by submission | Jul 17, 2011 | Story
Author : Adam Sprague
February 4, 2049
Ava flew out of bed like one of those spring loaded jack-in-the-box things she used to hear her grandmother talk about when she was younger. The Texas sun had just begun to cast its morning shadows as she grabbed her E-Comm and turned off its alarm.
“I know I didn’t set this thing that early,” she said to nobody in particular, while Tabitha began rubbing the crusted sleep from the corners of her eyes.
“What are you doing?” Tabitha sleepily slurred in her mother’s direction while she arose from the hotel bed.
No response. Ava’s eyes widened so quickly that she lost focus on the screen of her E-Comm. Her jaw plummeted downward.
“How old is this stream…how old is this stream!”
Ava began a series of shakes and smacks to the side of her E-Comm in hopes that pummeling the device would quicken the refresh rate of the screen.
“Four hours?” she screamed in a shaky, panicked tone of disbelief. Ava unleashed a string of profanity that Tabitha would not have otherwise learned for another three or four years and her daughter’s seven-year-old heart rate spiked.
“We have to go now!” Ava yelled.
“But what about Binkie,” Tabitha said as she reached back towards the stuffed rabbit on the bed.
Without another word Ava yanked Tabitha’s arm, nearly jerking it out of the socket. Still fumbling with her E-Comm, Ava plowed the door open and started jogging down the hallway, past the vacant front desk, and out the hotel’s main entrance. Everything was still.
“Bioter…Bioterror…Bioterrist attack, and nothing. It doesn’t make sense.”
She ignored the inquisitions of her child and scanned left to right as they stepped foot outside.
“Fuck me, the maglev isn’t running! We’re stuck…”
“Mom! Why is everyone sleeping in the street?” Tabitha cried out, pointing at a pile of bodies outside a local burger joint.
Bracing herself against the wall of the hotel, Ava felt the onset of a panic attack rising through her chest. Everywhere she looked, people were lying in the streets. Around the maglev, on the sidewalks, in the middle of streets, they were everywhere. It was worse than any stream she had ever seen on her E-Comm.
Hand in hand, both Ava and Tabitha began to put one shaky leg in front of the other and progressed down the street. They came within fifteen feet of one of the bodies and both instantly froze.
Ava quickly covered her daughter’s eyes as each corpse stared back at them with mushroom-like fungi extending from their ears, noses and mouths. It was then that she felt it herself.
Megaphones began to blare in the distance while Ava’s vision blurred and her mind turned to madness. She reached out for her daughter as her skull bounced off the pavement.
“The Department of National Security has quarantined the city of Abilene. Please remain indoors for your own safety, thank you.”
February 5, 2049
With a smile, the head of the Department of National Security ended the call on his E-Comm and turned towards President Leroy Gomez. Gomez, like a statue, continued to stare blankly out of his office window as he clenched his teeth in anticipation.
“President Gomez, Operation TX-24 was a complete success.”
“So this ends the testing then?”
“It does. Decades of research, and finally we know without a doubt what the Ophiocordyceps fungus is truly capable of.”
“At the expense of our own,” uttered Gomez with a remorseful sigh. He plopped himself down in the nearest chair and stared up at the ceiling.
by submission | Jul 16, 2011 | Story
Author : Michael F. da Silva
“And that is how we will neutralise the Entente’s forward operating positions, my colleagues.”
The Georgian style meeting room was located on a human-built Orbital Cylinder over Mycenae. The size of the cylinder was large enough that the curvature of the room’s floor could only be measured by precision tools or enhanced sensory organs.
Several dozen sets of eyes of various shapes and arrangements looked back at the Admiral representing the Consortium of Human Territories. Some exchanged expressions of doubt and hoped that someone else would pose the difficult questions of fleet strength and logistics.
One of the assembled military officers, a giant head on eight golden armoured legs, shifted his frame toward the human. “Admiral Caetano, I pose a question. If we assemble our forces here, as you propose, and transit directly to Gliese we will allow our fleet to be surrounded on all sides by enemy-held systems. Also, the fleet numbers your plan requires for this expedition would seriously undermine the defences of our own colonial systems. How are we to prevent the Entente from taking advantage as soon as they see our fleet movements?”
