by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 9, 2008 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Emily sat, quiet and alone in a corner, waiting for the evening’s last song to begin. She watched the immaculate boys prowling the dimly lit room, chatting up pretty girls in hope of securing companionship. No one wanted to be alone.
Emily wasn’t like those girls. She’d been beautiful once, in her own way. A rising star perhaps, soon to be debutante, but never quite comfortable in that skin. Her socialite parents, always considering their daughter more ornament than offspring, hired the finest of artisans to re-craft her after the accident. She was a masterpiece, a fine blend of flesh with fantasy; her own body augmented and elaborated upon with improbable features forged from gleaming materials. She was equal parts girl and gallery piece. She showed wonderfully in public, cleverly hiding her wounds from admiring eyes. Whole again, but no more complete.
Hands folded in her lap, she closed her eyes as the band continued to play a song she knew by heart. She imagined herself dancing with one of the immaculate boys, imagined one would truly care to do so. She’d been asked of course, as though she couldn’t see them in their groups, daring each other, sometimes so brazen as to draw straws. She knew what they were after, the bets they would have made. Curiosity. Bragging rights. A night with the freak girl.
She was glad not to be as stupid as they assumed her to be.
Someone stepped into her space, and she opened her eyes to find a young man standing before her. He started a little as she raised her eyes from well worn and polished shoes to a face nervously hopeful, her look equal parts curiosity and distrust. For a moment he looked away, then returned her gaze and held it steady.
“Can you dance?” he stammered. “Would you, I mean. With me. Would you dance with me?” He relaxed visibly, apparently relieved at having gotten the question out more or less intact. He shifted his weight from foot to foot as he awaited her response.
“I can dance,” Emily answered cooly, scanning the room for the group of boys she expected to find watching him, but finding no-one that seemed to be taking an interest.
“I’m Colin,” he put out his hand as he spoke, letting it hang awkwardly in space until she took it. Reluctantly Emily allowed herself to be coaxed from the safety of her chair.
“Emily,” she offered after a moment, as she let him lead her toward the dance floor. People were casting glances now, she could feel their eyes on them.
“I know,” Colin smiled, “I’ve watched you at all the dances. I’ve wanted to ask you forever, but I daren’t as you turn all the better boys down.”
The band began again, a lengthy familiar ballad she’d listened to from the shadows so many nights before. Colin slipped a hand around her waist to the small of her back, the other holding her one hand aloft. He was sweating, ever so slightly, and smiling. His jacket beneath her free hand was soft from too many washings, and gave off the delicate aroma of mint and coffee.
“Thank you,” he whispered into her ear as they set off, the room twirling around them in complementary orbits, “you’re so beautiful, I was scared you’d turn me down too”.
He squeezed her hand gently, guiding her gracefully around the crowded dance floor. She found herself feeling every bit as beautiful as she’d been fabricated to be, her unbreaking heart beating in time with the music, and the most beautiful boy she’d never known could exist.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 8, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
One thing I like to do is set my iPod to ‘receive’, set the radius to ten meters, and just take a long walk.
Everyone on the street has their buds in. I walk through a group of teens. Track five from Linkin Park’s post-crash album ravages my headphones followed by the final strains of Cancer Seed’s classic debut, overlapping with Speed Coma’s new track Anthem.
Ever since New Year’s Eve of 2012 and Jenny’s famous walkout, I’ve been wallowing in self pity. I can’t shake it off. I’ve been trying but it’s her face that haunts my mind, the imagery of her laughing or specific moments of affection. That’s how I know that I’ve got it bad.
It’s raining out, a fine mist. There is footage up on the main square’s giant screens of the final troops coming home from Iraq. It’s been looping for days. There is a world-wide sigh of relief but a quiet unease for the future of energy. How Do We Keep the Lights On has become the new catchphrase for Obama’s second term. He’s up there on the screens, too, waving from his wheelchair, survivor of two attempted assassinations. Wu Tang 2.0 has dubbed him Teflon Black.
