by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 9, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Hans lay face down on the surgical table, completely immobilized and wide awake. His father’s rubber shoes moved in and out of his field of vision as the older man busied himself in preparation, his voice a constant hum of information in the otherwise empty room.
“We can’t effectively target inactive neural pathways, which is why you’re awake. You won’t feel anything, at least, I don’t think I did…” his father’s voice trailed off only for a moment. “If you do feel uncomfortable, be sure to speak up. We’ll want to make a note of when.”
His father double checked his handiwork, having laid out all the instruments he would need on a sterile back table nearby. Overhead hung a large spring-coiled umbilical of fibre optic cable truncated in a blunt two inch long conical tip. A second such cable snaked into the back of Hans Senior’s skull, following him as he moved about the room.
“The initial prototype is completely polarized,” he tapped the back of his head, “one way. The materials that the interface nodes fabricated from were by nature unidirectional.” Barely pausing between sentences he scrubbed the back of the boy’s neck with iodine before deftly slicing through the skin and subcutaneous layers with a scalpel.
“Still lucrative, even with its limitations. Reconnaissance personnel, witnesses, even the skin trade paid handsomely.”
From the table he plucked an insect like device of surgical steel and placed it over the incision. From it a myriad of tiny appendages unfolded, carefully holding aside the lacerated flesh before burrowing even deeper into the boys’ neck, then up into the base of his skull. At the required depth, it injected a thin catheter and, its task completed, simply stopped in place.
“Frustrating how long it took to solve the polarizing issue. So much time, lost.”
Hans Senior unpackaged a fibre cable socket with a long single organic strand trailing from it. Grasping it with a set of forceps, he fed the strand into the catheter.
“This will be so much better for you than it was for me.” No sooner had the strand contacted the tube, it began to pull itself in. Hans’ head flooded with sights, sounds, and smells that he hadn’t known in years. The strand divided and doubled back on itself, only to divide again, sending countless atom thin filaments off into Hans’ grey matter. His father held the endcap until the strand had reeled in all of its slack before carefully guiding it into the still waiting insectile appliance.
The tiny unit came back to life, grasping and aligning the jack with the flesh. It then glue stitched the inner layers to the device below the surface, and sutured the outer skin to its perforated outer edge.
Its job complete, the mechanism detached, and allowed itself to be picked up and set aside with the other bloodied instruments.
Hans felt the restraints relax, followed by a flood of sensation, not all of it pleasant.
“The pain should subside in a few days.” The older man helped his son into a sitting position before grasping the unattached cable from overhead and positioning it behind the boy’s head. There was a strobe of light and a magnetic snapping as the two ends oriented themselves and fitted together.
His father stood in front of him, and closed his eyes.
Hans felt a strange pressure in his head, then had a sudden awareness of why his father had pushed so hard to implant him now.
“You’re dying.” It wasn’t a question, the facts had been laid out for him.
“Yes. I’ve used up my life. I’ve learned so much, but there’s so much left undone.”
Hans felt the pressure again, followed by waves of knowledge. Not all of it was pleasant either.
by submission | Nov 8, 2009 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
Hilton’s eyes opened, to his own mild surprise. Everything he saw was in dim monochrome, suggesting it was either really early or he was really tired. He was sitting in an armchair in a small office without the faintest clue how he had got here. The last thing he remembered was…
Oh.
So he’d gone through with it. Evidently it hadn’t worked.
Before this train of throught could get much further, a smartly dressed businesswoman entered the room, flashing him the thinnest of courtesy smiles.
“Good morning, Mr Hilton. My name is Annabel Tseng, and I’m here about your debt.”
He opened his mouth to speak, and was cut off, in a magnificently rude display of politeness.
“It’s probably best if you don’t try to deny it. I’m here on behalf of your insurance company and Zybeco Body Leasing. You were three months behind on payments and you decided to settle your balance by driving your car and your body off a cliff. We recovered you from the crash site and put you in temporary acmommodation.”
Hilton looked down at himself, and understood another part of what had been bothering him. His skin, visible only in greyscale, wasn’t skin. It was some kind of polymer replacement. He was in a sim. As he was looking down at what he had become, Ms Tseng pulled out a softscreen sheet from a manila folder.
“At this moment, your debt to your insurers and Zybeco equals around four trillion yuan, plus a twenty five per cent defaulter’s penalty. Repayment can be made by cash, credit, or servitude. At present pay and interest rates, you will have your debt settled in just under fourteen years of work. You’re a talented programmer, and that makes you worth more to us alive than dead. Not the easiest option in the world, but you should have thought of that before you attempted to defraud the company.”