“If we attempt to defend everything, we will defend nothing. We have no choice but to take the fight to the enemy, but we can choose where to strike. And what better objective than the enemy’s most important colony system?” Admiral Caetano rested his bio-armoured fists on the conference table. He continued, “If you evacuate your surface colonies to your homeworlds and Orbitals and limit colonial activities entirely to industries essential to the war effort, those mining and construction operations will be all the easier to defend.”
Many bristled at the prospect of relocating millions of citizens who had never been out of their home system. For those who represented democracies, it was not as simple a notion as the human made it sound.
“Within forty-eight hours after our forces depart from the objective rally point, we can completely negate the enemy’s ability to use the Gliese system as a staging point for fleet actions against our allies.”
A canine-headed centaur dressed like a warhorse bared her teeth in appreciation of that. The Capaill Madraí home system had been taking the brunt of enemy incursions for the last four decades. They had been pushing for aggressive action for almost as long but no longer had the economic clout to browbeat the other members or the military capacity to lead the way themselves.
Just then, a heretofore silent cephalopod reared up on its serpentine coils. “Barbarian bottomfeeder! Your progeny will all become slaves under the Entente! Devil of the Deep swallow you!” he cursed.
Caetano saw it too late to react. Inside the enraged alien, chemical processes that he had put to normal metabolism reached a fever pitch of activity. Fluids polymerised. Chemicals merged with each other creating new complex compounds.
The centre of the Orbital Cylinder flashed to eye-searing whiteness and what had been one majestic construct was rent into two Roman candles of dissolving metal and organo-ceramics falling to the planet below.
by submission | Jul 15, 2011 | Story
Author : Michael F. da Silva
Being dead, I wasn’t expecting much conversation at the café.
I had loaded the environment as soon as I was uploaded. The red carpet and round lamp-lighted tables stretched out to infinity in all directions. The Viennese coffee that had melted into being tasted as real to my digitised thought patterns as anything I had had before my retirement.
So I was surprised when the legal avatar came down the carpet like a supermodel on the catwalk, successfully pulling off someone’s idea of legal chic.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Vieira. I trust you’ve enjoyed your stay?”
Afternoon was a relative term in Lalaland. It was whatever time of day I wanted it to be.
“So far.” I answered trying to keep annoyance out of my voice and admiring the curve of her hips. “It’s only been a few hours, you know.”
I tried to undress her with the avatar control suite, thinking she might be just some cover girl I had fantasized about when I was a teenager.
“I’m afraid I’m quite the real thing, Mr. Vieira. I’m here about your return to Reality.” She pronounced the word like it came with its own punctuation mark.
“There must be some mistake. I’ve only just uploaded. I signed up for the Bachelor Retirement Package. That’s fifty years simulated vacation. I just got here, like I said.”
“Mr. Vieira.” My own name was starting to get on my nerves at this point. “There seems to have been a problem with your upload procedure. As you may recall, we perform a thorough analysis of each client’s neural pathways prior to digitalisation and upload to their vacation servers.”
“Yes.” I contributed, hoping against hope that this was going to lead to a champagne-drenched lap dance.
“What is left to the fine print, however, is that there is always the small chance of a mimetic neural virus being present in a client’s subconscious.”
I blinked incomprehension. Technical mumbo jumbo. Not my forte.
She plodded on, legally obliged to keep me in the loop. ”What that means, Mr. Vieira, is that you have had your fifty years simulated vacation. You just lose all memory of it after an interval of three hours and two minutes. I hope you understand.”
“Wait a minute. This has to be a mistake. I’ve only just arrived!”
“It’s not a mistake, Mr. Vieira.”
“Well, fix it then! Make me remember. I’ll be damned if I get packed back into a synthetic with no memories of my own vacation!”
“I’m afraid that can’t be helped, Mr. Vieira. A mimetic neural virus is intrinsic to a subject’s specific thought patterns. It can’t be removed without severely damaging the subject’s thought patterns at their core level. I would suggest you make good use of the next hour.”
And then she just walked away towards a crimson horizon leaving me with a panic-laced erection and not enough time to do anything with it. I considered running her down and bending her over a table for one last hurrah.
