by submission | Jan 13, 2010 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
Jenkis and Layla examined the husky robot. It stood fifteen feet high, maybe nine feet wide at its thickest point, gaping, many-toothed mouth in the front.
“It’s pretty ugly,” Layla said. “Maybe a coat of paint.”
“Maybe a coat of new parts,” Jenkis said. “It’s rusted through to the recycler, look.”
They looked. Layla took out a tension wrench and popped the front panel off. Inside, some species of rodent had built a nest, died, decomposed, and then been replaced by some species of insect, which were also dead.
“Not much insulation left on the wires,” Layla said.
“Not much wire left on the, uh, the thing,” Jenkis said. “And the internals are gone. No point to a Digestor without a recycler. Just… let’s go.”
They stopped in to see Honest Gephart on their way out.
“We don’t want it,” Layla said.
“You don’t want it? That Digestor is in prime condition! It’s practically an antique!”
“It’s a relic,” Jenkis said.
“It’s multi-generational.”
“There are multiple generations of dead things inside it,” Layla said. “You couldn’t sell that thing to a scrap yard. Not even you would buy it!”
“I did, so that proves you wrong,” Gephart said. “Listen, how about I cut the price in half.”
“Half of what you wanted for that robot would buy a brand new one, with better recycling,” Jenkis said. “And a three-year warranty with parts and labor and full replacement on referral.”
“Nobody’s going to buy it,” Layla said. “Your only hope would be a groundhog straight from downside without a clue, and you just won’t find one of those way out here. It’s going to sit on your lot forever, ruining your landscaping.” She grinned at Gephart. “On the other hand, we could haul it off for you.”
“For nothing?”
“It’s worth nothing already,” Jenkis said, “unless you haven’t eaten in a long, long time.”
“Good point. Just sign here and here,” –Gephart held out a sheaf of papers– “and fill these out and you’re fine for it.”
Jenkis didn’t take the papers. “Seriously?”
“There’s insurance, liability, refusal of warranty–”
“You turn your back for twenty minutes,” Layla said, “and then the wreckage is gone. No worries.
“Fine,” Gephart said. “But only because I like you and I need the space. You make sure nobody ever finds out that I let you have it for free, ok? It’ll ruin my rep.”
“Great,” Jenkis said with a huge, fake smile. “Now, let’s talk about our haulage fees.”
“Fees?”
“Fees,” Layla said, pulling up a chair. “Insurance, liability….”
*
“You could have just offered the job first,” Jenkis said.
“It’s more fun to haggle,” Layla said. “You know that. Besides, now he has a great story about how little he spent to have that thing hauled away.”
“To tell all his fellow sharks at the bar, over a cold pint of absinth,” Jenkis said. “Anyway, we’ll break even on it, but why were you so bullish to buy?”
“The insects,” Layla said. “You noticed all the caripaces? They’re rare off this world, and particularly at our next stop.”
“You had me buy that whole thing for some insects?”
“We’ll make about fifteen times the scrap price.”
“You know,” Jenkis said, “every time I wonder why I married you, you go and do something like this, and I remember.”
“How much you love me?”
“How much you conned me before I got wise. You are a sneaky bitch, no question.”
“No question,” Layla said, and kissed his cheek. “Now go strap the gear down. We’re superluminal in thirty minutes.”
by Kathy Kachelries | Jan 12, 2010 | Story
Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer
My husband doubts the existence of history. I wonder why I married this man.
When I woke up to the banshee-screech of a bandsaw, I assumed we were getting another door. He likes that too, building doors. But, when I came downstairs in a yellow bathrobe hoping he’d brewed a morning pot, I found no coffeemaker. In fact, I found no kitchen appliances. Nor did I find a husband, though a sign reading “time machine” was taped to the garage door.
“Progress calls, sweetheart,” he yelled from the garage. “Many scientific innovations have failed due to lack of funding.”
“You don’t believe in history.”
“I believe that history, if it exists at all, is subjective, but more likely, each instant is a singular point of awareness suspended in-”
“All right, honey,” I said.
“It’s entirely different,” he said. “Also, don’t go into the garage.”
One might wonder how my husband learned so much about time, space, or mechanical engineering. Since most modern philosophers discount his beliefs about the former two and he still hasn’t fixed the dishwasher (won’t, now), one might do well to dismiss that curiosity.
But if he is anything, it’s determined.
After returning from Starbucks with the sense of patience possessed only by those who expect their wealthy in-laws to replace their kitchen appliances, I was greeted by a man with curly, powdered hair.
“Bonjour, madame,” he said.
I knocked on the door to the garage. “There is a Frenchman in my kitchen,” I said.
“I know.”
“Well, so long as you know.”
“Thanks, dear,” he said.
