by Patricia Stewart | Apr 18, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Using his pincers, Brachyura meticulously trimmed the crust off the edges of his sandwich. Satisfied that it was all removed, he rapidly consumed the meal in a nibbling motion that was too fast for his human visitor to follow. Brachyura arched his two protruding eyestalks backward over his brow plate and cooed. “Wow,†he exclaimed, “that’s the best thing I ever tasted. What’s it called again?â€
“Peanut butter and jelly on sourdough,†answered Mike Kramble.
“And this exquisite white liquid?â€
“It’s called milk. Listen, Brachyura, let me talk to our Governor. Perhaps I can convince him that this incident was just an unfortunate misunderstanding. Maybe I can persuade him that you didn’t mean to kill the maintenance workers.â€
“Oh dear, Mike, you keep using that nasty word ‘kill.’ I didn’t kill them. I simply ate them.â€
“It’s the same thing, Brachyura.â€
“Of course it isn’t. It’s just eating. I was hungry; they were food. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s what we do on Beta Hydri. Doesn’t your species eat meat?â€
“We don’t eat sentient beings, Brachyura. Listen, you’re wasting valuable time. In a few minutes the guards are going to come in here and escort you to the beach. They plan to execute you in front of your friends and family. They want to make an example out of you, to discourage any future attacks. Please, Brachyura, I can beg for clemency if you show any sign of being remorseful.â€
“Mike, I’m not remorseful. I’m just full. Besides, it’s not a problem. I love our beach. It’s next to the ocean. I can finally go home.â€
“Brachyura, you don’t understand. You’re not going home. There’s a twenty-foot high electric fence around this island. We had to build it because you guys think that it is okay to eat us. We only want to live here in harmony with your species.†Mike could hear the escort detail coming down the main isle. A minute later they unlocked the large cage door and slid it to the side. The guards used their cattle prods to motion Brachyura out of his cage. Electricity was the only effective weapon against the four-foot tall by ten-foot wide crustaceans. Bullets only ricocheted off their super-hard exoskeletons. As Brachyura walked down the corridor, his eight legs skidded erratically on the hard concrete floor. When he stepped out of the makeshift warehouse prison onto the soft sand, he paused. He spread his foreclaws apart and raised them toward the noonday sun. Momentarily startled, the guards jumped backwards and extended their prods.
“What a beea-uuuuu-ti-ful day,†proclaimed Brachyura. Then he lowered his claws and turned toward Kramble. “I will miss you, my friend. I will also miss peanut butter and jelly on sourdough. Perhaps in a few years, the relationship between our two species will improve, and you can make me another sand-d-wich.†With that, he bowed his head in a respectful gesture. An instant later, the back of his shell split apart to allow four large wings to unfold. In a maelstrom of blowing sand and debris, his massive body lifted off the beach. He hovered for a second, then majestically turned and flew over the fence. He splashed into the ocean approximately 100 yards offshore.
“Well, I’ll be damned†remarked Kramble with a smile. “They can fly.†Then he suddenly realized the colony had a serious problem. “Whoa, I guess that kind of makes our electric fence worthless.â€
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by submission | Apr 17, 2008 | Story
Author : Jacinta A. Meyers
“Oh!” Justice jumped, spilling the two hundred year-old cabernet all over his ratty clothes. “Y’know what we got here, fellas?”
The other two looked at him. He was grinning like a fool, strings of diamonds draped over his neck and clothes dark with the wine.
“We done confiscated the king’s music box!”
“Music box?” Burgess arched a brow.
“Saw it on the Web-waves.” Reaching a grubby hand out, Justice touched the glass. “It’s old. Worth millions, I reckon.”
Citizen ran a hand over his chin. The rings on his fingers glistened. “Worth more than the crown jewels themselves?”
“Not sure, but it’s worth lots. And hell, anything’ll help the rev’lution.” Justice nudged Burgess with a knowing elbow. “Eh?”
But Burgess was staring into the dome. There was a boy inside, sitting on a small patch of marble. A violin lay beside him. The child’s eyes held such sadness, it hurt to look at him. “How old you say?” He asked absently.
