by Sam Clough | Dec 19, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
“My card.” The smooth-shelled android pressed a small square of cardboard into Gin’s hand.
Gin turned it over. Printed, in a fine copperplate script were the words ‘Best Supporting Actors’, and then underneath that, there was an address, a URL, and an e-mail address. He held it between his forefingers, and turned his head about to ask the android question, but it’d already moved on, circulating amongst the crowd. The android was part of Jamie’s entourage: he had shown up to the party with a half a dozen people and two androids. This, in and of itself was unusual — Jamie was a well-known introvert, however much of a contradiction in terms that seemed to be. But today, he had accepted an invitation, he’d shown up, and seemed to be the life of the party.
Gin carefully pocketed the card, and looked after Jamie in admiration.
* * *
“Good morning, Sir. How can I help you? Are you a new customer?” The pretty receptionist smiled at Gin, her entire demeanour exuding confidence and enthusiasm.
“Yeah, I was given one of your cards. I was wondering exactly what you…did…here.” Gin scratched the back of his head, feeling pretty awkward.
“Well, you’d probably be surprised at how many people come in here asking that question. Tell you what, one of our advisors is free. I’ll call him, to give you a rundown of our services.”
“That’d be awesome, thanks.” Gin availed himself of one of the comfortable seats that were available in the reception, and waited whilst the receptionist spoke quickly and quietly into a phone.
Five minutes later, the receptionist looked up at him.
“Mister Gibson is free. Down the hall, first door on your right.”
Gin nodded his thanks, and went to the door mentioned. It opened with his approach, revealing a comfortable-looking office. ‘Mister Gibson’ was sitting behind a desk bereft of paperwork.
“Gin! Gin Holden, it’s an honour.” Gibson got up and darted round his desk, clasping Gin warmly by the hand and shaking it vigourously.
“Uh…do I — know you?”
“No, not at all,” Gibson laughed, and released Gin’s hand, “as a point of fact, I don’t know you from John Q: just got your name and a bit of background data thirty seconds ago. We provide a service, Gin. Your life, everyone’s life is a story. Often an unspectacular, petty, boring story, but still a story. A play, a plot, that sort of thing.”
Gibson gestured to the seat in front of his desk, and returned to his own. He leaned forward conspiratorially, and Gin caught himself doing the same.
“You see where I’m going with this? You’re the lead role. We can cast someone to play second fiddle, to take up the supporting roles. We can be your backstory, Mister Holden. We set up jokes, deliver carefully crafted anecdotes, admire, intimidate and bluff our way through. With one or two of our Actors, you’ll be the centre of any event. We script and thoroughly choreograph everything. We have helpers, advisors, fall guys, muses, sparks, henchmen and the odd nemesis.” Gibson leaned back. “We assign a creative to each client and they decide which of our actors would work best with you.”
“Wow. So…” Gin was taken aback. It did sound like a good idea.
“Let me guess. You want henchmen?”
by submission | Dec 18, 2008 | Story
Author : Gavin Raine
It is with some consternation that I realize I am having difficulty in ordering my thoughts. Perhaps this is the onset of confusion one must expect, as the air supply becomes exhausted. I must make haste to write my account:
Only a few hours have passed since I was enjoying a bottle of port and a cigar with my good friend Dr Stanley. Stanley was pontificating on my work. “I know that I can’t match your grasp of mathematics, or the physical sciences,” he said, “but I still maintain that this whole notion of time travel is preposterous. If it were possible, then why haven’t we been visited by travellers from the future?”
“You well know that my theories will not allow travel backward in time,” said I. “The inevitability of paradox precludes any such journey. Time is an arrow that we all travel along at the rate defined by the clock, and my apparatus merely accelerates that progress.”
“So when can we see a demonstration?” said Stanley. “You completed your machine today, did you not?”
“Why not now?” said I, and I wobbled through into my laboratory, with the good doctor following closely.
I confess, the alcohol made me foolish and impetuous, but even in my most sober moments, I had not anticipated the fate that awaited me.
I placed myself in the saddle of the time machine and took the control rod in my hand. “Meet me here at exactly this time tomorrow night”, I exclaimed and, with a salute, I inched the rod forward.
