by Duncan Shields | Jul 12, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s one of those moments everyone dreads. You’re standing in front of an observation window looking out at open space and you see a crack silently trace its way up from the corner and across the glass.
Once when I was seven, I stayed with my mom on an Earth farm during the winter. The snow was deep and the air was cold. There was a small pond on the property that froze over in the winter.
I walked up to the pond and out across the ice. I was nearly at the center when I felt the ice crack. It was a crack I felt in my bowels, in my bones, in the very bottom of my soul. It wasn’t so much a sound as it was a muffled concussive force from beneath my feet. It became the subterranean creak of a door. I could feel very, very subtle changes in balance starting to fire up inside me as the vector of the surface I was standing on started to change.
I looked at the shore and in the clear cold air of winter panic, I calculated how long I had to get to the bank of the pond divided by how fast the ice was breaking and came up with a totally unknown quantity.
The spell broke and I dashed back to the shore. I never fell through the ice. If I had been older and heavier I never would have stepped through the ice on the shallow shore on my first step. If I was younger and lighter, I would have been safe on the ice.
I’m remembering that moment now looking at the flaw in the monocrystal of the spaceviewing window in front of me. It’s creaking its way across the glass with questing fingers that look like crystal tree branches growing in stuttering time lapse.
With a sharp intake of breath, I run. The alarm sounds on my first step towards the deck doors. I know the emergency shutter seals are going to come crashing down the millisecond they detect a drop in pressure.
I’m screaming like I didn’t know I could as I leap and dive through the doors into the hallway. The blast door comes down suddenly to cut off the doorway. There is a moment of silence. A second later, the blast door stiffens with a bang as the window on the other side blows out.
This is an old ship. I’m gasping and crying as I get to my feet and the emergency crews arrive. I swear if I see the engineer in next few hours, I won’t be legally responsible for the bodily harm I inflict on him. I cannot wait to dock and get off this ancient freighter.
by submission | Jul 11, 2010 | Story
Author : Thomas Desrochers
We’ve turned into such a peaceful race. We are so… So… Dull. We never fight any more, wars are a thing of the past. Even violent crime seems to have just disappeared. The typical city needs, maybe, one law enforcement officer per every million people.
Yes, violence has been replaced with communication, war with learning, militaries with space programs. Children listen and want to learn, science and math are favorites among them.
This is a problem. English and music have been usurped, and nobody cares about history any more. Culture is non-existent. Media is simply news. Radio is just an information exchange system. There is no music any more, except for what people play in their suits, and even then it’s mindless three- and four-note “techno,” a mockery of the music it was derived from.
I am not alone in my thoughts. There are others who agree with me – very few, but they are there. There’s Andrew, he writes music. He’s the only one out of all humanity who still does. Then there’s his wife, Anne. She paints. Her friend, Eilene, also paints. The three of them live together on The Subcontinent. I live on the west part of Continent B, with Marcus, Dominic, and Sheila. Marcus likes to work clay, Dominic makes sculptures. Sheila and I are just along for the ride.
See, none of us can get any inspiration from the blandness around us. There is no nature anymore, it was wiped out long ago in the name of humanity. The oceans are tamed, the weather under our control and as magical as a door. So we get our inspiration from people. We get people to show real, genuine emotion.
It’s very easy to draw them out of all that contrived peacefulness. After all, their suits connect directly to their brains. With some simple hacking we have direct control of their thoughts, emotions, and senses – most of which we don’t even need.
Our latest kill was a wonderful example of how we work. It was a young girl named Ana near here who is much like all of her peers, striving to excel in mathematics and science, her suit doing its job and regulating hormones quite well. The seven of us, myself, Marcus, Andrew, we all connect our systems together. Then Marcus sends out a feeler to make contact with the girl’s system.
Once we have a connection the seven of us mentally destroy her firewalls and silence any warning systems, in the space of about a second. Then we start pumping her full of hormones, and she very quickly becomes unstable. After that it’s simple. We just plant thoughts that she wouldn’t normally think, and she thinks she’s the one thinking them. Before long Ana decides she shouldn’t be alive any more.
Ana was quite creative. Instead of the usual “Jumping off a building” or “Forcing suit shutdown” she opened up a transformer and shoved her head inside it.
And God, that was so good, feeling the abrupt end when she did it. Andrew wrote a symphony that night, Dominic matched DaVinci – It was a wonderful night for their creativity.
