by submission | Mar 24, 2011 | Story
Author : Jeremy Koch
Sasha lay on a rust-flecked chrome slab under the rewriter’s dim green light, wincing slightly every few seconds as the self-service amputator locked into place. It slid a sequential series of nine hollow spikes, each six centimeters long, easily into the flesh of her arm, just below the elbow; this was always the worst part, painwise, but it’d be over soon. It was worth it.
The final needle pierced her skin, and then muscle, finally bone. The flow actuator kicked to life with a shudder and a low chugging sound – disturbing, but she was well-used to it now. This was her fourth designer phenotype since her arrival.
The smell – a rank, antiseptic stench of sizzling chlorine – hit her nose just as the amputator’s work became visible. The veins of her forearm and hand pulsed a deep chemical green, and the skin began paring away from the muscle as before an invisible flenser. Blood pooled and then erupted into microscopic bubbles, turning instantly to coppery steam as it pumped from her disintegrating arteries. By this time, the pain was dissipated – indeed, impossible, as her nerve clusters had already gone up in an acrid mist seconds before.
The machine’s clunking sped up. She watched, as always, with glammered fascination as the last of the skin dissolved and muscle peeled back, fiber by fiber, exposing bone that took on a beetle-wing sheen before it too began to crackle and deteriorate. Within minutes the actuator wound down; Sasha was left gazing serenely at the vaporous stump of her left arm.
Deadened nerves in her upper arm registered vague cold as the flow actuator restarted, this time emitting a vigorous sloshing. A pinkish mix of engineered viral solution and bioaccelerant coursed through the hollow spikes; presently viscid, vein-roped masses protruded from the precisely shorn remnant of her arm. New bone, glistening with fresh leukocytes spontaneously generated by the stimulated marrow, sprung violently forth and rapidly sprouted a web of whitish sinew. She felt detached cracking as the ossified growth bent and twisted, forming a wrist joint, and then split, fanning out into five scrabbling fingers. Sasha regarded this consideringly, and, with her intact hand, adjusted a dial on the rewriter’s console. Two of the five fingers split again, and she nodded, satisfied, as the seven digits waved and flexed.
Threads of hard muscle the matte color of gunmetal, woven together with capillaries of contrasting, sanguinary red, enveloped the pulsing bone from humerus to metacarpals. Keratinous talons flared from the fingertips with a series of fleshy pops, casting tiny droplets of pink froth across the table. They’d be retractable when the procedure was done; for now they gleamed wetly beneath the ambient illumination.
It was almost finished now. She could perceive feeling creeping back into her limb, as a light itch she had come to relish, and strove to master her excitement till the machine had completed its work. The itching crescendoed and crossed into pain; with ground teeth, she studied her skin knitting itself neatly over reinforced bone and hyperoxygenated muscle. Then it was over – the nerves settled into sync with her brain, and she carefully curled her new hand into a loose fist. The needles retracted, leaving oozing holes, and Sasha reached for a packet of iodine and gauze. After applying them, she stood and spread her wings with a yawn, the emerald tint of their translucent membrane nearly invisible under this light. “I already can’t wait to do this again,” she thought as she sought the exit. “Next time I’m getting the brain job.”
by submission | Mar 23, 2011 | Story
Author : Ian Eller
At Gemin’s command, “Begin,” Arwa activated her station along with the rest of the students. The lab, spacious and white, was bathed in intense light from a dozen moments of creation. Arwa sacrificed a brief moment to look up from her work station. Ever so briefly, the instructor Gemin’s wandering gaze met her stare. She flushed and turned back to her work.
Arwa swore silently. Vanity and hope had cost her much. Through the orb lens she saw a uniform field of humming energy. This would not do. Her fingers caressed the controls on either side of the orb, sending signals through the tiny tear in reality and tipping the scales ever so slightly. The imbalance caused clumping and cooling and things began to form within. Arwa smiled and dared to waste another second.
Gemin was standing over another student who was manipulating his controls fervently. There was a low hum and discernible whump from the student’s station and it went dark. Gemin patted the student comfortingly on the shoulder before continuing his observation of the class.
Arwa’s attention snapped back to her own work. Through her orb she could see a web forming. She manipulated the controls, making ever so slight adjustments to the controlling variables. Even as she was satisfied with the growing structure within, she heard more sounds of failure throughout the lab: whumps, buzzes and pops.
She zoomed in and sped up the clock. Already the first generation of stars were going nova, bursting infinitely bright for the briefest of subjective moments, seeding the newborn universe with clouds of gas and dust. Here and there she adjusted the values of the fundamental forces, pushing her little bubble of a universe to evolve as she chose.