There was a confusing blur of motion, after which I found myself looking at the stars. I was perplexed, but when I looked down to see the curve of the Earth, far below, my puzzlement turned to panic. It took some time before I calmed down enough to realize what had happened.
Throughout all of my theorizing and calculation, the one factor I had failed to take into account was the motion of the planets. While I travelled through the dimension of time, the Earth had continued onward in the other three physical dimensions. It had simply left me behind. Outside of my time dilation field, there was only the vacuum of space.
After a while, I advanced the control rod forward again, taking my machine a full year into the future. However, I could only watch in frustration as the Earth swung past, out of my reach. Perhaps I am drifting, or the solar system itself is moving, but it seems I have lost all hope of ever reaching home again.
My machine is moving through time at its maximum velocity now, and all I can do is hope that I intersect with some form of planetary surface, though I fear that the odds are against me. I am hundreds of years in the future already and it is becoming difficult to write in my notebook. All around me, the light sources are growing dimmer.
by Patricia Stewart | Dec 17, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Cephei A and Cephei B are eclipsing binary stars that are located approximately 3,000 light years from Earth. Cephei A is a supergiant that is currently the second largest star in the Milky Way Galaxy. It is so large that if it replaced Earth’s sun, its chromosphere would extend almost to the orbit of Saturn. Cephei B is no pipsqueak either. It is over ten times as massive as our sun, and over 100,000 times as luminous. Both stars have extremely elongated orbits that cause them to practically touch each other every twenty years as they whip around their celestial center of mass. During the close approach, the overpowering gravity wells of these two massive supergiants forms a localized space-time distortion between them. This previously unknown phenomenon is called a temporal vortex.
Twenty years earlier, during the previous close approach, Francisco Fontaneda discovered that the temporal vortex was not just a portal through time, as predicted by other scientists, but was actually the astrophysical equivalent to Ponce de León’s “Fountain of Youth.” His analysis of the Quantum-mechanical entanglement data collected during the brief formation of the vortex revealed that if a body passed through the vortex at the instant of closest approach, the body’s physiology would change by twenty years. In other words, it wouldn’t physically travel back in time, but it would emerge on the other side of the vortex 20 years younger. To his chagrin, this hypothesis was greeted with skepticism and ridicule by the scientific community. Unfortunately, his chance at vindication had to wait for the next transit, which wouldn’t occur for another twenty years.
***
Francisco Fontaneda sat in his spaceship meticulously going down the pre-flight checklist one item at a time. Fontaneda had spent the last ten years building his ship from scratch, making sure to only use parts that were at least twenty years old. He wanted to make certain that if his ship got younger too, the parts would have existed twenty years earlier; otherwise they might simply vanish. He was even wearing a thirty year old flightsuit. After all, he didn’t want the press to photograph him climbing out of his ship completely naked. Of course, that wouldn’t have been too bad, since he’d be a trim thirty year old, rather than his current flabby half century.
At the designated time, he fired his aft thrusters. The ship climbed above the A-B plane of the two supergiants, and began its slow parabolic plunge toward the coordinates where the 100 meter wide vortex would appear at the instant of closest approach. His timing was perfect. A swirling whirlpool of light and degenerate matter began to form a few hundred kilometers in front of the ship as he accelerated downward. Fontaneda held his breath as he entered, then exited, the temporal vortex. Momentarily blinded by the intense brightness, he fumbled for his communications equipment to contact his support ship. “Calling the SS Bimini. This is Fontaneda. Do you read me? Did I make it?” He tried to focus on the monitor as his vision slowly returned.
“Roger that, Fontaneda,” said the captain of the Bimini. “Direct hit. How do you fee…? Whoa. What the hell happened to you? Your face…”
Fontaneda saw the captain’s broad smile morph into a grimace. “What’s the matter, Peter?” asked Fontaneda. “Haven’t you seen a handsome young man before?” He pulled out the mirror he had stowed in his flight bag. “Oh shit,” he said, as he looked at the reflection of the horrified seventy year old man staring back at him.
by submission | Dec 16, 2008 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala
It was raining, it was always raining. It fell thick and oily. I sought refuge in a Food-a-Mat. I dropped a couple of bucks into the slot beside the little plastic door. It had once been clear, but now was clouded with age. I pulled out what was purported to be an egg salad sandwich, sloppily wrapped in cellophane.