“That simply wouldn’t do, Mr. Vieira.” She said turning neatly on one foot. “There are security measures to prevent such things from happening in virtual environments. And you would still face legal action for making the attempt.”
“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do, you courtroom drama bitch?!”
She cocked her head to one side and narrowed icy blue eyes. “You still have both hands, don’t you?”
by submission | Jul 14, 2011 | Story
Author : Ossian Ritchie
Frank Henstein stepped into the Huvver lift and was propelled upwards through the daily debris of handywipes and food wrappers that bobbed in the impossible antigravity lift field. The office stinks of fake pine and ice-cream aftershave.
Frank was born in Croydon, 1987, his brother Barry had been the one keen on Cryo. At twenty-nine Frank begrudgingly signs up to help promote Barry’s faltering Cryo business. The full body scan and physical checkup reveals Frank is dying of an incurable cancer. Without blinking, Barry enthusiastically suggests Frank freezes himself until science can find a cure.
Frank does not want to die. Getting frozen seems as much like death to him – and Barry wanted the Cryo done right now. Frank explains this to Barry, the two embrace and Barry cries and tells his little brother that he does not want to do anything to hurt him. It is touching. Frank wakes the next day, one thousand years in the future: his cancer cured.
On his break, Frank opens one of the few cartons of cigarettes left in the world and smokes at his desk. It is somebody’s birthday, but he can’t remember their name, or their nickname, or hair group. He is sure half the room are at the party right now: impossible to tell when the party is inside the computer.
Barry has already been and gone. They told Frank how long Barry lived, but four hundred and fifty years is too long for Frank to fathom. Frank can only wonder why his big brother hadn’t called for him.
His sister lived next, she barely lasted a year before calling her mother and father back from the dead. She died for real at the age of sixty, and their parents both went around the same time. The records don’t say why they died, or why they did not call on Frank. Maybe they all felt like he did, that this was unlivable, that they would not share this hell with the ones they loved?
Frank tries to relax, but only succeeds in starting another cigarette. He wants to watch more about what life was like two hundred years ago, when his parents lived. Frank remembers the last time he tuned in to History Unlimited – the next day, everyone turned up for work dressed as prehistoric men and spent the day throwing mud and staging crude, electric wars.
The girl that Frank tries to talk to every single day stops at the end of his desk.
“Chup,” she says.
“Chup,” he copies. She laughs and walks on. She greets her friends with a manly ‘chup’ and there is more laughter. Then she dances in a caustic 3d haze. It hurts to look at it if the broadcast is not meant for you and Frank winces as he tries to pick out details in the fizzing digital mush.
Frank wonders what to do after work. Even in his daydreams he goes home. Home to cushions that behave like pets and beds that burn his covers off in the morning with a fake fire he will never get used to. He dreams of the robot kitchen and how he will react, disgusted by every single meal he is presented with. He wonders how his sister lasted, almost a year, like this.
by submission | Jul 13, 2011 | Story
Author : Charlotte Lenox
She watched with tears in her eyes–they were going to fight again, this time too close to the spaceport. A massive, spidery one with corded, violet-blue legs stepped down into the valley, avalanches of snow following in its wake. The wall of windows she watched from shuddered and the rugged earth rumbled as another beast’s shadow passed overhead. Backing away, she almost fell into a row of seats near her boarding gate.
No one screamed because no one else was there.
Fresh terror suffused her as part of an indigo carapace cleared the spaceport and grazed her field of view. Memories filled her mind in rapid succession: the pale rime of the horizon, the skinned knees while playing on a lonely road, the clouds of mating swirls flickering at one another in the wind, her ear to the ground listening for her homeworld’s molten heartbeat. Then there were the deaths and fouling of the air when they appeared–from where, no one knew, or wouldn’t say. People had swamped spaceports (some had died in the press of bodies), taking with them whatever they could carry.
She had never left, and now never could. But then, she’d never wanted to leave her only friend behind. She had run away crying from her parents, and they had had left her behind. Her gate had been forever sealed weeks ago. By now, essentials were running out–food, clean air, time, sanity–but that didn’t matter, not anymore. The beasts collided with a heavy, spraying crash that painted the mountains burgundy.
A silvery crack bolted across the windows. Her scream finally filled her silenced world.
