by submission | Mar 8, 2008 | Story
Author : V.L.Ilian
“Linda Kroen! 155013! Report for duty”
Linda didn’t exactly know why the crystalline voice of the ship AI was blaring her name but she wasn’t going to answer. It’s her day off.
“Linda Kroen! It is estimated you only have 135 minutes until you expire. Report for duty!”
The impulses signaling the importance of the message and the impulse signaling that her mouth is full of blood were simultaneously received by Linda’s brain.
Stumbling out of bed she fell on the cold metal floor. She had sprayed blood all over while gasping for air but the room still looked sterile.
“WHAT? Why?”
Her radiation meter tattoo was black. The little patch of skin almost looked burned with a laser.
“You’ve been exposed to lethal doses of radiation. You must make your way to the auxiliary bridge”
“WHY? Where’s the captain?”
“You are acting captain”
“I’m a level 2 tech!”
“Linda Kroen 155013: promoted to acting field captain by automated succession order on 27 Feb ‘47”
“That’s today. Wher…” As she stood up her lungs filled and she coughed another spray of blood on the wall.
“Ok… Situation report.”
“Aces..Ac…Ac” The voice of the AI reverbed as if caught in an infinite loop. “Information limited. Data corruption. Sensor data shows extreme radiation spike approximately 2 hours ago. Uncorrupted log information begins 27 minutes ago as follows:
– Cpt. Musa deceased, replacement not mentioned
– automated succession order comes into effect. Linda Kroen 155013 selected.
– Cpt. Kroen’s lifesigns fluctuating. Life expectancy: 14 minutes. Medical staff not available. Stimulants administered through ventilation. Massive internal bleeding probable. New life expectancy: 160 minutes
– assessment of ship status begins
Current situation:
– large sections of hull missing”
“You pumped me full of damn stims to wake me up? That’s why I’m bleeding from every pore.”
“Your condition was critical captain”
“This doesn’t make sense… the succession order goes by rank there are hundreds of people above me and… everybody’s dead.”
“Linda Kroen 155013 is the highest ranking living crewmember. You must proceed to the auxiliary bridge to enable the main cannon.”
The new captain had already stepped out of the room leaving bloody footprints on the cold floor. Her heart was pounding, her eyes were sore but she was unfazed. Bodies littered the corridors.
“Why am I still alive?”
“You requested sick leave. That automatically creates a septic field in your quarters. Combined with your documented higher resistance to radiation it was enough to lower your exposure to the event. Next corridor, enter the lift.”
As Linda neared the lift its vents hissed open and flooded her senses with an electric feeling. The lift whirred down.
“Who…?”
“Data corrupted”
The doors opened and a body fell. The sound of his head hitting the metal floor seemed interesting to Linda. Vents hissed again in the corridor making her feel better.
Skipping her way to the next lift she started thinking how cool it will be to tell her friends how fast she made captain. Rubbing the black tattoo on her arm and seeing everyone else’s was the same she spit out some blood.
The lift took her directly to auxiliary command. As soon as the doors opened she jumped into the swivel chair of the captain. Something snapped at landing but Linda was enjoying too much to notice.
“Take a note! Effective tomorrow everybody can customize his or her tattoo.”
“Acknowledged. Please authorize AI control of main canon.”
“Who are we firing at again?”
“Data corrupted”
Linda logged into the console and switched all control options to AI.
“…Good.”
The vents hissed loudly letting in welcomed euphoria. Captain Linda Kroen reclined, twirling, with a smirk on her face, as tears of blood ran from her eyes.
“Stims are great…”
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by Kathy Kachelries | Mar 7, 2008 | Story
Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer
He’d always known about them.
When it snowed, Arwik lived in abandoned buildings. He slept in the rusted creases of abandoned subway tunnels to escape their satellites, and he ate whatever he could forage. He found a lot in disposal bins, but he’d never tried to eat it. People poisoned that stuff, he knew.
They injected tracking devices into his skin when he slept. Often he’d find an unexplained pockmark on his body, something that looked like an insect bite, but he knew what was inside of it. He used to try to gouge it out, but he soon realized that they’d used nanites. Thousands of silicon creatures, eating him from the inside out.
No one believed these things.