“It wasn’t like that”
Ms Tseng looked at him in mock-interest. His voice had sounded grating and artificial, words pumped through the cheapest voice-synth they could stick in this sim.
“Wasn’t it, Mr Hilton? Do tell.”
When he spoke, it all came out in a rush.
“Susan left me last month. I went into a spiral. Drink, pills, anything to put me into oblivion for as long as possible. I didn’t crash the car to default on my debts. I was praying for death.”
“Death?”
She laughed, and Hilton understood where he was. Humanity had found no hell, so they had built one for themselves.
“Mr Hilton, death is no excuse for laying off work.”
by submission | Nov 7, 2009 | Story
Author : James Marshall
Foray wondered why he didn’t just sit down and die. He was naked but for a pair of underpants, and his skin was stained red with the blood from hundreds of cuts and scratches. He was gaunt, and his hair and beard were long and itchy. The vines and thorns lashed at his body, grabbing on with their claws, dragging him back like needy children not wanting him to leave. He only stopped to pry them out when especially long stingers dug themselves into his naked, bloody skin and stopped his progress. Nothing hurt him anymore.
Foray’s ship had fought the enemy over this strategically important planet, inhabited by nothing of note but a species of dim-witted sub-humanoids and a few Terran missionaries, and had lost. The crash killed everyone on board but three. They didn’t have time to bury the dead. The enemy Searchers would arrive soon. Foray, Stavos, and Simmons had cut the implants from their palms and buried them deep in the pile of gore that was all that remained of the troopers in the Gpod, and then ran. Simmons’ hand became infected a few days later, and he got sick and quickly died. Then something out of the forest grabbed Stavos a few days later. It was funny, because the two of them had just been talking about the apparent lack of predators in the forest, when something came at him from their right and bit Stavos ‘ hip out. Foray turned around to see a large dog-like animal standing over Stavos, growling at him, almost daring him to try to save his friend. Stavos was under it, screaming loudly and beating the dog’s front legs. Foray backed off, hands up. “All yours,” he said, and when the dog turned its attention back to Stavos, he turned and ran, and didn’t stop until he was sick. That was weeks ago. He hadn’t seen any more dogs since then, but he assumed it was them he could hear howling at night.
It was difficult to be resigned to one’s death when the moment was postponed time and time again. When he was thirsty, he would come across a river. When he was hungry, he would find a dead monkey, or bird, and eat it. He was lucky, but he didn’t care. One day there would be no river, no monkey. His luck would run out and he would die. The creatures would eat him, clean his bones, and the floods would carry them away and leave nothing. He had fought for the Terrans for eight years, and being eaten by birds and bugs seemed a natural, even attractive death. He had seen confused men have their guts blown out and trampled into the mud as they watched. The enemy’s weapons suck men’s lungs out of their mouths like a pair of old, wet socks. Children mad with grief and fear, sitting trembling by the corpses of their parents, dead for days. He thought about those children a lot. This is what they would have wanted. Him dead.
He collapsed in the dark. He couldn’t walk anymore. He slept.
He awoke in the morning to see a face, a humanoid face, looking down at him, smiling. It was saying something. “Jesus?”
Foray blinked in the bright sun. “Huh?”
The humanoid’s face was dark green, with small, black eyes. “Jesus, yes? They say you come back one day.” The accent was thick, but it was English.
“Yes,” croaked Foray. He laughed as the strong humanoid helped him up. “Bless you, my child.”
Thank god for missionaries, he thought.
by Patricia Stewart | Nov 6, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Major Clanet’s head felt like it had split in half. He forced his eyes open and saw his android navigator standing above him. “What happened?” he asked.
The android extended a hand and helped the human to his feet. “We delivered the supplies to the station, and were returning to Earth. During reentry, there was a structural failure of the right hand glide wing. We began to tumble violently. You blacked out. Seconds before the shuttle exploded, aliens beamed us onto their spacecraft.”
“Aliens? What makes you think it was aliens?”
“Teleportation technology does not exist on Earth, so I concluded extraterrestrials were involved.”
“Right,” Clanet reluctantly acknowledged. “Well, when taken prisoner, our first duty is to escape. Are we still in space?”
“No. I believe the ship has landed.”