A gaggle of shoppers pass me with their buds gleaming white. Long, lithe women with that European air of lazy majesty. Flight attendants here on a layover, I guess. In my head, their Europop trickles in, all minimalist synth and languages I don’t recognize, layered as they pass around me. I hear what I guess is Scandinavian hip-hop fading into a German ballad as the last woman passes. She glances at me as I nod my head to her music and she grins.
It’s been raining for a year here. A new record every day. We’re at a higher elevation but the coastal cities have been in a state of emergency for months. Necessity is the mother of invention, though, and now that rich people’s estates are being threatened on both coasts, forward motion on Atmosphere Healing bills are being passed through the governmental law-making bodies at a regular pace. We are an entire planet of people that hope it’s not too late.
I’m walking past the art gallery now, past the drug dealers and the old people playing chess for money. Their headphones are big and waterproof, making the people look like ancient DJs or bugs. Strings of Mozart and Wagner trill through my headphones as I pass the chess tables, along with the slow reggae of Marley and the dubstep of RE-Shine from the dealers relaxing on the steps like the rain is sunshine.
It’s like spinning the dial on a radio tuner and every station has something different going on. I’m thinking of Jenny again but these walks always calm me down. I feel a kinship with the world, like we’ve both been hurt, like we’re both crying, but we’re getting better.
by submission | Dec 7, 2008 | Story
Author : Tom Mazanec
Everybody needs a hobby. I am a collector.
I just made it to slide implant technology. I was in my nineties when nanojuve came out, over 100 when I got my Slide implant. What I do is, I buy a small piece of jewelry. Then I walk around downtown Cleveland, using the View option to study a random timeline as far up the 300 year Masterson asymptote as I can get (usually at least a quarter millennium). I look for an empty alley so no one will see me Slide. Of course if I just see charred rubble or something, I View a different timeline. When I get there, I hunt out a pawnshop and pawn the jewelry. Then I look for a bookstore. They are getting tough to find, with readers replacing books in most timelines within reach (and my reader is non-compatible), there are enough bibliophiles in a big city like Cleveland to make one or two flourish. Then I buy a reference almanac or other “guide to modern history” with the money from the pawnshop. Some timelines are using biometric money, but I can usually still do cash, even if it gets me funny looks. I then slide back home with the book and change. I put the change in the coin and currency folders in my closet and the book in my bookshelf.
At first Cleveland had various names (once it was called “Smithburg”), then soon it was called “Cleaveland”, after Moses Cleveland (I go to a Point of Divergence before we changed our name). Lately people have started noticing that I am a Slider…my accent is off, or some point of ignorance in conversation. They ask if I am a “Jumper” or some other such word for sideways in time traveler (never “Slider”…they are lucky enough never to have had that TV show). I know Masterson was a prodigy, but when it is time for telephones, you get telephones (Elisha Gray submitted his patent the same day Alexander Graham Bell did). Before they just thought I was a foreigner.
I have learned a huge amount of history. For example, I have yet to find a timeline where nuclear weapons were never used in anger, or one where a man landed on the moon before we did (and usually well after). My first book was from a timeline with a French Louisiana bisecting the United States, my newest is from a timeline where a Mormon nation called Deseret fills the Great Basin.
It’s been fun. Everyone needs a hobby. I am a collector.
by submission | Dec 6, 2008 | Story
Author : Renee Leyburn
I dream things before they happen to me. I dreamed the day I will die. From what I hear tell, the foresight is a side effect of the genetic selection and enhancement process that was used when my parents decided to have a child. I don’t know all the delicate ins and outs, all I know is that I’m not allowed in casinos, that I have to wear a special armband everywhere I go so that I can be identified, and that I’m viciously aware of how I will meet my demise.
So much for luck. So much for “you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up.”