My husband isn’t good with sarcasm.
I sat the man in the living room, set the television to Nickelodeon, and went upstairs to read. I let my husband deal with his own problems, until the police or fire department get involved.
When I finished my book, the living room was filled with Frenchmen. Again, I knocked on the garage door.
“There are more Frenchmen,” I said.
“I know.”
“Where did they come from?”
“France.”
I needed more coffee. “Did you invent a time machine?” I asked him.
“I did.”
“Even though you don’t believe in time?”
“Yep.”
“Are you going to send them back?”
“As soon as I invent an un-time machine,” he told me.
“Maybe you should invent someone who knows what they’re doing.”
The silence suggested he believed that science did not concern women.
Since I couldn’t cook without an oven, stove, or microwave, I ordered pizza for the Frenchmen. All in all, they didn’t seem disturbed by the displacement-in-time thing.
The next day, I found not just Frenchmen, but several Russians as well.
“Honey, there are Russians in my living room,” I said.
“I know.” I heard a whirring sound, then a thud. “I’ve almost got the ‘specific time’ thing down.”
“And this will empty out my living room?”
“I’m getting Americans next,” he said. “I heard that they both did some crazy stuff during the Cold War.”
“You heard.”
“It’s not like I believed in history,” he said, cross.
I went to buy coffee. I also bought several boxes of donuts. The Frenchmen were still transfixed by the television. The Russians, from several points in time, were eagerly exchanging stories. In the garage, my husband was negotiating his own little cold war. I took a leisurely stroll and had reached the town park when the solution occurred to me. I hurried home to tell my husband.
“Dear,” I said.
“I’m busy, darling.”
“Why don’t you invent a future time machine, and ask someone how to do it right?”
There was a long silence. “I don’t believe in the future, sweetheart,” he said.
The voices in the garage resumed.
by J.R. Blackwell | Jan 11, 2010 | Story
Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer
The suns rotate around each other, red over yellow, yellow over red, and Sharra’s skin sheds again. Yet again, she had refused to mate. He hasn’t had a single sexual encounter during the last sun rotation and her body knows. It thinks it has failed her. So she molts her body trying another shape to attract mates. The process is painful. She stays at home for days, picking at her skin, nursing new limbs out of their hard shells. When it’s over, her sweat glands open and her scent hangs heavy in the hot air. Males sniff in the streets, noses veiled, but twitching as she walks by. She smells like copulation, like love.
“What is it that you want?” asked her sister, who had mated since her first molt, maintaining the same shape since her adolescence.
“Not this.” Sharra tells her, running her new limbs over her body.
She bathes to wash the scent off, but by the first sunrise it’s always back, wafting from her scales. Males flair their leathery skin wings at her – vestigial, but colorful reds and yellows, sometimes a dramatic neon blue. But Sharra isn’t interested. In the cafeteria, males give her colorful spun latticework, made from their vibrating tongues. Some of them are dull and gooey, but others are stiff and beautiful, colorful, works of art. She keeps all of them until they crumble. They are all sincere, if unwanted.
“Mate now,” says her sister, “and you will keep that scent. Don’t you want to have your pick of mates?” Her sister believes this is important, as important as work, as breath, as her own eggs.
“No.” says Sharra. “It’s not right.”
“But changing every sun rotation is a hassle! If you don’t like any of your mating options right now, you can always have a stimulator,” her sister says, “it will do the trick. Then you can keep that amazing scent!”
“I want to change,” says Sharra, her new skin tender under her scales. “This is what I want.”
This scent attracts too much attention. The scales are too rigid. Already Sharra knows she is ready for a change. Maybe next time, her shape will be right.
by submission | Jan 10, 2010 | Story
Author : S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
The hail slammed the ground like the ground was some poor kid who preferred writing out math problems to kicking a red rubber ball. That ball pitted like the kid’s face. The ground was pretty pitted by the hail. I never had that problem. I played baseball and did the math problems in the dugout. The problem was this was unexpected. This hail. I’d been trying to control the weather again.
Luckily I had brought my portable blast shield and now we were safe. Though how long would it take for safe to go to trapped? I smiled reassuringly at my daughter Marie, who paid no attention, wrapped in her phone, probably tweeting, her black polished fingernails a blur.
“Don’t you dare post anything about this,” I told her.
“Really? So I should erase my status: Marie’s dad the mad scientist makes her spend the weekend out in a field with a fucked up hail storm of his own making.”
“Does your mother let you curse?” I asked genuinely interested. But she only gave me that sigh she’d contracted since turning fourteen.
The hail storm increased in intensity, which I feared was the exact opposite of what should have happened when I recalibrated my machine when the first few chunks fell. The corn all around was being beaten down. We’d come out to the outskirts of Sumerville because on the one hand it had the advantage of being virtually deserted and on the other hand in the grip of a devastating drought that appealed to my altruistic desires.
