by submission | Mar 19, 2011 | Story
Author : John Wallace
The subtle, pulsing “bing” alert of an unread MindMessage — MM for short — punctuated the Jazz-Trance track she was listening to through her MindTunes channel stream. She switched to the chatView window on her interface, minimizing the music to the back of her mind.
“What u doin’ babe?” The message blinked until she read it and minimized their chat log.
She patted the soil above the seeds and wiped dirt on her dress. She sent him an eyeView link to show him the neatly packed dirt in the beige ceramic pot with the hairline crack that she’d picked up at an estate sale in her mother’s neighborhood.
“What do u think, hun?” she MMed, proudly carrying the pot into the house where she set it on an appliance.
“Looks dirty. Feelin’ dirty?” he asked lazily. He lay on their bed, dreamily sleepWatching tele-streams.
“Dirty look,” she replied.
“Come 2 bed. I wanna (.)(.) u,” he MMed.
She sighed and rolled her eyes to the right, inadvertently logging off the MindLink server. She blinked rapidly and looked left, accessing the login screen, and entered her saccade passpattern. After IntelLaunching chatView, she MMed: “I’m doin’ stuff, dude. 1 sec.”
She uploaded the seeds’ grow-codes to the appliance and sent it the thought+controls “water” & “light.” The appliance wet the illuminated soil with H2O+.
He MMed a flirticon with a suggestive eyeView link.
She giggled. “Can’t. I’m makin’ ur dinner.”
“Whatjamakin’?”
“Iamakin’ pasta.” She put dried linguine into a steam drawer in the appliance. “Wanna help? U can watch the plant grow.”
“hahaha. I’m fine thanks. Watch me grow?”
“L8er, perv.”
“Ur 2 pure :p”
He opened his eyeView and sat up. “Eat please? :^D~ So hungry!” He rose from the bed and stretched.
“In a sec.”
She sent another eyeView link when the noodles were done and held up the bowl to show off her accomplishment. “Voyez ceci!” she exclaimed.
“È ‘presto’, actually,” he replied after searching the translation. “Quando servite il linguine,” he added immodestly as he silently entered the room behind her.
“Dirt looks good,” he MMed and then softly touched her neck. Startled, she hit him with her elbow and nearly dropped the noodles.
“It’s real basil 4 pesto, sneaky,” she MMed, leaning back against him.
“Yum. Xcited,” he MMed. “I’ve never had basil b4.”
Her reply was lost when the MindLink server crashed abruptly for the third time that week. They blinked and looked left repeatedly, trying to log on. They squinted as their eyes adjusted to the unfiltered light of the everyday world.
“Stupid MindLink,” he spoke. “We’re switching servers. I’m sick of these dropouts.”
She nodded, pulling his arms around her. They watched the motionless soil intently.
“How long’s it take?” he asked, pointing at the pot.
“Dunno,” she replied. “Forever. It’s been like five minutes.”
by submission | Mar 18, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
This is how it ends.
I turn the corner with coffees for us and everything, everything, is on the front yard. I don’t know how she did it (I wasn’t gone long) or how she did it (I thought she loved me). My eyes race over it all and stop at the porch, at her standing there.
I had never dated outside of the Vim Catal and never thought I would. This girl, this Earth girl, convinced me it could work. Her people seemed to see the value of objects as we did; she did not seem to be an exception.
No appreciator of things could throw a complete set of Dorbid Melume’s vidis onto a front yard, a place where they could not hope to avoid scratches, or complete disruption from their proximity to the equally cast out vintage Wultonizers even now sending up a small shower of sparks as they spill out of their encasing Braxe fields.
How could I gather her up in all of my arms after this? How would I feel holding the woman who carelessly scattered my many signed hololids, objects expressive of my earliest attempts at discernment and preservation? How could I forget that in my arms I held the one responsible for the degradation of the only existing near mint copy of Uttie’s “If Space Be My Home” to merely good? Wouldn’t I be haunted in such a moment by images of a rare bust of Prialc, Space Emperor for twenty seven seconds, sinking into the fertile soil of our Ohio?