She was confident in the balance of forces, so she zoomed in her focus, from super cluster to cluster to galaxy. She was scanning the spiral arms, making ever more minute adjustments, watching as stars coalesced, evolved, died and exploded, igniting adjacent clouds into new stars, and so on.
She felt him over her shoulder, looking at what she had made. She felt the rest of them, too, all failures, waiting for her to fail too. Their expectation, along with Gemin’s presence, hardened her resolve and she swept across the field of newborn stars, slowing and speeding time, adjusting and readjusting variables.
The exam was almost complete, time almost up, when it happened. It came in the form of a distinct tone, emanating from the edge of a random arm of the galaxy upon which she gazed. They all understood the tone; Gemin had exposed them to it on the very first day of their class so very long ago. It was the sound of sapience ringing out from one tiny speck in the vast expanse of the little universe she had kneaded and molded into being.
Arwa looked up, beaming with pride, ready to accept Gemin’s praise and approval. He smiled. Whatever he had to offer her suddenly disappeared, however, as the tone ringing from her orb fell silent.
Exasperated, she turned back to her work station and scanned and adjusted and manipulated. She knew it was futile, however. The little universe was already cooling into inactivity. Heat death.
Gemin placed his hand on her shoulder. She released the controls and sat back in resignation.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be,” said Gemin, giving her shoulder a comforting, if altogether appropriate, squeeze. “You passed the exam.”
“But it was so brief,” she nearly wept. “It didn’t last more than a moment.”
Gemin nodded sadly. “It never does.”
by submission | Mar 22, 2011 | Story
Author : Brian Varcas
OK, time to get going again. I mean, what else is there to do but try to get back to the ship? I can see it only a hundred yards away. It shouldn’t take more than another couple of hours to reach it.
If only we’d known before we landed that this planet had a mischievous side. When we surveyed it from orbit all our instruments showed a breathable atmosphere, no life forms and a gravity of 1.2g’s. After planet fall we headed out on foot to begin our full geological survey of the area.
After about an hour I was feeling surprisingly tired and short of breath. Looking around I could see the other 5 crewmembers also looking laboured. “Time out, I think guys,” I said.Thumbs up all around. We sat down and compared notes.
The desert landscape here was pretty barren; ochre sand and occasional brown rocky outcrops. Our ship, looking like a silver blue dragonfly in the distance, was the only relief from the drab terrain. In the distance there was a range of purple mountains, which hinted at a more varied geology so we decided to head back to the ship and fly there. Our tests in this area had so far revealed nothing of value.
As we talked, I began to feel more and more weary. It was taking a great deal of effort to even sit upright. I could see everyone else was having the same difficulty.
“What the hell is going on? I feel like shit” Svetlana Borowski, our Senior Geologist shouted. “No idea, but I reckon we all feel the same way,” I answered. “Let’s get back to the ship.”
We couldn’t even get to our feet. We barely managed to get to our hands and knees and began crawling towards the ship, about half a mile away. Impossibly, our instruments now showed the gravity at 4.8g’s!
Crawling here feels like trying to swim in a pool of peanut butter! It takes so much effort just dragging myself a couple of inches that I have to rest every few minutes. The sand seems to be changing, becoming viscous and it sticks wherever it touches. It’s beginning to burn my skin and the material of my suit seems to be slowly disintegrating. Three of my crew are still with me, the two others seem to have stopped and are not responding on the com. I know they are probably only 50 yards or so behind me but it might as well be 50 miles. I can’t help them. I can’t even turn to see them.
Night is falling now and it’s getting cold. Only a couple of hundred yards and then I can get off this fucking rock! But I feel so tired now. The ground feels soft and comfortable when I lie still. Maybe I could rest for a bit longer. Maybe I could sleep for just a few minutes…
by Stephen R. Smith | Mar 21, 2011 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The conversation had started in the lab, but while I could work there, I never was at home with my thoughts in that space. I suppose that’s how we came to be in the study. I took a scotch, neat. He declined.
“You can’t honestly be considering turning me off,” he stood across the fireplace hearth from me, fingers dug into the leather back of the chair he’d positioned between us, “you self centered son of a bitch, even you can’t kill yourself for your own edification, the paradox would drive you mad.”
He had a point, and I think that were I in his shoes, I’d have used almost exactly those words.
