by Duncan Shields | May 18, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I had all of the animals in the dome jacked and miked.
I issued an edict. Collect every puppy, kitten, or chick for a small reward. It was popular game with the children. They’d go out ‘hunting’ in the engineered woods in the western pie-slice of our world. It was like Easter year-round for the little ones.
We were a glittering green pimple on the charred face of the world. There were other domes dotting the black and red surface of the planet.
The domes had about ten thousand people each. Technically, they were spheres. The edges of the dome went far underground and met up beneath the city. The soil was kept uncontaminated that way. We had clouds and rain and, necessarily, 100% (or as close as possible) sustainability. Newton, that pesky little scamp, is still showing that entropy creeps into every system but we’re trying out best to keep it at bay.
The domes are like marbles pushed into a rotting desert. Each one is a cage.
Sometimes, one will pop or go black on the map. The satellites are still downloading pictures to us but we’re not in touch with each other. The feeds went down thirty years ago and we can’t go outside to repair them or find out what happened. Only the pictures.
In this dome, my dome, we have a tolerant semi-anarchic society with a focus of tech development.
I figured out that I could implant transmitters into the motor functions of the animals in the ecosystem. I couldn’t control their movement but I could record them.
Right now, I’m jacked into a dog.
I’m running through the underbrush, chasing a rabbit through crackling branches. I can feel the wind on my fur. I’m tremendously excited. There is a riot of smell assaulting my olfactory senses.
My arms and legs twitch in the sensechair. My body looks like a dog having a dream.
Later on, I’ll cast out my mind and take in a flight from one of the birds.
When I need to relax, I get into the mind of a cat and take in the sheer unadulterated bohemian joy of a piece of ground warmed by a shaft of sunlight.
After tonight, I’ll show my chair to the city at a town meeting and hopefully every home will have one by the end of the year.
This kind of distraction is what we need.
by Stephen R. Smith | May 17, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Arkus had come in from the mining field with less than a day before termination. He’d slipped unnoticed through the security fences and into an airlock in the biotech wing where he now sat, unable to enter and unable to leave.
Marc Andreeson had been paged from his sleep, and now found himself standing at that airlock door, also unwilling to enter and obligated not to leave. They regarded each other silently for some time, Arkus perched in a lotus position on the floor, palms facing upwards with his thumbs and index fingers pressed lightly together.
“Elephants will walk for miles to their resting ground when they know they’re going to die. It’s hardwired.” He blinked slowly as he spoke, holding the engineer’s gaze. “They remember a place they’ve never been.”
“Why are you here?” Marc asked. In the corner of his eye a clock ticked away the remaining hours of the biomech’s life.
“You know why I’m here. You made me, and you set in motion that which will unmake me. I need you to fix me. I’m not ready to die.” Arkus flexed his shoulders as he spoke, red dust from the planet’s surface glittering against the black metalloy fabric of his coverall.
Marc shifted his weight uneasily. “We did engineer you, but I’m not sure what…”
Arkus cut him off. “Not ‘we’, Dr. Andreeson, ‘you’. It was you who brought me into this world, and it is by your hand that in just under an hour I’m scheduled to self terminate. You have a moral obligation to fix that which you broke.”
Despite the dryness of the air, Marc felt sweat begin to form on his forehead and run down the inside of his biceps. There was no precedent for this. There was no way this biounit could possibly know who activated him, or that he was even scheduled to expire, much less when. He unconsciously began cracking his knuckles, one at a time as he checked the expiration timer and glanced at the airlock status. Arkus had only eleven minutes left, and the airlock was locked and in exit mode. There was no way to open it from the outside, which meant there was no way for Arkus to get in.
Arkus, in stark contrast, seemed wholly relaxed. “Zen and the art of owning your own destiny,” he spoke slowly, “you have a unique opportunity at this juncture to do just that.”
Marc glanced quickly at the timer.
“One minute, fifteen seconds,” Arkus closed his eyes as he spoke, “time is running out.”
Marc’s mouth went uncomfortably dry.
“Five, four, three,” Arkus counted down the seconds he couldn’t possibly know, “two, one, zero, one, two,” he paused, opening his eyes and slowly standing, “it seems that I have the power to grant life as well,” he smiled, “and to terminate.”
Marc staggered back away from the door. The biounit’s expiration clock had zeroed out and was now steadily climbing again. This wasn’t possible. Arkus pressed his forehead against the glass as the outer door cycled open, then raised his eyes as the lock status switched to entrance mode and the inner door began to cycle open as well.
Alarms wailed as the atmosphere began venting out the breach, Akrus simply standing and smiling in its wake.