Perhps I am not meant to hold her again. Her eyes are as steely as Yorka Tleuz’s on the cover of the inaugural issue of ReWtIk, likewise facing me as its spine bends to cracking while I look up and away from it. The sky is dark, very dark. There is, as the Earthers say, a strong chance of showers. This can only be intentional. Can this be a test? It looks like a goodbye, a goodbye with teeth, and not the little things the humans call teeth.
She was the one to draw me in. Her dwelling had copious amounts of unused space, I liked that about her. Her muted interest in collecting was not so strong as to interfere with my own, also a plus. All about her person hung the most pronounced loveliness, this likely sealing the deal. Many times she questioned her own beauty, doubting it for some unknown reason. It was difficult, in these times, to not bring up the general aesthetic shortcomings of humans as a whole.
Rain drops strike my top tuft. A decision is required. I take it all in with a deep breath of Ohio air. I take it all in and hold it, inscribing a full sense memory. Only when the completed nub drops into my back pouch do I act. I reach down with my non-coffee holding middle arms and stretch out the atavistic gliding membrane unique to my federated clan. The winds of the advancing storm carry me onto the porch. Her expression changes. Either she sees that there is so much more to me or she really wants the coffee I hold out to her, still steaming.
I can’t know what’s behind her eyes as I can the tears out front. I reply in kind. She grabs one of my elbows and pulls me into the house with her; it looks to be one hell of a storm. I pull the door closed behind us.
This is how it begins.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 17, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
He reeled out of the stinking alley into me.
He was nearly eight feet tall and looked too skinny to stand. His hair was several different colours but as I looked at it more closely, it appeared to be made of metal. It sparked just after he bumped into me and the colours in it shimmered and changed like the wings of a beetle.
I was fixated on that until I noticed his two extra arms and his tail. I say ‘his’ because his genitals were exposed. He was wearing what appeared to be tight chaps and a red cellophane cardigan.
If he hadn’t been staring into my eyes and grabbing my shoulders, I would have backed quickly away from him like everyone else on the sidewalk did.
“Pour gras que serachi marta kursk trench ma jakatra, triestin?” he screamed at me. He looked at me, waiting for an answer.
“Uh, what?” I said.
“Oh. I see. English. Okay. What day is it?” he said to me. His breath smelled like over-ripe strawberries.
“Uh, Wednesday?” I answered.
He looked at me with that expression like he didn’t understand my language again. He looked at a device on his wrist. I guessed it was a translator. He acted like it was broken. He spoke again, louder and more slowly this time,
“What day is it? Centrus? Martus?” he said.
“Wednesday.” I said back to him.
He shook his head and looked behind him into the alley. There were sounds of a struggle and some impossible sound. If I had to describe it, it was like a sheet of glass being ripped in half. It sounded like something pivotal to reality was being split by force.
“What the DATE, then? The DATE? It’s supposed to be the 46th! Is that correct?” he yelled.
“46th? That’s not….it’s the 13th. March the 13th.” I answered.
“Maaaaaarch” he said and looked at me as if to confirm that he’d pronounced it correctly. I nodded. He looked at his wrist translator in terrified frustration. I realized that his eyes were different colours and that they never blinked at the same time. First one, then the other. Every time.
“Posska DAMMIT!” he yelled and let me go. He seemed to realize that even though I’d spoken to him in the correct language, my information was useless to him.
It was like he was a time-traveler except his frame of reference was useless at his destination.
There was a blue glow from the alley. The traveler tucked in all four of his arms and ducked into the crowd. It didn’t help.
Tentacles shot out of the alley and entered the traveller’s back. He was dragged back to the alley’s entrance. He spread his arms wide and grabbed the bricks on either side of the entrance with his impossibly long arms, forming a giant X. He looked at me with clenched teeth. His watch device broke and fell off his wrist. He glanced at it and nodded towards me.
“Remember-” he said but a charge of energy came through the tentacles and he shuddered. He was lifted into the air for a moment before disappearing quickly into the shadows of the alley.
There was the sound of thunder and then a sound of reality zipping itself up.