At first, he’d tried to warn people. He tried on the subways and on the streets, but everyone walked by with their eyes firmly on the ground. They could come for anyone, he said. They could come for you. Arwik hadn’t wanted anyone to get hurt.
Now, it was about survival.
Sometimes he saw the cops on the street and felt their sideways glances. Sometimes he couldn’t see them at all, but felt their eyes as they watched him through the scope of a sniper rifle. Arwik had seen those rifles, watched them in movies as a child. He knew the power of invisibility.
Once, they’d cornered him on the L train. The trackers, he knew. The goddamn trackers. They always knew where to find him. They offered help, but he knew what help meant. Scalpels and brainwashing. His eyes held open with wires as he would be forced to watch propaganda. Drugged with truth serum and forced to confess to everything he knew about them. He’d be executed in an electric chair, or shot at point-blank range in a seedy alleyway. Sometimes he wished that he hadn’t been smart enough to figure them out. If he hadn’t known the truth, they might have left him alone.
Arwik ran, dashing up slush-covered subway stairs until he found a dumpster in a trash-filled alleyway. The metal lids scrambled the signal, and surrounded by fish bones and plastic bags, he knew that he was almost protected. They could have used dogs, but they didn’t. That time, he’d gotten away.
It’s impossible to know who’s real. Some of them are brainwashed, or have given into the nanites. Some of them might even be cyborgs. Arwik has nowhere to turn. No one is ever safe.
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by Duncan Shields | Mar 6, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
With those sleek shoulders and sculpted faceplate features, I would have guessed her be a Russian model.
Hard to tell with the standard techniques. The criminals always had their own serial numbers sanded off and I2P addys scrambled. I don’t know how it’s possible to live like that.
I’d seen the initiation ceremonies for those involved in the ferrogangs. I understood needing a sense of belonging but the bosses of those gangs were so brutal. Plus, having your identifying marks removed in a shower of sparks just didn’t seem to me like something that a friend would do.
I was made by a good parent company, though. Still in business, still under warranty, still protected. I guess I’d never really know what it would take to become like the unit here in the interrogation chair in front of me.
I had guessed her make to be a relatively recent design going by trends. I’d have to check the catalogues. Wear and tear made her look to be about thirty kilocycles old. She was more likely sixteen with no repairs or upkeep. I’d never know her serial number but at least I’d able to pinpoint year, make, and O-stats with a little research.
Her chipsets were a mess. They’d been booby-trapped, privacy-looped and dust-locked to the point that it was a wonder she could form rational sentences. A low-level soldier for the gang, I’d say. Expendable to the point of being borderline scrap.
I had the wiretap link spooling across the table from my head to hers. It was touch and go. I was sniffing around in her head to find evidence without tripping a defense charge that would kill her. She sat silently during the process. She knew that her life was in my hands. She had to trust that I was a careful detective.
Colleagues of mine cared less about the fates of units like this. I had seen fellow officers hook up, go in and laugh when their clumsy antics triggered their prisoner unit to freeze up and smoke. Feeble excuses and a few months of probation later, they’d be back on the street. It made my wires cross.
I probed slowly, looking for something circumstantial that seemed harmless to her internal watchdog programs but might lead me to a physical location that we could search later for something more incriminating.
Trawling through her memory directories, I found .3pegs and bitmap snapshots of units she’d allowed herself to love and save in non-password protected folders. Their faces were pixilated to me, of course, but the backgrounds weren’t.
There. A signpost in the background. 12th and Iron Ave. Next to a rundown house that was a ferrogang hovel if I’ve ever seen one.
Feigning boredom so as not to alarm her, I copied the shots into a viral protected temp folder in my memory and jacked out.
She looked up at me. “Find anything, sparkpig?†she asked with a sneer.
“No. You’re free to go. Don’t leave town, though. We might need to ask you more questions later.†I said.
“Screw you, bolt-fucker.†She said.
I buzzed for the flatfoots to come in and escort her out.
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by submission | Mar 5, 2008 | Story
Author : Jacinta A. Meyers
A man lay limp in my arms. The body of a little boy was sprawled a few feet away from us, his young face motionless against the blood-stained earth.
“I will stay with you through this.” I said, stroking the man’s face very gently. “I won’t leave you.”
He coughed a little, grit his teeth.
