by Patricia Stewart | Apr 23, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Tom Erickson smiled as he greeted his guest, “Ah, General Kelly, welcome to the Ames Advanced Research Laboratory. This is my partner, Dr. Mark Montgomery.” They all shook hands. Erickson continued, “Are you ready for the dog and pony show?”
The general grinned. “You bet, Dr. Erickson. I’m interested to see how you managed to overcome the Heisenberg uncertainty problem?”
Somewhat taken aback, Dr. Erickson asked, “Uh, you’re familiar with quantum mechanics?”
“Physics is a hobby of mine,” said the general proudly. “That’s why the President asked me to review your progress.”
“That’s great, General. Well, you certainly asked a relevant question. As it turns out, if our transporter focused on the positions and momentums of objects at the atomic or molecular level, we would never be able to make simultaneous predictions of conjugate variables. However, our technique focuses on the massless, subnuclear particles and interactions, such as gluons, neutrinos, and hyperphotons. We can quantify them without significantly affecting the fermions and isospin quantum numbers. In other words, we can accurately locate every atom in an object without changing them. This allows us to successfully dematerialize and then rematerialize the object.”
The General nodded his head. “Understood. You make it sound so simple. Have you been able to transport an animal yet?”
“Yes, General. We successfully transported mice six months ago. They were disoriented at first, but eventually they were ably to negotiate the maze as quickly as their pre-transport times. Last month, we transported a rhesus monkey. She was able to perform all her trained behaviors without any apparent loss in cognitive ability. We’re ready to try it with a human.”
“Fantastic,” announced the General. “I’ve authorized a conditional commutation for one of our death row inmates…”
“Whoa,” interrupted Erickson, “That would be unethical, General. The first human subject has to be either Dr. Montgomery or myself.” He turned toward Montgomery. “Mark, do you have a coin?”
Mark nodded and pulled a coin from his pocket and flipped it into the air and called “heads.” He caught the spinning coin in his right hand and slapped it onto his left wrist. He lifted his “cover” hand and announced, “Heads, I win.” He quickly pocketed the coin and walked over to the transport platform, and stood there with a coy smile. “Com’on, Tom, let’s make history.”
Although feeling that he had just been hoodwinked, Erickson powered up the equipment and activated the transport switch. Montgomery dematerialized, and then rematerialize on the receiver platform, still smiling. Three medical doctors rushed over and began examining him. “How many fingers am I holding up? What city are you in? What’s the cube root of 356?”
Montgomery responded with a smirk, “Three, Albuquerque, to how many decimal places?” After an hour, the doctors announced Montgomery was “perfectly normal.”
Montgomery could not contain his jubilance. He hopped off the examination table and walked over to Erickson. He extended his left hand and said “Congratulations, Tom, we did it.”
Erickson momentarily stepped back. Shocked, he looked more closely at his friend. “Mark, what side do you part your hair?”
Confused, Montgomery raised his right hand to his head, and said “What are you talking about? The left side, of course.”
Erickson closed his eyes and began to count aloud. “Let’s see. One, two, three, four, five. Damn, there are an odd number of magnetic lenses in the re-sequencing buffers. Mark, you’re inverted. Get back onto the transporter. After I re-invert you, we’ll add another lens to the sequencer. No wonder the mice kept crashing into the walls the first day.”
by submission | Apr 22, 2009 | Story
Author : Carter Lee
Everyone can see me. I can’t see them, of course, but I can tell by the way that they shy away from me on the street and in stores. Their grey, featureless forms flinch, and drift away from me. No matter how crowded the area might be, I always have room to breathe.
I live in a world where the space between the ground and sky is composed of bare outlines. I subscribe to almost nothing, and so the world of men gives me only the smallest amount needed to make my way through it.
I wear my shield, of course, but I don’t sell the skin for display, unlike everyone else. I don’t sell my display, and I don’t buy anyone else’s.
I used to, of course. When I walked down the streets, the garish colors of the displays crawling and throbbing from the shield-skins of every building filled my eyes. What are now nebulous shapes would show the fantastic corporate creatures of the companies that had bought their personal displays.
One day, in a restaurant, I walked into a room full of people, each one looking like the mascot of the Deltoid Gymnasium Company. Almost 200 people, all with the same face, smile, and body. My eye had caught the words on my own retinal scrawl. Current Display: Deltoid Jim, paid for by DGC.
I was dumbstruck. I wondered for the first time who these people might be, under the picture of the blond god each was displaying. And I knew I’d never find out, that I could never find out. People showed their un-displayed forms only to those they knew very well. Some never showed their true self to anyone.
I’d disabled all of my subscriptions that evening, and declined to renew my contract with my display broker when it came up the next week. The only display anyone gets from me is me. If they want my deep background, I won’t transmit it. They have to ask me.
I lost a good number of friends over this. Many people seem to find my lack of any kind of barrier to the world as something indecent. It makes them uncomfortable to be around someone who isn’t masked in any way.
I was delighted to find that the libraries and museums in my city either don’t have fees, or only charge a small amount for upkeep, and rarely display commercials. I use old-style wall displays for information and entertainment.
I told myself that I would not pay for any more viewing subscriptions, and for the most part, I’ve stayed true to that. The one subscription I’m saving for, though, will let me look at buildings directly. I became interested in architecture a while back, after I found that the first buildings covered with shields had had them installed to protect their beauty, not to cover them with come-ons for foot powder and the like. There are pictures of the lovely structures in my city, but I’d like to see them in real life. I’d like to walk the streets and study the beauty humanity has wrought in stone and steel.