People around me kept on walking. I lay on the sidewalk looking at the entrance of the alley. I looked at the wrist device the traveler had dropped. I scuttled forward, picked it up and brought it home.
I’m looking at it right now, daring myself to try it on.
by submission | Mar 16, 2011 | Story
Author : Jordan Whicker
We’d been asking the wrong question all along.
It was first posed by some fringe intellectuals: “Do they feel pain?” Initial research showed that yes, stimuli that might be regarded as ‘painful’ would invoke any number of reactions that could be described as self-preservatory. The breadth of these reactions even raised some eyebrows in the academic world and garnered one or two op-ed pieces in some of the more liberal media outlets. Aside from the canonically expected mechanisms like flinching and defensive posturing, a whole subset of pheromonic and what could only be described as supra-neural – neural firings that existed within the organism but at the same time beyond it – illustrated the very depths of our ignorance on this particular topic.
Research continued at a snail’s pace after that point, funded mainly by the type of eccentrics who were likely to have read past the headline of the spattering of articles that actually made it to print. Yellow donate buttons nestled into homepage corners and direct appeals from a plethora of sites that together didn’t garnish one-thousandth the traffic of a celebrity gossip blog represented humanity’s devotion to the fledgling field. Not that this matters, necessarily, as even if we reallocated the entire budget of the Department of Defense and conscripted every biologist, chemist and physicist in the country would we have begun to ask the right question in time. A question that after the fact seems as clear as day and even easier to answer: “Do they feel anger?”
Yes, they do. We know that now.
For many thousands of years we have fine tuned our dominance over the beasts of the earth. Cows bred too fat and too apathetic to move at more than a trot. Pigs confined to one room prisons, their madness and that of those around them the only available distraction. Chickens that reach slaughtering weight before they have time to grow bored of their confinements. Although numerous, none of them ever posed us a threat.
We slipped, though. Let them into our neighborhoods, cultivated them in our parks and around our schools. Along our highways and surrounding our airports. There is nowhere safe left – nor was there anywhere that ever really was.
We all remember the morning that the trees awoke. Those few of us that still live, at least.
by Patricia Stewart | Mar 15, 2011 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Lieutenant Robinson studied the sensor readings. The Captain stood behind him, patiently waiting for his science officer’s technical assessment. “It’s clearly artificial, sir,” Robinson finally said. “Although its surface composition is consistent with an S-type asteroid, its structure is completely different from the other asteroids in this field. For example, gravimetric data indicates that its density is 70% lower than it should be, and an asteroid with a mass under a trillion kilograms should be potato-shaped. It should not be perfectly spherical.”
“Your recommendation, Lieutenant?” prompted the Captain.
“We need to know what the inside looks like. I recommend we deploy seismic probes with ground penetrating imaging systems.”
Two hours later, they were looking at an intricate 3-D holographic image of the subsurface structure of the anomaly. There were 720 geometrically identically subsurface chambers that were uniformly distributed just below the exterior of the asteroid. Each chamber contained an irregularly shaped object of silicaceous material with a mass of approximately three metric tons each. Beneath the 720 outer chambers, there were additional, larger subchambers, but there was insufficient resolution in the data to determine the contents, or nature, of those chambers.
“Captain,” said the ensign manning the science station, “I’m detecting an increase in seismic activity within the asteroid. There are hundreds of low magnitude earthquakes, I mean asteroidquakes. It appears that the surface of the asteroid is crumbling.”
“Put it on the main viewer, magnification fifty,” ordered the captain. As he studied the viewscreen, the surface of the asteroid blasted away and a coma of dust expanded outward in slow motion. Then hundreds of shuttlecraft-sized rocks flew from the asteroid in random, erratic, corkscrewing trajectories. Eventually, they all settled down, and began traveling in straight lines. A few seconds later, they increased speed, and flew off into the asteroid field with apparent purpose. A dozen of the flying “rocks,” which happened to be heading in the general direction of the ship, paused at a distance of approximately one hundred meters. They hovered like bees for a few minutes and then one by one, they detoured around the ship and headed off toward remote regions of the asteroid field.