Some people call this thing a gift. I call it a disease. When I was a boy I thought that I was normal. I thought that everybody was like me. When I hit puberty and the dreams started coming more often, began to be more far-reaching, people started to treat me differently. The future is inescapable and people don’t want to hear about the bad things that are going to happen to them. They want to go on with their lives, dumbly unaware, pretending like they are happy.
There aren’t that many more like me, but there are enough that lately there’s been quite a lot of talk about the need to fix the “flaw” in the genetic enhancement process that created us. They don’t want types like me to get too common. Never mind that the exact same process created them and it’s just a fluke that their futures assault me in my sleep instead of the other way around. Never mind that I never asked for this. Never mind that their future is already what it is, whether they hear about it from someone or not.
Never mind that most of the things I see are not even supposed to be about anybody else. They’re just about me. It’s all about me. It’s all about how my life will go, no matter what I do. It’s all about how this is out of my hands. Last night it was all about how in a moment five hooded men are going to break down the door to my apartment and purge the world of whatever influence they think I have. So much for luck. So much for the gift.
So much for the good of humanity.
by submission | Dec 5, 2008 | Story
Author : Rob Burton
Pour. Spit. Ram. Withdraw. Prime. Cock.
I had really hoped people were better than this.
Aim. Fire.
It’s just a game.
I heard somewhere once that the military used to recruit gamers to be snipers. They’d voluntarily honed their skills since childhood, and could be calm and dispassionate under fire. I can believe that. My hands move fluidly now, too quick to worry about the heat as the drill marches through my head. The words are voiced by some archetypal sergeant. I can almost see the moustache.
Aim. Fire.
The man falls down, an entry wound in his hip like a juicy red apple.
I was a human rights lawyer. I knew the terrible things people were capable of. I just didn’t think it was our natural state. I didn’t want Hobbes to be right. Yet here I am, at a castle gate, making everyone’s life nasty, brutish and short.
Aim. Fire.
When it all switched off we were bemused. Then there was looting, rioting, arson, rape. Blood like the pavements had just rusted. The guns showed themselves for a few days, before the ammunition ran out. I think that killed nearly as many as the knives.
Aim. Fire. His arm still grips the ladder when it falls.
I quickly realised, hiding with the weeping weak, that the simple provision of high walls was enough to keep us alive whilst the world went mad. It’s always the young men. Even before the collapse, as a man you were more likely to die between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five than any other ten-year period of your life.
Aim. Fire. Missed.
So, for all our advances, and all the many places in this great city, we ended up here. The terrible truth is that medieval stuff just works. Forty of us here, access to the river, a safe place to store food, fuel and medicine. Also enough to make us a target. A young man tells me that he thinks the earth’s magnetic field flipped. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it was a computer virus, or nanobots. It doesn’t matter.
Aim. Fire.
Of course, it was a museum, full of things we’d thought we were done with. One of the old men from the home was a chemist. I don’t know how he made this powder, but it was worth every moment of those terrifying midnight scavenging runs. I was nervous when we first fired the musket, shocked when I found out I was the best shot. It turns out that shooting grouse with my grandfather and playing countless hours of ‘longshot’ wasn’t such a waste of time after all.
Aim. Fire. A head pops. It’s just a game.
Except that it isn’t. Maybe it’ll calm down, after some time. Maybe it’s fatty food and television deprivation, or the closing of the world down from global feeds to your field of vision, or worse, some horrible echo of expected behaviour, reinforced by countless films and stories, the same cultural hangover that helps me do this. The longer this lasts, though, this daily grind, the more I doubt it. The more this seems like our natural state.
Pour. Spit. Ram. Prime. Cock. Aim. Fire.
And there goes the ramrod. It didn’t even hit anyone.
So now we die.
A young mother dashes up to me. She’s brandishing a spare ramrod, a prize from another exhibit. With sudden clarity, I wish that she hadn’t found it. Will it be the same tomorrow, as it was yesterday? Can I face it?
Pour. Spit. Ram. Withdraw. Prime. Cock. Aim. Fire.