The ghosts steer themselves away from me, the stranger they can see clearly. How wonderful.
by J.R. Blackwell | Apr 21, 2009 | Story
Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer
We drank poison to prove that we were real. My mother fed me the poison herself, holding me in six of her twelve arms, cooing to me while I sipped the foul liquid. She had fed me things I thought were awful before, but I was obedient – ever a good child. Her last living child.
The rebels watched her feed me poison and admired her for it. She was the bravest among them, a symbol of their willingness to sacrifice for freedom. Her darkened eyes and shredded wings told her story for her. After we drank the poison in that dark hole, we spent days fighting the illness that followed, nausea and pain. After it was over, only two of my legs remained, the rest, shriveled husks.
Before the invasion, my mother used to say how pretty my wings were, how perfect. She was so sad now, and I would flutter my wings at her, pushing myself to lie at her feet. “Mama. Mama.” I would say, and she would touch my head, soothing me. I felt beautiful, even then.
Of course, they came for us. The worst of it was that when they came, they looked like us. It would have been better had they looked alien, but they were all too familiar, sculpting themselves to look friendly, like young adults or trustworthy mamas holding out their arms and legs and murmuring sweetness.
When they found us, my mother ran. She strapped me to her underside, pressed against her carapace, white cloth binding us together. I curled the legs I could move into my body shell and snuggled against her, afraid.
Even after weeks of struggling through poison, my mother was fast, burrowing into ground and then springing, nearly flying over the rubble of the city where we lived, through and over and under. She was glorious, then, in her moment of freedom. Then the aliens caught her and pinned her to the ground. She was a fast runner, but they could fly.
“Mother,” they said, so respectfully. She spat at them, the poison from her glands. It landed on them but it did not sizzle their exposed carapace -that’s how you could tell they were aliens, they were unaffected by poison. That and they could fly.
“Mother, you have a child – let us help you.” She kicked them and wounded herself.
“You are hurting yourself,” said one who looked like a young mother, “and your baby is ill. Please let us help you.”
My mother put her pincers around my spinal corridor. “I will kill her before you take her. She will die free.”
They looked at one another, and then they moved faster than I thought possible, breaking off my mother’s arms. She cried out and fought them, but they cut me from her in moments, and carried me away. I couldn’t move to look behind, where I heard my mother’s cries.
Two of them converted me, in that wonderful and compelling process I cannot forget. The pain in the conversion was of growth and change. I am no longer wounded; I no longer suffer from lost limbs and poison. I am one of them. Alien. Whole.
by Duncan Shields | Apr 20, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I weigh six tons and my back is on fire. I’m treading slowly through the hot bowl of what used to Los Angeles. Walking on these streets brings back a memory.
I remember walking on a thick crust of snow in the winter as a child. I could run across the top of the frozen snow with no worries. As I got older and heavier, I had to walk more carefully in case I broke through the top layer and ended up struggling through the waist-deep powder underneath. Eventually I got too heavy to walk on top of the snow.
Back when I was human.
I’m in the downtown core now. One foot busts through the deserted street asphalt and punches down into the sewer underneath. Carefully, like on that snow when I was a child, I pull my foot out and step gingerly up onto the street again.
I remember that when I became too heavy to walk on top of the snow, I bought snowshoes.
I look around at the fires and the bodies and the melting glass of the buildings. There are a couple of cars near to me. I tear their roofs off and step on them. They immediately melt from the heat of my huge feet, attaching themselves to me. Presto. Urban snowshoes.
If my new face would allow it, I would smile.
I’m not responsible for this carnage, I’m just reporting on it. I’m a soldier that’s been suited up permanently and sent in to report on the damage.
I’m wearing a giant exoskeleton made of thermal insulate. I was welded into it. I have super-hydrated cameras strapped to me and a boosted transmitter in my helmet to receive directions and relay information back.
I’m like one of those remote control submarines except for radioactive pits instead of the ocean.
I remember paper burning in the fireplace when I was growing up. I remember the paper turning black and then flying up the fireplace, red-edged and victim to the thermals.
I’m watching human bodies do that now every time I turn something over or a storefront collapses when I walk past.
I’ve absorbed too much radiation to go back but I knew this was a one way trip. There are others soldiers like me here reporting back as well and they’ll send more once our cameras dry out and break.
I’ll have friends. We’ll hang out here and see how many days it takes for our suits to melt.
by submission | Apr 19, 2009 | Story
Author : Debbie Mac Rory
My heartbeat is sluggish. My breathing is equally slow. My eyes, when they blink, take an eternity to open and on the other side of the glass, people appear and move as blurs and streaks of colour.
Panic struggles to rise as the primitive parts of my brain send out signals that my body simply can’t respond to yet. I close my eyes and begin the relaxation exercises we were taught before undergoing this mission. The gentle voice of the teacher floats across my memory as I count. “Just relax”, he said. “Just try and relax. I know it’s hard and it’ll be the last thing you want to do. But your body knows what to do, you just have to have confidence in it, and let it move at its own pace”.
When I reach 100, my body feels loose and easy again. I open my eyes and the blurs don’t seem to be moving as quickly now. Some of them are almost recognisable. One of the colours stops in front of me, and stays there long enough for her movement to resolve into a face. She has short, dark hair and when she sees me focusing on her, she smiles. A name surfaces from my slowly warming memory.. Maria…
As soon as I leave this cold-sleep pod, the work will start. A whole new world awaits me out there.