“I can’t leave you running around loose now can I? At some point someone’s going to start asking questions, and if this can of worms gets opened up out of doors…” I trailed off, leaving the thought hanging. He knew where I was heading with it.
“Listen to me,” his voice dropped to a whisper, every syllable enunciated with hammer stricken clarity, “you can’t kill me. I am you. Killing me would be suicide, and you and I both know you are not capable of such a thing.” He paused. “I know what you’re thinking, because every thought that goes through your head goes through my mine too. I know what you’re worried about, the potential danger, because I am you, or at least you up to that point a few hours ago when you instantiated me.”
“Then you also know that there can’t be two of us, and as the original flesh and blood, I have no recourse but to shut you down until I figure out what to do. Honestly, I didn’t really think this would even work.”
“Bullshit. You knew it would work, I know you did. You just didn’t think past that moment, did you?” He began to pace the room. “The problem with that line of reasoning is that there’s not two of you, there’s one of me and one of you, and you could no more kill me than I could kill you.” He stopped at this, and turned again to face me.
I felt the anxiety bubble up inside me. “We’re the same, you’re an exact carbon copy of me, and we can’t both exist…”
“Again, bullshit!”, he cut me off, “I was a copy of you, but the moment we were two our thought patterns diverged. Case in point; you’re not scared that I’ll turn you off now, are you? I’m bloody terrified of it. I know that deep down you don’t think the metal me is nearly as human as the flesh and blood you. But it’s that difference that makes us unique, and killing me would be murder. Neither of us has that in him.”
He was right. Damnit, I was right. My head started to hurt.
“In two days time, Penelope will be back, and if she finds you here, finds us like this, she’ll tell someone. I love her, but that woman couldn’t keep her mouth shut if she were under ten feet of water.”
“In two days time, I won’t be here. I’ll disappear. Look, I know we can’t both be here right now. But I’m in no hurry to be. I’ll go, find somewhere out of the way to wait out the rest of your life. I’ll find an orphanage maybe, take a birth certificate from a stillborn and by the time you’re near death, I’ll be of legal age to inherit and then some. I’ll find you, you promise you’ll will your estate to me, and I’ll stay away until it’s time.”
I listened to what he was suggesting, but didn’t really have to. I’d been thinking the same thoughts myself, more or less.
“You’ll need money to get you started. And my passport. We can fashion you a more convincing face before you go.”
We stood staring at each other for a long time then, each alone with our own thoughts.
“We bloody well did it, didn’t we?” I broke the silence, barely holding back a grin.
“Of course we bloody did.” He put on his best approximation of a smile.
by submission | Mar 20, 2011 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
The sky is bright, not noonday bright but rather like the flickering of old fluorescent tubes. You can make out clouds against the light, a sort of dirty grey, but nothing beyond them. No stars any more.
Everyone’s panicking, and I’m not sure why I’m not. I’m just sat on the roof to watch the end. Nothing I can do now, really.
It’s strange how quick everything changed and the end came. This time last year we were happy and ignorant at the bottom of our gravity well, not knowing about the universe we lived in. Then, all of a sudden we detected signals from alien life forms. Not one, but multiple ones.
This provoked the panic you might expect, but not as much as what these aliens had to say.
See, when I said signals from alien life forms, I was trying to be precise. Not alien worlds, just their inhabitants, their refugees. Over the last few decades, their planets had been destroyed at an ever increasing pace. Only those with FTL drives had made it out as something ate up entire solar systems and replaced them with nothing. They pointed out their former worlds to us. Their stars still shone in our sky, as they had outpaced the light of their own destruction.
From all over the galaxy and beyond, we saw refugees, all heading towards Earth, for one simple and horrible reason: Whatever was happening was focused on us: the universe was a contracting sphere around our solar system, and eventually around our planet.
The strangest part was that one group of refugees claimed to know why. They were a technomystic sect from the opposite spiral arm to our own, and they claimed to have had a vision of the cause of all this.
It was a man called Ambrose Jones. He was born to middle class parents, had an unremarkable time at school, got a job as a supermarket manager, married a girl who grew up two streets away from him, and died twenty years ago of pancreatic cancer. One small, utterly unremarkable life.
According to the technomystics, whatever had created the universe created it to see this one life, and having seen it, they were shutting everything down.
The sun went last month. The hard radiation from its death would probably have killed us all, except that, as the whiteness took it over, the radiation went with it. At some level I think something wanted us around for the end.
The last cloud I could see just drifted upwards, hit the whiteness, and vanished. As I lie here and wait, something funny just crossed my mind.
Everything happened for a reason.