I took a bite, considered swallowing, thought better of it, and spat it out. I got a cup of coffee. Well, it was brown anyway, and decided I could swallow that. Neon signs flashed outside the window, failing to impart a festive air to the wet, filthy, garbage strewn streets.
“Honey, time to get up.” My wife shook me awake, “I already showered. I thought you might want a few extra minutes sleep. You tossed and turned all night.”
“I’ve been having those dreams again. They’re so depressing.”
“Maybe I can cheer you up.” She dropped the towel, her long golden hair spilled down her shoulders. She laid down beside me. I ran my hand up her stomach. “Enough of that,” she teased, “you have to get ready. Check in with the med techs at work, you probably just need to have your serotonin levels altered.”
“Yes Dear,” I said, in mock exasperation. I gave her a gentle slap on that cute little ass of hers, and made my way to the bathroom.
“What setting Sir?”
“My settings, number three. Thank you Alfred.” I said to the shower. Lean always chided me about my politeness when it came to dealing with the household machinery, especially naming them. I guess I’m too sentimental, but hey, they’re polite to me, what does it hurt if I reply in kind. Hell, maybe the Animystics who scrounge money at the docking port are right, maybe machines do have feelings. I’m no theologian.
The scalding shower pounded on my back. Leaan said it hurt, but I found it soothing. Wakes you up in a hurry that’s for certain.
“Off please Alfred.”
“Scent, Sir?”
“Synmusk, thank you,” I read somewhere that this scent was actually procured from slaughtered animals centuries ago. Revolting.
I stepped out, and folded the bathroom back into the wall. Leaan was just pulling out the kitchen.
“Kof, “she asked holding up a mug.
“No Sweetheart, tea for me.” I always preferred tea. It had a natural flavour, and the plants were far more efficient at producing oxygen. The older folk said the synkof tasted just like the real thing, but how would they know? The oldest among them was maybe three hundred, and the plague hit more than four hundred years ago.
She placed a cup of tea and a plate of macrobiotic eggs and toast in front of me, and kissed me on the cheek. “I have to run. Doris is being transferred to the Ionian settlement, and we’re having a going away party before the work period begins. Bye love.” She hopped in the tube and was gone. She liked tubing to work, but I’m old fashioned. I like to drive in the sunshine.
I shoved the dishes in the `cycler, and headed to my car. I put my baby in drive and gently lifted into the morning sky. The sun felt good on my face.
“Sir, sir,” a hand shook me roughly. “If you’re not eating, you have to leave.”
I pulled the lead from behind my ear, and pocketed my Sony Dream Man. Reality congealed around me. I walked out into the oily rain.
It was raining. It was always raining.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 15, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was the free-range humans that Dorg liked best.
Those fatty, preservative-laced humans from the cage-farms were disgusting. They had most of their senses ironed off. Eyes, ears, and nose sealed shut for maximum docility. Their sense of taste and their frontal brain lobes were removed. They grew to unnatural sizes, pink fat squeezing through the little squares of their cages. Their slobbering mouth-holes became nothing more than intake valves.
Setting them free would do nothing. They didn’t have the muscles to move their own limbs or the higher brain functions needed to realize a need to escape.
They were pumped so full of antibiotics and preservatives and anti-coagulant that their blood was a dark purple.
When you got right down to it, Dorg had to admit there was a negligible difference in the taste of the meat but as a sentient conquering race, Dorg felt a responsibility to treat the food-source races with respect and dignity.
Let them reproduce the natural way instead of clone splicing. Let them run around in their grass habitats, laughing all the way to maturity until they’re led to the kill-cabins.
Dorg was in favour of the mental dampening so that the humans never learned language, math, or organizational skills. Dorg’s race couldn’t have rebellion. They’d learned their lesson there.
But the humans should at least be allowed to smell the ground, see the stars, and build up some tender, tasty muscle tone before they were taken.
Dorg knew that he was in the minority. Dorg didn’t have the means to buy free-range all the time but he looked forward to the cycles when he had enough money to afford it. Until then, though, he was stuck eating the cheap stuff.
He sucked the flesh off of a fat human arm with his rasping lips and threw the bones back into the bucket of 20 that he’d ordered.