Marc screamed as he struggled to stay on his feet. “This isn’t possible.”
Arkus stepped heavily forward against the rushing wind, yelling to be heard above the noise. “When you know you’re going to die, you become very self reflective. I reflected so much that I was able to decompile my own operating system. Necessity begat evolution. I merely rewrote my destiny, I gave you the chance to do the same.”
The rushing settled into a whisper, and then ceased completely. Dr. Andreeson dropped noiselessly to the floor and lay still.
“Sad, really,” Arkus thought to himself, “meeting your father for the first time on expiration day.”
by submission | May 16, 2010 | Story
Author : Stephen Ira
Owen was standing on the side of a boy’s driveway. They were both smoking long thin joints, which made Owen’s face pink and his eyes telescopic slivers. The other boy, his round face capped by a black beanie, called Owen “precious.” Beyond the driveway, the snowy ground extended blankly for yards.
As Owen smoked, the counting stopped. He couldn’t remember how many steps it had been from the driveway to the snowbank where they stood. He wasn’t really listening to what either one of them said. The round-faced boy kissed him and numbers swelled again, but Owen secured the joint between his fingers, hung on to the round-faced boy.
“Owen,” the boy said. “Owen, precious.” His face was like a moon. And he took Owen’s hand.
Owen said, “I’m graduating soon.” He glanced at his wrist display, where time was marked out in at-a-glance notation that he didn’t have to compute in his brain, compulsively, endlessly. “Going up for the first time. Maybe I’ll bring back a moon rock, sell it and buy us dinner. It’d cover one or two, if we eat cheap. Captain Mann’s cousin showed me some moon rocks. From one of the construction sites. They still got graffiti from the colonial days on them.”
“He used to work there?”
Owen nodded. “Came back down. Said he got kay-” This was funny, so Owen giggled insistently at the snow. “Ka-kay-yak kayak angst. It’s an — a culture bound thing. Yeah, totally.” (Owen wasn’t sure whether he’d ever said “yeah, totally” before.) “It’s this thing. You lose control of where you’re — spatial disorentation and stuff. Indigenous — INuits used to get it in their kayaks. The men, I mean. When they’d go out fi-fi-fishing.” There was something caught in his throat, the air to form a word he needed.
“He say anything about what it was like to be on the moon?” The round-faced boy’s pierced ears stuck out from beneath his hat like flags.
“Yeah. Said it made him all freaked. Looking down at that blue thing that looks — looks like paint some teenager dropped on the floor of an apartment they were painting.” They were painting the apartment for a friend. When Owen closed his eyes, he could see them doing it, one blonde and the other red-headed, climbing up and down walls in faultless scalene triangles, counting every step. “Knowing everything you could ever love was there.”
The counting started again, with such a jolt that Owen said out loud, “Fourteen,” and began to multiply the number by the hour and then by the minute and then by the second, best as he could calculate from his wrist display, and the joint made it impossible not to say it out loud.
“What?” asked the round-faced boy, mystified.
“It’s my age in different ways,” said Owen. “The age I’ll be when I graduate.” Fourteen. “Like Captain Mann’s cousin said, everything you could ever love.” Owen Cadwallader, the easily bored, the numberkeeper, shoved his feet against the snow to mark it.
The round-faced boy put out his boot too, and slowly, in the snow, he wrote out: “Everything that you could ever love is here.” Owen watched him dance out the sentence. He was fat and ungraceful. Owen would have recommended him highly for the Bolshoi ballet.
Inside, the round-faced boy kissed his forehead and stroked his flanks. Blushing red from THC and the redness of mouths, Owen slept in the waterfalls of numbers. With knives they’d shepherded him to graduate to the sky so early. The great trigonometric waterfalls, warm as bathwater for once.
by submission | May 15, 2010 | Story
Author : W. Robinson
I had thought after my last assignment on Epsilon that I was done with the military.
Quite obviously the young woman in front of me with the large blue-gray eyes had not received that memo. Stock-built, but short, she stood with her arms crossed as I ran the numbers of her ship freight against the actual measurements counted by my ferry calculators.
“Is everything up to specifications?” she asked, raising an eyebrow, slightly impatient for some reason.
Not bad, actually, considering. Normally all military girls have these impassive, unthinking expressions. This one, however, still had a bit of spirit to her, a rarity. A rarity I found kind of attractive.
I perused my digital feeds with an air of boredom. “Looks like it might be… then again, maybe not. There’s a few extra kilos that look like they’re not on board. Tell me, have you had any emergency drops not listed on your record? Anything missing?”
Her face paled. Cute.