Marie quit tapping for a second to watch the hail destroy my machine. It collapsed, a dinted and dinged warrior, what I liked to think of as the fighter who met his end crushed by Goliath right before David was up. My next one will be the David machine and slay this idiotic ecosystem slave master.
“Maybe it’s God’s wraith,” Marie said.
“Honey, you know there’s no god.”
“Right. Spaghetti monster.” She gave me a look and twirled a sprig of blonde hair in a way that can only mean she plans on sleeping with the first evangelical Christian she can, just to spite me.
My feeling of safety erodes as the hail piles up. The cozy paternal closeness to Marie had turned into claustrophobia and I cowardly wondered if I could bring myself to push her out of the pup-tent-sized shelter.
“Should I call for help?” she asked.
“Nope, I got this.” I had nothing.
“You leveled Sumerville,” she reported. “It’s on the news feed all over. ‘Hail Storm Cripples Small Town,’ ‘Windows smashed, roofs collapse under weight, seven killed.’ It’s like you’re Godzilla. Only a geek.”
“This is probably unrelated,” I said. “My experiment was more about research.”
“You told me to ‘watch this’ and made a speech about ending droughts and hunger and poverty.”
“Research.” I watch the clouds darken and the hail add up.
“This is why Mom left you.”
“Your mom cheated on me.”
“What? You never told me that.”
“I didn’t want you to think badly about her, but now that you think badly about me because I’ve doomed us I don’t care so much.”
“Sorry. But according to the Doppler your little mistake is breaking up.”
And a few silent minutes later, the sky did lighten. Surely, when this mess melted, it would be a lot of water. That would help. His daughter told him she forgave him—for what exactly he wasn’t sure—and that the next weekend she expected to go to a concert of her choosing.
by submission | Jan 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Christopher Booth
The war was over…sorta…The big one was over. It led to the Texan independence wars. Eventually five states all wanting to be called Texas.
He is dressed in blue denim and gray to match the day. A cold dull light comes inside. Vern never liked drinking in the morning. He wished he did.
Not much need for software engineers in this brave new frontier. His wife left, daughter whoring, and son killed in the war. No work, very little money.
His career started in an aerospace/defense firm programming technology that the world would not see commercially for decades. When he disobeyed the CIA’s orders (long explanation for another time) he was off to find another job. That is when the Superconducting Super Collider called. Really just a big hole in the North Texas plain. No atom was ever intended to be smashed there. It did allow Congress or the CIA or somebody to funnel billions of dollars to a project the public never really questioned. It was closed five years later.
Vern wrote neural networks. His software was the brain. The other engineers and biologist etc. would build the bodies. A soldier. Let the enemies kill the machines. We can always make more. Vern never saw his software used. Vern eventually went to work for a bank. Stayed there twenty-five years.
Then came the war. America had lost it’s will to fight after Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran and Iraq again. The states broke up. Each state became its own little republic. Texas tried to stay together, but in the tumultuous times the state split into five separate states. The south (proclaiming itself Texicana) was definitely the strongest of the states. Back by a still functioning Mexican government and a population that was once considered minority now had the regional power. Vern hated Texicans – That is where his son was killed and his daughter was shacking-up with one of the bastards. Vern wasn’t sure, but he thought the Texicans would kill anyone with skin whiter than theirs.
The knock on the door startled him…He was dozing. Still before noon. Too early to start drinking. Vern cracked the door. A young man who appeared to be tired and scared – jittery. Dressed in a Sabine (the current name of the East Texas state) army captain’s uniform.
“Mr. Adams, you got to let me in. Mr. Adams, THEY want to kill me!”
“Who the hell are you? No I am not letting you in”. Vern’s voice startled himself…when was the last time he spoke?
“And how do you know my name?” The phlegm caught in Vern’s throat. Apparently he had not spoken in quite a while.
“You are Vern Adams, correct?” The young man’s words were urgent, the tone wasn’t.
“Whatever. And who are you? And if they want to kill you don’t do it in my hall”.
“Mr. Adams, sir, I am your child. You are my father…”
Vern tried to remember the last time he had sex. Some whore with a birthmark right below the top of her pubic hair. Vern initially thought she had some damn disease. He eventually got it up, but he swore off of sex ever since.
“Boy, my son is dead. Killed somewhere near Padre. This Ain’t funny…”
“Mr. Adams, the SSC. You wrote me into existence at the SSC. I know who you are. You have to help me Mr. Adams. I am part of you. Please Mr. Adams! THEY want to KILL me!”
Vern pulled the door to and leaned back against it.
“Damn!” Vern knew he was gonna have to think for a minute.
