by submission | Oct 12, 2010 | Story
Author : Rob Burton
More useful for sound deadening than reference, the books lining the office’s walls also symbolised the traditional values of the head of the firm. The junior partner privately referred to him as ‘Old Man’ Price.
‘You play computer games, don’t you, Simpson?’
‘Yes, sir. Mostly TIISR’s’ The word sounded like ‘teasers’, which struck Simpson as an odd thing to say to the Old Man.
‘Total immersion? Perfect. Done any research on these recent cases of,’ Mr Price peered through reading glasses at the screen before him, ‘autonomous NPC’s suing players?’
Simpson was fascinated, something the old man surely knew; Simpson’s company account was filled with related feeds. ‘Somewhat, Sir.’
‘You are aware of the Dezmond Psyke case?’
Simpson nodded.
‘Why doesn’t this come up every time they die, Simpson?’
‘This information is available online, Sir…’
‘I’d rather someone explained it to me in the real world, Simpson. Call me old-fashioned.’
‘Very well. Under normal circumstances, programs that run the non-player characters are given new roles when they’re killed. Providing it doesn’t occur in an overly abusive manner, they don’t see this as a bad thing. Some even commit suicide when they’re bored. However, permanent physical disability is different. Especially when they’re subject to a non-suicide clause.’
‘I see. So they have to put up with it when some careless player breaks their virtual spine. This must have happened before. The Turing precedents are, what, eight years old now?’
‘Companies have settled out of court in five similar cases, getting the writers and programmers to either come up with excuses as to why their characters got better, or compensate them in other ways – increased powers, special vehicles, that kind of thing.’
‘Why can’t that be done in this case?’
‘Well, he…’
‘He?’
‘Yes sir, he prefers the male archetypes.’
‘Go on.’
‘He was unlucky enough to be fairly high-profile in a realistic realm with tight continuity. Plus, it seems to be a point of principle. It’s the way he was programmed.’
‘They can’t change that?’
‘Violation of personal autonomy rights, established in Apple vs. Drunkchamp, 2046.’
The Old Man sat back and steepled his fingers in a way Simpson found particularly patronising. ‘Do you know who our client is?’
‘Yes Sir.’ Simpson had to force himself to avoid rolling his eyes. In his opinion the Royal Family was an institution so clearly out of date it should only be remembered in the Old Man’s books. He couldn’t imagine how such outdated inequalities and prejudices had survived so long. The other Senior Partner, Scruple (now long dead), had never courted such clients.
‘Then you know how important it is that he not lose to some bundle of electrons.’ Price frowned, ‘No offence.’
‘Perhaps a little more than a bunch of electrons, sir.’
Old Man Price raised one eyebrow. ‘Well, I’m assigning you the case, so that’s something you may have to deal with.’
‘Sir, I should warn you, I have a personal involvement that may conflict with the firm’s position.’
The Old Man sighed and removed his glasses. ‘I made you a Junior Partner because I knew you were professional enough not to let your personal feelings get in the way of giving the best possible defence to those who require it.’
Simpson gritted his teeth and nodded. ‘I’ll try my best, Sir.’ He turned to leave.
‘Just one more thing, Simpson. Win this case, and it’ll be Price & Simpson at the top of our webpages.’
He nodded again, ‘just a bundle of electrons’. Price was right, Simpson was a professional.
by submission | Oct 11, 2010 | Story
Author : Thomas Keene
“Plip-plip!” beeped the lenses. Blue jumped up and ran to the bathroom to dry his hair, then stepped back into the living room and pressed his lenses to the bridge of his nose. Glowing green letters reading, “CONNECTING…” seemed to hover in the middle of the room for half a second.
“Blue! How was your day?” A few posters popped onto the walls, followed by a bed, a desk, a high-def console on the opposite wall slightly intersecting Blue’s musty couch. He waited for the rest of the room to load, and then Spaz appeared, lying lazily on her bed. She was wearing a more simple t-shirt today, plain and peach-colored.
“Alright, Spaz. You know, you should clean your room,” he said, squinting at the dirty laundry. “My console took a good fifteen seconds to load all your socks.”
They both laughed. “You’ve already been my boyfriend for a year, you should be used to this by now.”
“Yeah, well, I wanted to talk about that…”
Spaz jumped off of her bed and walked across the room to Blue. “Uh, ‘scuse me, closet.” She stepped around him, and walked through his couch and the wall. “We’ve gotta finish Quest of the Dragon-Tiger, Marissa wants to borrow it.”
Blue stared awkwardly at his dingy, peeling apartment wall. “Look, Spaz, I was wondering if, uh, you know, I could come visit you sometime.”
Spaz leaned out of the wall with a few games in her hand. “What?”
“You know, like in real life. In person.”