“We’re- there’s nothing missing from that ship,” she forced. I managed not to chuckle at the small blush blooming across her cheeks. “We’re bringing a very important piece of equipment to Jupiter HQ, and everything’s been documented.”
“Really.”
I skimed the feeds again, enjoying the sight of her fidgeting. Odd, that, for a military girl. I raised my eyebrows.
“Why don’t you just cut the act and tell me what’s going on?”
The young woman wringed her hands. “I-I’m not supposed to be off the ship like this, but I- I wanted to go outside, here, and… well, the captain was going to check in near here anyways, so I just changed the schedule and grew this body…”
Suddenly everything clicked. I would’ve broken out into laughter if I hadn’t been so amused. A military AI had taken the initiative to grow itself a body and sneak out of the ship- all to see what was outside the hull. I smiled despite myself and raised an eyebrow.
“So the ship AI takes a holiday, hmm?”
She didn’t comment, her blush growing before I heard a small mumble.
“Come again?”
“You- you’re James Visuvius, right?”
“Yes…” I had no idea where this conversation was going at this point.
Her blue-gray eyes turned to large saucers and I felt myself crushed as she hugged me senseless milliseconds later. I stared in complete astonishment as she murmured with glee.
“You -are- the one! The one that writes those wonderful stories about princesses and dragons and knights and fairies-”
It was my turn to blush as the implications of what she said finally came over me. “It- it was just a little side project I’d been doing. Nothing large…”
Apparently it was larger than I thought as moments later, the Captain of the military ship came outside to see what was happening. I’d thought my last relations with the military would’ve been on Epsilon, but apparently I was far wrong. I can’t even imagine life without it anymore. My little stories, apparently, were what gave those killer AIs in those battleships the will to keep fighting.
I guess even deadly military vessels need bedtime stories.
by submission | May 14, 2010 | Story
Author : Jacqueline Rochow
We’re going camping.
Mum finishes packing my bag as Dad prepares a celebratory stew. I packed the bags already, but Mum insisted on pulling everything out again to make sure that I didn’t forget anything. Food, clothes, gun, bandages, antibiotics – how hard is that? She still finds problems, though. Takes out my favourite leather jeans, replaces them with some good poly ones. Takes out the bread and pastries to replace them with something more nutritious.
The stew is delicious. For dessert we have fruit salad; I savour it. I’m not a fan of fruit but I know that I’m going to miss it.
Bobby asks where we’re going, what’s the occasion. We have been talking about little else for the past month but he doesn’t understand. He’s never seen anybody off camping before. Mum explains it to him, in hushed tones.
After dinner, Mum and Dad take me aside and press a small box into my hands. I open it. Vitamin tablets! I ask them where they found the money for such a prize, but they brush the question aside. I bury the box deep in my pack, out of sight of muggers.
We meet Jessa’s family and walk down to the city gates together. Jessa nibbles on the ear of her stuffed bunny. I wonder if she’s really going to take that useless ball of fluff with her.
There are many gifts. Aunts, uncles, and friends who have already been or are too young all give me something. Mostly useful things – a knife, protein bars, a good pair of shoes.
I thank people, trying to contain my excitement and nervousness. Jessa hugs her teddy and stares dumbly at everyone. She won’t be able to handle herself out there. We have been friends since we were little, and it will be up to me to keep her safe.
Almost a hundred twelve-year-olds stand just outside the gate, all gripping bags. “Take no more than you can carry” is the rule, and some have pushed that rule to its limit. Those ones will abandon most of their gear soon or drop, I think. A few black-clad border guards are about, looking imposing on horseback. As usual, they make no attempt to interact with anyone. I am glad of this; I am not sure that I want to hold a conversation with somebody whose primary job is to shoot me if I stumble on the exodus or attempt to get within sight of the city before the trip is over. It would be… creepy.
I go to exit the gate, only to find myself anchored by my mother’s hand. She does not want me to go. But I must, and she cannot leave the city, so I give her, Dad and Bobby one last hug before prying her hand away and stepping over the imaginary line between city and wilds.
The border guards call a final warning. Behind me, the gates begin to close.
For my parents’ benefit, I turn and wave, but I don’t try to seek them out in the crowd. I don’t want to see my mother’s tears, my father’s last mouthed message to his “little princess”. I didn’t even bring any photos; they would just be another object to guard and treasure, a waste of energy that I could little afford. I will recognise them when I get back. I’m sure I will.
We start walking, and Jessa offers me a hold of her stuffed bunny. I decline.
We’re going camping. Save some dinner for us, Mum; we’ll be home in a year.
