his way into the heart of the banker’s inner sanctum.
Fitzsimmons on the other hand had quite a different reaction.
“Pretty Boy, how did you…?” He started, spilling a drink as he stood up quickly behind the deep polished expanse of his desk. “Guards!” He bellowed, regaining some composure.
Floyd pulled an ugly looking blaster from inside his jacket, the barrel short and fat. “Stow it fella, nobody’s coming.” He pushed the study door closed behind him with a heavy clunk.
“What the hell do you want you thug? When the police get here you’ll…”
Floyd cut him off. “The police aren’t coming. They don’t know because nobody called, and if they do happen by your security team will tell them everything’s just fine.”
Fitzsimmons’ mouth opened and closed several times.
“You call me a thug, you who’ve corrupted the lawmakers, the peacekeepers. You who hold the purse strings and use them to bully people from their homes. Do you know how I got in here?” He lowered the gun only slightly, keeping a bead on the banker from his hip.
The banker swallowed hard. “You must have promised them more money than you could possibly have. When you don’t deliver they’ll cut you up and feed you to the livestock.”
Floyd laughed. “No, actually I walked in here without offering anyone a single credit. Last week you foreclosed a number of mortgages to make way for new construction. Those homes belonged to the aunts and uncles of the men you underpay to keep you safe.”
The banker paled. “I’ll move them, give them new homes.”
“It’s a little late for that. They’ve got no use for you. I on the other hand,” he paused, “I think you may be partially useful.”
Fitzsimmons straightened, sensing an opportunity to save himself. “What can I do?”
Floyd sang a quiet verse, “Through all the worlds you travel, through all the worlds you roam, you’ll never see an outlaw drive a family from their home.”
With that he raised his weapon. The banker managed to get one hand in front of his face before the beam tore through his midsection, atomizing him from the neck to the waist and sending his head and raised arm flying to the wall behind him, before they came to rest in a smoking pile of cauterized flesh on the floor.
Floyd recovered them both, laying the hand on the palm scanner and holding the head, eyes wide and staring up to the retinal scanner.
“These are the parts I’ll find useful,” he chuckled as the system unlocked the accounts management console and he began to make amends.
by submission | Oct 17, 2011 | Story |
Author : Isaac Archer
Dad brought me to his lab again today. I was really excited when he told me I could come help him with his work because I want to be a scientist too. He told me not to tell Mom, because it’s a secret, our secret.
“Some things are for sharing,” he said, “but some things are for keeping. Secrets are for keeping.”
He even called my teacher to tell her I was going to be out sick today from the car, so Mom wouldn’t hear. I like helping Dad and I like missing school even more. I haven’t been enjoying school since I got in trouble last week. Ms. Roberts said I skipped her class, but I told her I didn’t skip it, I’ve never skipped! She told me not to lie and said I was developing bad habits. Dad believed me though and he said we didn’t have to tell Mom either. He said we don’t need to worry her.
Dad works in his own private lab. It’s pretty messy – there’s not much space left because one big machine fills up most of the room. Dad can barely even get to his desk, let alone the shelves and piles of stuff, which is why I can help him. He spends all day doing experiments with the machine, except when somebody comes to talk to him. Those times are the worst because I have to be really quiet and go in the corner and it’s boring.
Today only one person comes to talk. He’s a bald man in a gray suit. The top of his head is so shiny I almost laugh, but I try my hardest to stay quiet. I’m not paying attention when the man and Dad start talking but then the man starts to yell.
“People are dead because of your shoddy work! This is the only project we have without any direct oversight and you’d quit over it? We’re fighting a war here. We can’t have our own weapons killing our soldiers.”
“There will always be risk involved, and you don’t have anybody capable of understanding, much less overseeing, my work.”
“Don’t give me that risk line! Genetic modification–”
“Is not what the implants do! Genes can’t subvert the laws of the universe, no matter how cleverly you configure aminos. The implants are produced by accessing properties that aren’t comprehensible to our physics, much less our biology. They translate those properties biologically, but the machine, the source… most of it is pure mathematics. And it’s probabilistic. I don’t know what a given implant will do. In fact it cannot be known with certainty. You just have to test them, see what each solution does.”
Dad turns away from the bald man. “You guys treat this like it’s magic, but expect it to operate with the consistency of science. Every council meeting, you chatter like little kids with comic books, arguing over whether you’d prefer flight or invisibility. Flight and invisibility! Listen to yourself. No, I won’t have someone in here looking over my shoulder.”
The bald man’s head is purple now, but he doesn’t say anything else, and after a while he leaves. He reminds me of Ms. Roberts.
I decide to ask Dad about it, so I hover over to him and flicker once to get his attention. “Dad,” I say, “Isn’t it wrong to lie? Why didn’t you tell him about my implant?”
He sighs and stares at the ceiling behind me.
“Some things are for sharing, son,” he says, “but some things are for keeping.”
by submission | Oct 16, 2011 | Story |
Author : Holly Day
The boy didn’t fly so much as claw his way up through the air, swinging first one arm, then the next, up over his head while he made his ascent. His arms and legs were twisted metal wrapped in plastic, and his face was completely covered with a clear plastic shield. The eyes that stared up at Valerie were bright and angry against a pallor of sagging, dying flesh.
Valerie eyed the boy coolly, automatically willing the projectiles in the palms of her hands to slide into place. It wouldn’t be any big deal to just circumvent the boy completely, but she hadn’t had a chance to try the tiny bombs out on anything yet. She sized up her opponent as he grew nearer, deciding that the large, clunky tube grenade launcher strapped to his forearms would be no threat to her.
Valerie slowed her decent until it was little more than a hover and waited for the deformed creature below her to draw close. It was funny, or ironic, how she felt right now—she wasn’t sure which. The short time she had spent in an adolescent, fully-human body, she had been riddled with insecurity about her body, her body language, what she was supposed to talk about with friends and what she was allowed to say to boys, and the whole experience had been just awful. But now, just weeks after officially joining the military as part of their Elite, she felt perfectly in control of everything around her. Everything. The boy below her posed no threat on any level. He could either attack her or try to kiss her, and she would have been able to deal with either situation perfectly.
“Wouldn’t it be strange if he did try to kiss me?” she marveled suddenly, almost laughing, then shuddered. The closer he drew, the more she could see how unlike her he, or at least his construction, was. He was a brutish pile of sharp metal parts and exposed tubes and wires, with bits of human flesh showing here and there as if left by accident. His mouth was an angry snarl of teeth, lips dry and split, gray. He probably would not try to kiss her.
As the boy drew nearer, Valerie coolly took survey of what she took to be vulnerable areas and aimed accordingly. She paused, not sure if she should just shoot the newcomer and get it over with, or if she should wait until he was within earshot and saw something menacing, or brave, or comic-book corny, like “Nice killing you!” or “Next time, make sure your arms match your feet before taking off, Lunkhead!”
It seemed as though her attacker was thinking the same thing. As she watched, the boy tried to shape his malformed mouth into words, finally settling on some sort of gesture which Valerie decided must be insulting. It had to be. She made a gesture of her own in return, then aimed carefully and fired.