This was my least favorite part. I had only seen an unmaking twice before this. It’s different from death. In an unmaking, the body disintegrates before your very eyes. The DNA in every cell actually unwinds, each reverting to a more primitive state until they cannot hold a recognizable form, cannot continue to function as a complex whole organism. It’s a relatively quick process compared to the amount of time it takes a human being to develop over the course of a lifetime. The rate of change is comparable to the development of a fetus, only in reverse. I watched the wrinkles fading from his face.Very soon this man would be nothing more than a puddle of inert, inorganic matter.
His eyes roved slowly over to the boy still lying in the grass. “Why?” He managed.
“Because I had to.”
He sputtered a bit. “I only came back to tell myself I had a future to be hopeful for. I can remember being so… so despondent then…”
“I had to kill you. That is our job. The past must be protected at all costs.” I said it as I had been trained to. “Through it, we are protecting our future.” He would understand, if he still could.
He was shrinking in my arms. Growing lighter, growing limper. A small trail of saliva ran down his chin. He shuddered. But something in his eyes hardened. “You…are wrong. There is… no way you can be sure.” He was fighting it. “You… may have damaged the future worse… than I might have. Worse… than you could ever know.”
But I was smiling. I held his diminishing body close. “There will still be a future for us to be hopeful for.” I said. “Shhh, it will be over soon.”
“You… you broke the rules… you and your kind…”
“Perhaps we did.” I whispered gently to what was left of his ear. “But you broke them first.”
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by Sam Clough | Mar 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
Below level one-one, there have been several issues with the life support mechanisms. High temperatures, pressures, and an abundance of certain harmful chemical compounds have rendered these levels uninhabitable. You will require a blue keycard to pass the environmental filters, and even so, such an action is not recommended.
“Ash!” Peter yelled, scanning around for his companion. Ash and Peter were regular visitors to the zero-levels, part of a small cadre of ‘smokers’: people who explored and mapped the zero-levels. They repaired essential machinery, looted non-essential gear, and created maps. The only real danger any more was the smoke, and that was most of the appeal in and of itself.
The grating underfoot was heating up. His helmet was analysing the smoke: as they penetrated lower, the percentage of sulphur was increasing. This was level zero-three, the last level that had been reliably mapped. Any further down, and the corridors couldn’t be relied upon to stay in the same place from day to day. Peter dragged his fingers across the wall to his left. A long string of plastic stretched away from his fingertips, and he swore. The wall was searing hot, and he’d just reduced the integrity of his gloves. The choking smoke was only getting thicker.
Ash was nowhere to be seen.
Peter’s helmet picked up and amplified a skittering sound coming from beneath his feet. There was a hole to his right. In the smoke, forethought was a luxury that most couldn’t afford. It had killed a good number of people that had paused when they should have jumped. He dropped through the hole, landing safely on zero-two.
The visibility was down to about a metre, so Peter upped the power on the primitive radar built into his suit. A faint return came back from the corridor to his left. Ash. He chased it down, radar traces mapping the outlines of the corridor onto his visor.
He was moving too fast. He never saw the floor fall away beneath him. He crashed down onto zero-one, and promptly blacked out.
Pain screaming along his arm and across his back dragged him back to consciousness. The skin of his suit had melted to the floor where he’s struck it. The radar unit was damaged, emitting at only irregular intervals. Someone dragged him to his feet, something clacked against his visor.
“You’re in a bad way, Peter. I’ve found somewhere safe to rest, but you have to trust me. Do you trust me?”
“Yes!”
Ash took hold of Peter’s good arm, and started to drag him along, running through corridors that were slowly drifting, semi-liquid due to the heat. Peter dimly wondered how he could move with such surety. Suddenly, their run sloped downwards. Zero-zero. Still, Ash didn’t stop. With a last burst of speed, he dragged Peter through one more corridor, and down through a hole.
They fell – not far – onto a soft surface. The smoke was gone. In a daze, Peter stared upwards. Another suited individual was pushing a hatch shut and sealing it. Ash propped himself up, and pulled Peter’s helmet off him. The small compartments and corridors that Peter had known all his life were missing: they were laying on grass, the air was sweet and clear. Soft light permeated the area. There were trees in the distance, showing up sharp against the bulkhead. There were plants growing in neat rows.
“Welcome to Agriculture One, Peter.”
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