“Well, from the twenty-third cent’ry at least.” Justice was nodding. “They made ‘im look older though. Costume and all,” he pointed to the elaborate waistcoat, the lace at the boy’s neck and sleeves.
Citizen leaned forward eagerly, a hungry expression on his face. “Don’t suppose we could take a listen…”
“Don’t see why not.” Justice shrugged. He stepped forward and gave the gilded base a kick. “Come on now, play you bloody thing.”
The boy got slowly to his feet. He tucked the violin beneath his chin and raised its bow in his hand. He began to play.
At first they heard nothing. Then, gradually, they began to notice a low rumbling. The air filled with a sound, the most delicate thing imaginable. The men stood staring in awe, listening.
“How’s it work?” Citizen whispered.
“He’s makin’ the glass vibrate from inside…” Justice whispered back. “That’s what we’re hearin’. Like a bell or somethin’.”
“It’s beautiful.”
But Burgess was weeping, big fat tears rolling silently down his cheeks. He couldn’t bear it. Taking up the bar they’d used to pry the box’s case open, he swung it at the dome.
There was a soul-shattering clatter. Shards of glass shot everywhere. Justice and Citizen stood there, mouths agape. “What’d you do?!”
The boy stared too, then dropped to the ground. Burgess went to him, held him up, watched as he began to age rapidly before their eyes. The skin of his face crinkled like old paper. But he was smiling, the violin still clasped in his shriveled hand. “Merci,” he whispered. “Merci.”
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by submission | Apr 16, 2008 | Story
Author : V.L. Ilian
Vice manager Hans Heidelberg exited the elevator with unusual nervousness. He knew the chief was awaiting his report but never in his life had Hans been so unsure about himself.
“Mr. DeVries… The report on the 2 hour outage of our mainframe is complete.”
“Well… get on with it.”
Hans took a deep breath imagining the scene where he gets fired for incompetence in interpreting the data.
“Less than 24 hours ago the mainframe started constructing a profile for a new employee, Joana Baker, a young graduate student who’d been accepted as a research assistant. 6 seconds into the profile build a speeding ticket threw up a red flag with the plausibility checker.”
“How can a speeding ticket fail a plausibility check?”
“It seems it had been issued exactly 54 minutes earlier in Singapore. The AI established that Joana Baker could not have traveled from Singapore to her interview in a 20 minute window. However this did not freeze our mainframe. A series of programs started running to check for mistakes, identity theft and a number of other theories.”
Hans put his thumbdrive on chief’s desk and pressed the little button on it. The file of Joana Baker appeared on the display surface of the desk in front of Mr. DeVries.
“It turned out another Joana Baker who lives in Singapore received that ticket.”
A second file appeared next to the first one that also read Joana Baker but the photo was of the same person. Different hairstyle, different clothes but undoubtedly the same person.
“The puzzle is their biometrics match 99%”
“Separated sisters?”
Hans pushed the little button again.
“Researching this other woman threw up several other plausibility errors. We discovered a third woman named Joana Bakker living in Amsterdam.”
A new file was being displayed, again of a woman who strongly resembled the first.
“Are you certain this is correct?”
Hans swallowed dryly and continued.
“All 3 women are exactly the same age and match biometrically 99%. This time the results attracted the interest of a background program that had been running continuously for 20 years. It had the credentials to prioritize itself and it did so by putting every program on hold. This resulted in the freezing of all our operations.”
“What program is this? Who gave it these permissions?”
“When queried it identifies itself as Project Harper Detector v3.2.”
Mr. DeVries changed his expression noticeably.
“No links, no ownership info and there’s no project Harper in our database. It was so firmly rooted in our mainframe we couldn’t stop it without cutting all the power. We were ready to do just that when it finished and returned the mainframe to normal operation. It… gave us some results”
Hans pressed the little button again, the first three files shrunk and the desk was filled with files. All variations Joana Baker, all 99% match to the first, spread all over the world.
“In total we’ve identified 27 Joana Baker… s. Born on the same date, in fact if we take into account errors in hospital clocks… they’re all born at approximately 13:30GMT.”
Hans waited to be fired.