Clanet surveyed the small room. There were four walls; two curved and two straight. A convex wall contained a large door with a vertical handle near the right hand side. The opposite wall was concave, and contained a similar door, but the handle was horizontal and crossed the mid-height of the door. “Assuming the ship is cylindrical,” Clanet concluded, “the concave wall must contain the door to the outside.” He walked over to the door and pushed against the handle with all his strength, but nothing happened. “Damn, it’s locked. I guess we’ll have to go inboard, and fight our way out. We need to find some kind of weapon.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary, Major Clanet? The aliens saved our lives, there is no reason to assume that they intend to harm us.”
“First of all, they saved my life, you’re not alive. You’re just a sophisticated GPS unit. Secondly, I’m the one that does the thinking. That’s what humans do best.” Clanet strode over to the convex wall and grabbed the door’s vertical handle and pulled; first with one hand, then with two. The door didn’t budge. “Damn, both doors are locked.”
The android walked over to the door and placed his index finger on the vertical handle. “It has been my experience,” he lectured, “that human arrogance hampers your ability to reason. Your species assumes that your physiology is the pinnacle of evolution. Hence, you built robots in your image, even though there are more efficient design options. You also assume that aliens must look like you; with two legs, two arms, two hands, and opposable thumbs. Therefore, you conclude that a vertical handle must always be pulled.” The android gave a slight push with his finger and the door swung open.
The android entered first, followed by Clanet. The adjacent room was clearly the bridge. It contained approximately thirty robots of varying sizes and configurations. A few were scurrying about, but most were occupied at the numerous work stations. A tall, bobble-head robot, with four snake-like arms appeared to be directing activities from the center of the bridge. It finally noticed the two newcomers and quickly motored toward them on a pair of rapidly rotating tank treads. It agilely banked around several crisscrossing robots, and came to a screeching stop a few feet away. “Good, good, you appear to be functional. We are very pleased to make your greeting. We look forward to a great friendship between our two worlds.” The alien robot suddenly stopped its rambling and turned toward Major Clanet. Its optical scanner panned the human from head to toe. “Ah,” it said as he turned back toward the android, “I see that your companion is biological. Is it a servant, or a pet?”
by submission | Nov 5, 2009 | Story
Author : Chris Abernethy
I don’t know why I ran.
Caution, paranoia, groupthink… pure blind panic maybe, god knows what finally sent me scurrying up out of the elliptic, screaming in tight round ol’ Ares and out into the darkness.
Guess it won’t really matter, hell it’s not like there’s anything up here to actually be running to, though that’s half the reason I hurled myself out here; last place anyone would look because it’s the last place anyone with half a brain would run… no easy way back, nothing to slingshot yourself round; just you, the black and all that delta-v you’re sat barrelling along on…
To start with I hoped, kidded myself, maybe even prayed that I’d just jumped at sounds in the night, that all the little things that had spooked me turned out to be a series of coincidences; nothing but an addendum to the catalogue of meaningless accidents and lives sacrificed to the cold depths of space.
But then the reports started coming in, slow at first; lost Kuiper Belt terraforming teams spiked from one in ten to nine in ten, the deep imaging array on Charon fell off the grid, SatGov declaring a state of emergency after all contact was lost with Rhea colony… the litany of loss went on.
I suppose that’s when people started to really worry, EarthGov statements that “these rumours of a crisis are baseless fear mongering” not withstanding, but things went ballistic when the Belt mining stations started dropping out; one or two at first, then dozens, then hundreds… the industrial heart of the species was going dark and the only thing the politicians had to offer us was, “No comment”.
Panic was all but inevitable, people ran where they could; to other colonies, to satellite rings, to the hills, to each other.
Things seemed to peak for a moment when the UNSC special forces were sent in to find out what had happened in the Belt; days of upbeat but oh so serious reporting from the media as they moved towards their targets, then silence… for hours, nothing.
God knows what happened to those soldiers, even trying to patch things together after the fact it’s hard to find anything concrete about what happened, what they faced, why none of them came back.
One thing I can tell you from the fragments of coms chatter that I’ve scrapped together from what filtered out; they died bloody, they died hard, they went down howling their defiance at an unseen and implacable foe.
After that history seemed to pause; whatever was lurking malignantly in the heart of our system stopped reaching out for a time, bland assurances were issued, whole worlds held their breath.
Then it went for Earth.
Have you ever listened to a planet die? Listened to millions of lives being torn away in an instant and billions more screaming for a reprieve that would never come?
We were culled, wiped from the face of universe like a flawed design, something best forgotten…
I huddle here terrified and impotent in the night watching the shattered remnants of civilisation’s light gutter out one by one in the darkness, knowing that as each light goes out it will never come again, and I mourn the slaughter of my kind.