She laughed. “Now why would you want to do that? If you’d just quit being so cheap and bought some decent VR equipment, you wouldn’t have to. The new models are like you’re wearing nothing at all.”
She teased Blue with a quick kiss on the cheek before pushing right through him to sit down on her bed. He couldn’t feel it of course.
“But I just want it to feel real.”
“Ah, well, you could always go rent some time at a V-lounge.”
“No, Spaz! I mean really real. This whole time, we’ve never met each other. It feels so strange, but it’s like this relationship isn’t… I want us to have something that’s going to last, something more substantial.”
“What, you want us to have a kid?”
“No! I mean yes, but not now! I’m not like a seventy-something year old having a midlife crisis. I…”
“Okay, Blue. Spit it out. What do you want to tell me?”
He sighed as he felt his cheeks turn flush. “I… I was walking home through the rain today, and thought, ‘this is the most real thing that’s happened to me this week.’ It made me sad, I don’t want the cold and wet to feel more real than you.”
Spaz grinned, and leaned forward with interest. Her shirt had changed colors as they talked, it was red now. “Go on.”
“See, I haven’t bought a VR suit or new games because I’ve been saving up money for…” Blue took a small box out of his pocket. “See, I got you this…”
Blue knelt down so that he was at eye level with Spaz, and opened the box.
“Blue, is that… gzz… you… bzz… ring…”
Spaz froze, purple and yellow cubes popped in the air around her. Socks started jumping around. Then everything in the room disappeared, and “CONNECTION LOST” flashed in front of Spaz’s eyes in foot-tall green letters.
“Dammit!”
by submission | Oct 10, 2010 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
Two people sat in the observation room, side by side, their fingers intertwined.
From behind a two-way mirror my associate Maria and I watched the man and the woman. We were sociologists and, recently, biological partners intent on parenting a child. The man and the woman in the observation room were there because together they’d exhibited unusual behavior, and confused authorities had thought our expertise might shed some light.
One of the subjects Maria and I studied were memes, cultural ideas that propagate through behavior and media. Since the spread of the anti-meme six decades ago this study was a lost art. The anti-meme was an overarching idea which blocked the ability, in those infected, to absorb other infective ideas.
So we lived in a rational world. Gone were the reactionaries, the revolutionaries, the radicals who passed sometimes violent and cataclysmic ideas to others, and acted upon them. We held logical and reasonable political discourse, worshipped without dogma, and raised our children in a civilization gone quiet with stability and measured growth. Advertising was dead, popular music was no longer popular nor galvanizing, and we dressed according to our environmental needs.
Maria and I sat watching the man and woman. The room was quiet, environmental controls sighed, the microphones in the observation room relayed no talk between the two. They sat there only gazing at one another, holding hands. Maria and I spoke about our attempts to reproduce, and quietly agreed to organize our schedules to increase our couplings and the likelihood of success, when we noticed a change in the observation room.
The man moved his arm to the back of the chair the woman sat in, and then up along her shoulders and over her arm. The woman slumped to the side of the man, her head tipped forward, and their foreheads met and touched. The man released the woman’s hand and moved his other hand to her face, cupped the side of her neck and jaw, brought his face up and his lips to hers, and they kissed.
“I love you,” the man said. “I love you,” the woman said, looking into the man’s eyes.
I looked at Maria, she at me. This was the behavior we were looking for but it no longer mattered. Maria’s eyes sparkled, her skin glowed, and I wanted to have children with her. I wanted to put my arms around her, to hold her to me and to not let go. I knew then that she was my life, she was my world. She smiled and I knew it was so for her, too.
If love is an idea, then let the idea spread. Let the whole world be engulfed in this fashion, this passion, in all things.
by submission | Oct 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Adena Brons
The sign at the border assured them that the wait would be “no time at all.”
Literal, but misleading. Garam looked at the lines of chronocars in front of them. They were so far back; he couldn’t even see the gate. With a word to Sarah, he stepped out of the car and strolled up the lane marked 1300-1400AD. He passed a couple vans pulling horse trailers – Reenactors. It was a popular holiday among those with a passion for the Middle Ages to pop down for a weekend tournament and be back in the office on Monday. Someone that dedicated would have a Timepass and be able to use the express lane. There was the odd run down car, overloaded with hippie kids, who smoked tobacco and talked about living off the land. They probably didn’t even have their immunizations. But most of the cars were people like him and Sarah, lower middle class, with enough money for a lower middle chronocar and a streak of independence that would lead them to another time.
It was incredible, he thought, looking around the enormous time crossing, how much had been accomplished in the last fifty years. Time travel had been invented nearly a century before, but had first been reserved for governments, meaning armies, and had only slowly filtered down for use by the general public. The Public Release, 47 years ago, had created a wave of emigration as other times were suddenly opened to those seeking other lives
“Word is,” he said, returning to Sarah, “it’s a middling century. There’s a fair bit of room coz of the plague but there’s no one outgoing so they can’t go crazy letting people in. I think we’ve got a good chance. A few Reenactors in our line and they’re only weekenders and won’t cause us trouble.”
