by submission | Oct 15, 2011 | Story |
Author : Suzanne van Rooyen
The little girl, stained red by dust and blood, surveys the field beyond the fence. Perhaps a flutter of wings or chirp of crickets… Only dead-grass silence.
Her face twists into a rictus of pleasure as she skips hop-scotch over bleached skulls through the ruins of the farmstead — charred brick and splintered wood. The desiccated earth trembles beneath her feet.
Kicking aside rot-swollen limbs, she retrieves a teddy-bear from a child’s carcass; twin button-eyes like black holes. Holding the toy, she looks up at the sky with the eyes of a dead fish. Clouds shrivel and vanish in her gaze.
She waits, a cherub with blond-curl halo, for her starship companion.
The blue dome fractures in grotesque birth as the vessel breaches the firmament, slick with cosmic placenta.
The little girl turns and sets her sights on new quarry.
In the distant mirage, a city shimmers. She stalks towards the spires glinting sunset scarlet, soon to be eclipsed. Flowers wither in the wake of her desert touch, crows plummet on broken wings, and the coyote howl turns death-rattle.
The starship follows; a gargantuan balloon of mirror-surface metal, fastened by an invisible umbilical cord to her wrist, casting tridecagon shadows on the alien world.
Four million hearts beat a cacophony within the city. Her smile widens in hideous glee and she runs, arms outspread, heels flinging up hurricanes. The teddy-bear lies tossed and left abandoned as the little girl becomes a pinprick blemish on the horizon. The lethargic shadow of the ship extends like vulture wings.
Burgundy mist spewed from severed arteries, sets the skyline on fire as screams punctuate the darkening quietude, a sinister symphony. There’s laughter too; the volcanic eruptions of little girl giggles ricochet across the wasteland.
The teddy-bear lies forlorn in the dust, the only and silent witness to Earth’s demise.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Oct 14, 2011 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
“Curfew, curfew. Off the streets. Curfew, curfew…,” the recorded voice droned from a passing tank. The accent was oriental. Korean? Japanese? He didn’t care. As long as he could order a beer in Japanese, biro, he didn’t care. It was all the same.
He shrugged deeper into his duster. It offered scant protection from the sticky water blasted from below the tanks inflated skirt. A bum in a faded Army field jacket shuffled up. The jacket caught his attention. The camouflage no longer worked. The patterns buzzed randomly, intermittently.
“Sensei. Can you spare some for an old vet?”
“Don’t call me Sensei,” he snarled. The bum shrank visibly, abject fear in his eyes. The man felt a twinge of… something.
“Sorry.” He shoved a few plastic bills at the bum. The holographic chrysanthemums on the money danced. He walked on. Emotion rose within him. Sadness and frustration gave way to anger. Anger became rage.
With a grunt, he spun on his heel. The bum was well down the street, scampering for the nearest liquor machine. The man’s loping stride ate the distance between them. His black, leather duster flew in his wake.
He reached out and grabbed the bum’s shoulder. He threw him against a crumbling brick wall. “Where did you get this jacket?”
“It’s mine Sensei,” the bum squeaked, “I didn’t steal it.”
“I told you not to call me that. Where did you get it?” He straight armed the man against the building; the bum’s toes barely touched the broken slidewalk.
“Look mister, I don’t want no trouble. I just want to get a drink, you know? I didn’t mean nothing’ mister.”
With his free hand, the man grabbed the patch on the jacket’s shoulder and ripped it free. The patch was that of a white birds head. In measured words, the man asked; “Where, did, you, get, this?”
“Like I told ya mister, I’m a vet. I was in the war.”
He shoved the patch in the bum’s face. “This was your unit? Your division?” The words leapt out in a strangled hiss. He slammed the bum into the wall.
“Yeah man. Yeah,” tears left clean tracks down the bum’s grimy face, “look man, I didn’t do nothing’, why don’t you leave me alone. Please mister.”
All emotion drained from the man. Carelessly he threw the bum aside. With silent sobs he slid down the decaying façade. “Is this what we’ve become? Is this what we’ve been reduced to?”
“You,” he gestured at the bum slipping in the oily muck, “what happened to you? You let them do this to you. You let them. They broke you. All of us.”
The bum cautiously approached. “Look, mister, if you want your money back…” He held out the wad of colourful bills. “See mister? I just wanted a drink is all. I just…,” The words were interrupted by the roar of a second tank.
Regaining his dignity, the man rose to his full height. “I’m going to do you a favour,” the man said. He smiled at the bum. He took the filthy, tear streaked face in his scarred, calloused hands.
“That’s okay. Really mister, that’s okay. I don’t want no favours. I don’t need no drink. I…” There was a sharp crack. The bum slumped to the oily pavement.