And me? I rode that lovely buzz and philosophized. I thought about Secular Humanism that night, pondered the idea that all people are fundamentally good. I don’t believe it. If people were good they would have let the violence continue.
Luckily for them there’s still a few of us right-minded people left.
God, I do love that rush.
by submission | Jul 10, 2010 | Story
Author : Waldo van der Waal
Nobody warned me about the pain. Creeping from your brain and slowly extending to every bloody nerve-ending. Hot acid makes way for molten lava before the really hot stuff arrives. A million tiny needles prod at every part of your body. From the inside outwards and from the outside in, right into each atom that makes you what you are. Feeble movements of your fingertips are as much as you can muster. There’s nothing to do but scream until your throat bleeds. Nothing to do but wait. Nobody warned me about the pain.
They didn’t warn me because they probably didn’t know. Not at the time, anyway. Back then it was all smiles and champagne and fancy pens to sign the contract. Their office looked like the Ritz and their salesman – his name escapes me while I scream some more – their saleman was glib and self-assured and just a little cocky. And I fell for it. I took the diamond-encrusted Waterman and signed on the dotten line. And I gave them access to my First Bank of the Confederation account. It all sounded to good to be true. But their scientists must’ve known. Maybe they even knew themselves.
Things actually started going wrong some 872 years ago. That’s when I pinged the numbers in the Quadrant Lottomax – the only winner out of nearly 12 billion entires. What are the chances? It was a rollover, and I didn’t get rich from it. I got mind bogglingly, stupidly, richer-than-Zaphod-himself rich. Started snorting caviar because I could. Used chapmagne to brush my teeth. Bought anything I could see, including Pluto. And had a lot of money left over.
The only thing that was running out for me was time. I was 88 when the last lotto ball fell into place, matching my numbers. I aged considerably when I saw the result, sure, but realistically closing time was, uh, closing in on me. So I found a public terminal and did a bit of searching. Found the guys with the Ritz office and the fancy pens, who said they could make me live forever. They had tested it on rats and pigs and it worked.
So I climbed into the dewar they prepared – didn’t even wait to die. They said if I waited, I might be too far from their facility when the time came. So I went willingly while they pumped my body full of stuff. Cold stuff. I don’t remember dying, but my mind didn’t switch off completely. Blackness, but with peripheral dreams, if that makes sense. Lots of it.
I don’t know how much time passed, but it was a stack. Then, last week I became aware of the pain. My eyes started focussing and I saw a note pasted to the faceplate of my dewar. “Cryogenic reversal starting. Good luck.” Good luck? Then came the torture. Even through the thick sides of my casket, I can hear other screams. I hear more and more of them every day, but I haven’t heard one of them stop yet.
Needles filled with poison assault me constantly. They tested it, they had said. It worked, they had said. But surely they must have known. And not one of the bastards told me about the fucking pain.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Walter had felt cold before, but nothing like this. In the hours since sundown the temperature had dropped steadily, but in the last hundred yards it had been dropping twice as fast.
He had to find shelter quickly or risk freezing to death.
Cresting a small hill, Walter came upon a door stuck as if by accident in the side of a tall snow drift. A smooth metal oval was clearly cut into the side of a wall buried in the ice. Walter, too cold and desperate to be cautious simply pushed on it, and when it retracted out of his way, he fell in a heap to the floor inside.
Walter struggled to regain his footing, and with difficulty managed to stand. Turning, he realized the oval shape had closed behind him, sealing him off from the cold and the wind outside.
Before him a round tunnel stretched away, smooth walled and featureless.
Walter cleared his throat noisily and was startled by a voice.
“Come, come, bring it to us please.”
The sound was nothing if not unnerving.
Realizing there was nowhere to go but on, he walked slowly down the passageway until it emptied out into a large squashed spherical chamber. This space, unlike the stark emptiness of the hall was filled with clutter. Quilts of earth toned fabric hung in sheets from the walls and ceiling, thrown over climbing rope that was looped through pitons hammered haphazardly around the room. Carefully sorted piles of canned goods, glass and other equipment decorated the floor. In the shadows of the perimeter he could make out what looked like long bolts of cotton.
Something moved, and Walter’s attention snapped to it, heart pounding.
“Warm, warm, it comes to us warm.”