In a moment that is rarely witnessed Mr. DeVries smiled broadly.
“Project Harper was a classified research initiative… we tried to create ripples in the fabric of the universe. The theory was that if we could disrupt space-time we could create anomalies that we could detect and find out how the great machine ticks. After 11 years of failures the project was abandoned but we left an AI running to spot data anomalies just in case.”
Hans looked down at the 27 files.
“…The universe threw an exception error?”
“Yes… Now we just have to figure out how.”
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by Duncan Shields | Apr 15, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“I mean, what I’m saying is,†he said, “is that going skinny dipping never killed anyone.â€
Her eyes trembled back for a second and her look softened to a vacancy that let him know that she was accessing.
“Brandy and Jorge Garcia were killed in 1956 by their own village for skinny-dipping.†She replied. “It was seen an indecent behaviour for an unmarried couple. There are twenty such incidents on file and 48 more hits unexplored on the subject.â€
She took the fun out of everything.
Every open-ended argument about what the capital of Zaire was, or what actor starred in that action film ten years ago, or how the words to that song were sung was suddenly a five-second conversation that ended correctly and abruptly.
His friends teased him about going out with a girl with implants. They said that she was obviously slumming it by going out with a kid too poor to afford brainwork. He told them all politely to get fucked. He was in love with her.
The implants were trying his patience, though. He realized that the inadequacies of his own memory and lack of connection to the network were basically the reasons that he had conversations at all.
The only things that she wanted to speak about were the unknowable answers to age-old questions like “what is life?†and “which religion is best?†and even then she had volumes of theories to draw upon.
They had a lot of sex together which was pretty mind-blowing considering all the tantric volumes that she studied and downloaded but afterwards, he got the feeling that while she knew, well, everything, she really didn’t have a personal opinion on anything.
When he asked her how she felt about something, she’d get a confused look on her face and he could see the effort it took her to frame an answer. In a way, she was even more naïve and simple than he was.
That’s why he loved her and that was the reason why she loved him, he thought. He could challenge her in ways that her implant-ridden, philosophy-obsessed pals uptown could not.
He was wrong, of course, but it was a fantastic summer for both of them.
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by submission | Apr 14, 2008 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
“There’s a bug in my drink,” said the customer.
I lifted the glass and held it to the light. Sure enough, a little fly floated midway, almost obscured by the amber liquid.
“Sorry about that.” I poured him a replacement, and he went back to his table satisfied.
The bar was busy tonight. Several people had requested The Game on TV, and I had reluctantly turned it on. Naturally, that spawned a group of Moral Authorities to come over and berate me for allowing “pornographic filth” into a family establishment.
The Game patrons tip better. I told the Moral Authorities to look elsewhere for their superiority complex.
Over in a corner, three women were drinking too much and giggling. Occasionally, one would glance over at me, look away hastily, and giggle even louder. I knew what was coming and prepared myself.
Sure enough, after a minute one of the women came over with a twenty and a smirk. “You got a minute?” Her voice was noticeably slurred.
I nodded, and she placed the twenty on the bar. “I hear you can make a woman orgasm with one kiss.”
“Is that so?” I glanced around; people were watching The Game, and the room was loud enough. Still….
“Go ahead,” she said. “See if it works. You can keep the twenty either way.” Her eyes were heavy-lidded. I wondered briefly if she would remember. Her friends would, though.
Unless….
I quickly poured three shots of my special brew from under the counter and put them on a serving plate. “Lean over this way,” I said.
She smirked and did, and I kissed her, careful to keep my lesser libido in check. Her skin flushed, her eyes widened, her shoulders rolled. A trembling began at her loins and worked up her stomach to her head, and I placed a hand under her arm to support her.
“Take these three on the house,” I said, walking her back to the table. She sat down heavily, shell-shocked, and her friends whooped. The Game drowned them out. I winked and went back to the bar.
It was always a risk, but the special brew would make their memories fuzzy and other people would remember The Game better anyway. With luck, she would never notice the babies hatching in her body until it was too late.
Under the cover of the bar, I refilled the Brew bottle from my proboscis, then cheered a particularly good beheading.
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