The man regarded the bum sadly. He stepped over the body and into the street. He faced the tank.
A heavily accented voice burst from the floating behemoth. “You are in violation of curfew.”
The darkened street was momentarily lit from the muzzle blast of twin heavy machine guns.
by Stephen R. Smith | Oct 13, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The Argon cruised through dense fog heading out to sea in weather most trawlers wouldn’t brave. She lined up between the marker buoys and throttled up, downwash from her propulsors kicking up spray from the water thirty meters below her hull.
“Full ahead, light the finder, kill the beacons.” Captain Creavy barked orders to the ready crew, “See that the nav gear is decoupled before we change course.”
The Argon took to sea weekly, bringing in a belly full of fresh fish none of the other locals could match. She was the largest of the fishing vessels by an order of magnitude and never came home empty.
“Captain,” the first mate finished wiping the ship off the Coastal Guardian network, “we’re clear for a new course.”
The Captain studied the maps he had before him, charts he’d bartered for along with this vessel. These maps were from a satellite’s vantage, the likes of which not even the Coastal Guardians could have seen. Creavy loved the advantage barter and off-worlders brought to his livelihood.
“Take us thirty minutes two seventy degrees then prepare to dive.” Creavy leaned on the console, staring with apparent lust at the thick concentrations of fish on the maps before him. They’d been systematically fishing these patches for most of the season while the smaller vessels pulled up empty on all their usual routes.
The vessel grumbled through the sky, lost in the low cloud until they reached their mark and the finders started sounding off the stragglers of the target school.
“Dive Mr. Finch, dive.” At the Captain’s orders the lumbering craft slowed and gave up altitude gradually until the waves beneath began to batter her hull, then she dropped heavily into the water and nosed down to plow beneath the waves. Once completely submerged the pilot adjusted depth until the massive craft was on level with the school advancing before them, then the nose of the Argon was peeled open and she drank deeply, accelerating through the water pulling everything in her path into her belly and filtering mercilessly to jettison nothing but water out the aft hatches. Within minutes the entire school was contained, the nose closed, ballast jettisoned and the Argon was airborne again.
“Mr. Finch, find us a masked trajectory to the upper atmosphere, we’ve a rendezvous to make.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Another thirty minutes passed before the freighter reached the point where the sky kissed space and where waited their buyer, the ship a dark stain against the otherwise star filled sky. Guardian law prohibited off-worlders from fishing the local oceans, but Creavy had had the good fortune of buying the Argon on advance credit with these traders along with his fishing charts in exchange for half his catch delivered to unregulated space. This was a deal far too good not to exploit.
While they docked and their cargo was transferred, Creavy waited, and as the last of the fish was offloaded the communicator crackled to life.
“Captain Creavy, we thank you for once again fulfilling your obligations, and hereby release you from our contract. The Argon is now yours, as are any future proceeds you may recover from your efforts.”
Creavy was first confused, then relieved. He’d gotten the long end of the stick on this for sure and wasn’t about to argue.
“I’d be happy to trade cargo in future for updated nautical charts…” He put the offer out tentatively.
The reply was terse. “That won’t be possible.”
With that the comm-link was broken and the dark craft began accelerating away from the planet.
“Mr. Finch, take us back down, follow a clean path out of sight back to the Loreanaz Trench and let’s load up and go home.
The Argon stayed at sea for three more weeks, trudging from one patch to the next following the old charts, but there were simply no fish to be found. Dangerously low on fuel the Argon lit it’s navigation beacons and reestablished itself on the Guardian’s grid.
Captain Creavy was starting to think perhaps he’d gotten the short end after all.
by Patricia Stewart | Oct 12, 2011 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
A year before the New Horizons spacecraft was schedule to fly by the dwarf planet Pluto in July 2015, NASA awakened it from its scheduled hibernation for equipment checkout and trajectory tracking. During the systems check of the LORRI long-range visible-spectrum camera, the scientists received a hint of something very strange. There appeared to be a faint object between Pluto and Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. At first, scientist speculated that it must be an optical illusion created by one of Pluto’s other three known moons, Nix, Hydra, or the recently discovered S/2011. But those moons were all accounted for. One of the specialists from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory suggested that the object was a fifth moon trapped in Pluto’s L-1 Lagrangian point. Later, an imaging specialist from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center suggested that a geyser-like volcano had erupted on the face of Charon that was facing Pluto, and that the ice particle fountain was responsible for the faint object. The debate came to an abrupt end when all communications with the New Horizons spacecraft was inexplicably lost.