The speaking shape resolved into that of an old woman, only the sagging skin of her head and hands were visible from a cavernous patchwork gown. Her hair was filthy and drawn back in a long ponytail, her forehead expansive above brow-less eyes.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Walter spoke slowly, “but it’s bloody cold outside and I was afraid I might freeze to death.”
The strange woman tugged at her forearms through her sleeves, the skin of her hands pulling taught and then falling slack again as she let go.
“Cold outside, cold inside, we takes the heat from where we can, far away and far below,” the woman smiled, her mouth a black toothless gash in her face, “we’re so happy you’ve come.”
Walter felt his stomach turn, empty though it was.
Walter began to back towards the mouth of the tunnel as the woman dropped her arms to her sides. One of her hands fell away, and Walter realized they weren’t hands, but rather gloves made of skin. Turning to run, he tripped over one of the bundles on the floor, falling hard and hearing the sound of breaking bone. When pain didn’t follow, he looked to see broken bone protruding not from his leg, but from the white mass on the floor.
“All the warm stays with us.” Walter whipped around to find the creature standing over him, the braided wig slipped sideways now at an impossible angle. The face was that of a woman, but pulled over something else as a mask. It moved impossibly fast as he tried to scramble for the tunnel, the arms clamped onto him, pulling him toward it. He screamed as it reared up on it’s hind six legs and spun him round and round into a long bundle of sticky silk. By the time it bound his face, his voice had left him.
Walter could feel it drop him and skitter away across the floor. He only hoped he could freeze to death before it got hungry.
by submission | Jul 8, 2010 | Story
Author : John Logan
At 34 years old, I was in bad shape. Sixty pounds over weight and wheezing like a dying man every time I trudged up a flight of stairs. The cigarettes didn’t help. My wife, Claire, constantly nagged at me to stop. She hated the smell. I also drank heavily. I’d abused my body. I was a wreck, a biological time bomb just waiting to explode. The day of reckoning finally arrived when I dropped off Claire at her office and moments later was clutching my chest while trying to breath through the intense pain.
Somehow I survived the ordeal. Angina they told me. After recovering, my physician insisted I visit one of the New Life clinics. I took his advice and ignored the financial grumblings of my wife. That’s when my life changed drastically.
I’d always been skeptical of their ads. “Take back your life, you deserve it!” said their slogan. They promised a total body transformation. And what did I have to do? Nothing. The tech at the clinic went through the details with me, I signed the papers and the next day lumbered into their lab room where a slab of metal awaited. Next to it, a man laid completely naked and deep in slumber.
“That him?” I asked.
“Yup, your trainer, Mike, he’s the best,” said the tech. “He’ll take over your body and get you into top shape. You’ll feel like a new man, mark my words.”
He was a fine specimen, rippling torso and bulging biceps.
I mimicked Mike’s posture and lay down on my own slab while feeling self-conscious of the rolls of fat that wobbled over my unseemly gait.
“See you in six months,” said the tech and smiled.
Syringes filled with colored liquid descended and the world turned dark.
#
I woke.
A voice beckoned me to sit up. I hunched my shoulders, expecting old pains to return. None came. My abdomen felt taut and strong as I sat up effortlessly. The room was a touch cold and for the first time I looked down at the gooseflesh skin covering my biceps. They were thick, powerful and vascular, like they’d been when I was an athlete in my teens. My breathing was steady, my mood pleasantly euphoric.
“Bad news I’m afraid,” said the tech who appraised me with a furrowed brow.
I shifted from the slab, marveling at how fluid my body moved, how light I felt with each step. “Bad news?” I laughed. “But I feel fantastic!”
The grave expression the tech returned cut short my pleasant mood. “What happened?” I asked. A feeling of apprehension began to worm its way under my skin.
“It concerns your wife.”
“Is she ok?”
The tech paused. “I’m afraid she committed suicide last night.”
“What?” I shouted and swayed slightly as though slapped in the face. “How?”
“Mike, your trainer, evaluated your lifestyle and determined that your wife was the main factor in your poor health. Five months ago, he divorced her.”
“What the hell?” I shouted louder. I heard my knuckles crack. “You can’t do that.”
The tech looked apologetic. “It’s in the contract,” he said then sighed. “Look, for what it’s worth I’m sorry for your loss but just look at you now. Mike made you his masterpiece.”
He gestured to a mirror. I turned and stared in amazement. Mike really had turned me around. “I suppose it is time to move on,” I said and my thoughts drifted to a cute twenty-something I’d had my eye on at work but never had the confidence to approach, until now.