She leaned over and kissed him. “We’ll get through. We have our visas and you have that certificate from the college. They can’t turn us away.”
He returned the kiss, “Then a real life with the sky overhead and children underfoot.”
“Children?” Sarah asked, giggling.
“Children,” he said firmly, pulling her closer.
“Here? Now?”
“Dim the windows. No one will see.”
They tumbled into the backseat as the windows went black.
In what would have been forty-five days if they weren’t stuck in line in a timeless other dimension, Sarah and Garam reached the border guard.
“Destination?” he asked, as he scanned their passports.
“Sussex,” Garam answered, trying not to sound too nervous or too hasty. From the look Sarah gave him, he wasn’t succeeding.
“Can I see your chrono-adaptor for the car?”
Garam hurriedly rooted around in the glovebox for their insurance certificate. He handed it to the guard, who laboriously pecked at the keyboard.
“Adapts to: …One Horse and Wagon. Seems to be in order sir,” he said as he handed it back. “When you depart the border zone, please inset these coordinates into your chronocar’s positioning system. I’m sending you to August 26th, 1314. Local time 06:24. Enjoy your stay.”
A machine spat out a card with the coordinates on it and the guard passed it to Garam through the window.
“Yes sir. Thank you!” Garam said, rolling up the window. He gave the card to Sarah and slowly rolled out of the gate. There was a parking lot beyond the border crossing, where he pulled over and crushed Sarah in a bear hug.
“We made it! We’re through!”
Sarah grinned shyly as she whispered, “All three of us.”
by Patricia Stewart | Oct 8, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“Cledus, why is the porch door open?” bellowed a heavy set woman wielding a flour covered rolling pin. “You’re lettin’ the flies in.”
“Relax, Thelma. I just put Duke out, and I didn’t want to git up to let’m back in. Now, hush-up, Junior is fixin’ to pass Kyle.”
As his wife headed back toward the kitchen, Cletus hear a soft voice from the other side of the sofa “Greetings, earthman,” it said.
Startled, Cledus turned toward the empty cushion and exclaimed “Who the hell said that?”
A second later, a miniature spaceman materialized next to the “I heart Elvis” throw pillow. “Sorry, earthman, I had forgotten that I was cloaked. I hope I didn’t cause you any distress.”
Cledus stared at the two foot tall alien wearing a shiny metallic spacesuit, and then glanced at the six empty beer bottles toppled over on the coffee table. “Damn, I must be hearin’ and seein’ things,” he said. “I have to start cuttin’ back,” he added as he finished off the seventh bottle and turned back toward the TV, “…tomorrow.”
“Excuse me, sir, but I could really use your assistance.”
Cledus rubbed his eyes and looked at the alien again. “Shoot, it’s real. What the hell do you want?”
“It seems that my spaceship sank in a swampy bog a few miles from here. I was hoping that you could use your tractor to tow it to dry land. I’d greatly appreciate it.”
Never one to pass up a potential opportunity, “What’s in it fer me?” asked Cledus with some degree of anticipation.
“What would you like?” inquired the little alien. “I can provide substantial compensation.”
“Kin you build me a contraption that will turn water into beer?”
“If that’s what you desire, consider it done.”
“Cledus,” yelled Thelma from the kitchen, “who y’all talkin’ to?”
“Quick,” whispered Cledus, “disappear until I gits rid of the misses.”
The alien disappeared and Cledus reached for another beer. “Uh, oh, no one sweetie. Just watchin’ the 500. Must have been a commercial.”
Thelma scowled as she approached her lying husband. “Don’t lie to me, you lying buzzard,” she threatened. “I know you’re up to somethin’.” Then she plopped down onto the empty side of the sofa.
“Aaagggghhh,” screamed Cledus as he jumped up and started pulling on her arm. “Git up you ornery cuss. If you squished him, I’ll…”
“Squish who?” asked the confused Thelma as Cledus finally managed to get her upright.
He scrambled past her and started feeling around the cushions looking for the flattened alien. “Don’t you never mind,” he snapped. “Now, git back to the kitchen and make my supper. And be fast about it. I’m gittin’ hungry.”
“Well, you’re just a dang fool,” replied Thelma as she indignantly hoofed off toward the kitchen. “I should have listened to mamma when she warned me… Now what’s goin’ on out there,” she said as she paused at the open front door. “It looks like, Beau and Duke are havin’ a tug-o-war with a ‘possum covered in tin foil.” As she watched the two animals rip the small creature apart, she suddenly realized what they had done. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “This is awful, Cledus, them dumb dawgs just stole the neighbor’s dinner right off the grill.”