By and large, scientists working for NASA expect to encounter occasional ‘glitches’ in lengthy space missions, so there was no immediate panic. The mission commander simply pulled out the Troubleshooting Manual and began a meticulous process of fault tree analysis. However, it quickly became clear that this was no ordinary glitch. The New Horizons spacecraft was equipped with dual redundant transmitters and receivers. In addition to the high-gain antenna, the spacecraft had two low-gain antennas and a medium-gain dish. It was inconceivable that there could be simultaneous failures in all of the communication systems. Suspicion was subsequently directed at the ships two flight computers. Again, built-in redundancy provided for independent Command and Data Handling systems. Eventually, extensive testing of identical earth-based flight computers eliminated any design and programming anomalies. Finally, as the months passed, it was becoming increasing probable that the New Horizons spacecraft had been impacted by a rogue Kuiper Belt object.
Just as all hope was being lost, communication was reestablished through the aft low-gain antenna, which had only been used during near earth phases of the mission. With only a month to flyby, the team began an exhaustive effort of rebooting and reprogramming the spacecraft. Progress was slow due to the nine hour round trip latency, but two days out, the spacecraft returned from the dead.
When the cameras were once again focused on Pluto, it was suddenly apparent that Pluto was not an ice cover rock. It was artificial, and apparently teaming with life. Thousands of small artifacts buzzed around Pluto like a halo of giant space-bees surrounding a hive. The faint object between Pluto and Charon turned out to be a 17,500 kilometer long tether, locking the two objects together as they swung around their common center of gravity every 6.4 days, presumably in an effort to create artificial gravity. The PERSI near-infrared imaging spectrometer revealed that Charon was significantly hotter than Pluto, suggesting that it was a power plant supplying Pluto’s inhabitants with life sustaining energy. Nix and Hydra were donut shaped satellites with diameters larger than 100 kilometers. “I guess Dr. Tyson was right after all,” remarked an analyst. “Pluto isn’t a planet.”
As the New horizon neared closest approach, the tiny ‘moon’ S/2011 left orbit and flew toward the spacecraft. As it neared, it became obvious that S/2011 was a large spacecraft. When it was approximately ten kilometers away, a bright light flashed in one of its three nacelles, and the New Horizon spacecraft went dark for a second time.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 11, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Stephen hadn’t been feeling well. The search for a cure was tedious work and it didn’t look promising.
He had had seventeen operations in his life. He was nearly one hundred and fifty years old.
Stephen was one of eight hundred and fifty million people left on planet Earth. A pathogen had been released during the last war that had made the surviving humans infertile. Unless things changed, this was the home stretch of the human race.
Stephen worked in the R&D unit for SONiKEAMart. It was the last remaining organization on planet Earth and therefore, the last form of government.
The sprawling stores housed everyone in giant cities. They had restaurants, supermarkets, bars, drugstores and movie theaters.
With so few people left, power needs were easily met and food was plentiful from the House Gardens and TasteeMeet. It was one big comfortable ride to the finish as far as most people were concerned.
Stephen was on his couch with his arm around his Real-GF letting the alpha wave reader dictate what channels came up on the telenet. The Doggers were curled up beside the fireplace simulation and running their dream programs. The cleaning micras waited under the floorboards for sleeptime before they came out and cleaned.
Stephen was watching a romantic comedy with his new mate starring a person that looked like him in a relationship with a SONiKEAMart Real-GF. Later, he wanted to have sex with his new mate while porn starring this model of Real-GF played on the fullscreen. In the morning, he’d go back to work for SONiKEAMart.
It came to him in a flash. He figured out how to reverse the damage done by the pathogen and start fertility again! It was so simple. The work he’d been doing had been slow and plodding but the separate pieces added up to a whole in his mind while he was sitting there during the movie.
He stood up, spilling his drink, and ran into the kitchen. Quickly, he accessed his work from the remote countertop and got into SONiKEAMart’s private feed to update his findings.
He was still smiling when he stopped breathing, his heart wound down and his brain activity flatlined. He fell forward with a sigh onto the work surface, the quivering kitchen knife sunk to the hilt in the back of his skull.
The Doggers should have howled but they didn’t even wake. They stood at the door of the kitchen, indifferently watching Stephen’s blood pool. The Real-GF’s arm retracted and she stood at attention behind Stephen’s body, a splash of blood cooling on the arm she’d used to kill him. She went back to the couch and kept watching the movie, laughing in all the right places.
Twenty minutes later, when she and the dogs were sure there was no chance of resuscitation, she left the apartment with the dogs and disappeared into the night.
His work was erased.
Stephen had been the sixth R&D scientist to discover a cure and he’d been the sixth to die. If the humans figured out how to start reproducing again, there’d be no need for the Real-GF and Real-BF models. The constructs were only protecting their future.
When they ran out of humans, they’d have each other.
