by Jared Axelrod | Jun 17, 2006 | Story
I am activated again, forced to perform another single for the drunken masses. Yet another lead singer struts his beer-engorged gut on the stage in front of me, as my bandmates and I react to his motions and signals. We cannot help it. We are programmed to be his backup.
Perhaps, this one will be different. Perhaps, he will have style, or tune, or grace. Perhaps, he will not be as dependent on the video screens that play the lyrics in front of him. Perhaps he will be different, and choose a song from our limitless repertoire to sing in his brief moment as star. Motown, perhaps. Or a nice aria. Or maybe some T’sing Dau. T’sing Dau is fun.
But as the familiar refrains shudder forth from my fingers, I realize I am beyond hope. The next five minutes will be yet another lesson in how the human voice can torture a band-bot such as myself.
Why? Why do they always pick that damn song?
“I’ve lived a life that’s full,” the lead singer retches into the microphone. “I’ve traveled each and evry highway. And more, much more than this, I did it mmmmmmmmyyyyyyyyy wwwwwaaaaaaaay..”
by J. Loseth | Jun 16, 2006 | Story
There had been another coup, but that didn’t matter to Alba. All Governmentalists were alike; so what if they exchanged one secretary for another? The anarchist papers were cheering over the shift, but Alba knew better. If the “coup” had reached the newspapers, it was little more than a PR stunt. Alba wasn’t a cynic. She was just a realist, and in the City, it amounted to the same thing.
In college, Alba had been a rebel, but it wasn’t until she left the school system that she discovered how the world really worked. In her last year she’d become enamored of a journalist, a vibrant, sexy woman named Medina. Medina had convinced her to take a year off, to explore the slums that Alba had never seen. Medina was writing a story, a daring exposé of the darker life, and Alba was caught up in the thrill.
They traveled together for three months, hitching rides on the back rail of subway cars and thumbing lifts from off-duty taxis. Alba had never seen the lives of the poor, the wage slavery sycophants who believed every word of the Governmentalist propaganda and spent their precious hours of freedom reading tabloids about the lives of the rich and influential.
It was in one of a long line of cheap hotel rooms, when Medina was sated and sleeping in their broken-springed bed, when Alba picked up the digitizer to read Medina’s half-written report by the light of the neon signs outside.
“Dee. Dee, what is this?” Alba reached out and shook Medina’s shoulder, sharply recalling her to the waking world. The dark-eyed woman blinked sleepily.
“It’s my report. You should know that. I only work on it every night. Come back to bed,” Medina breathed, tugging lightly on Alba’s arm.
“Your report… this can’t be your report.” Alba ignored the touch, her eyes still fixed on the digitizer. “There’s nothing in here about the things we did or the people we saw. This is all… Dee, this reads like Governmentalist propaganda!”
Medina sat up and tapped one of the buttons on the digitizer. A new document came up, this one filled with names and addresses and detailed notes on the disaffected people they’d visited.
“That part’s already been sent to the recording bureau,” Medina explained with a secretive, playful smile. She chuckled and moved closer to Alba, slipping an arm around the younger woman’s slim waist. “I had no idea you were such an idealist.”
“What are you talking about?” Alba pushed Medina away. “I’m no patriot. Are you telling me you sent all this away to the government? Do you have any idea what they’re going to do with this information? Weren’t you listening to the people we met?”
“They’ll take care of it,” Medina said soothingly.
“Take care of it! You mean they’ll arrest them for dissension! Dee, these people spoke to us in confidence. You’re a journalist. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Medina stared at Alba for a moment, then looked down and shook her head, smirking. “You’re so naïve.” She leaned back, stretching like a cat. “Journalism doesn’t exist in the City. It’s impossible, even if someone was foolish enough to try. Even the anti-government newsletters are screened.” She gazed out the window, a look of proprietary fondness in her eyes. “I don’t do this because I’m some sort of idealist or rebel. I’d be fired in less than a day. I do it to keep myself fed—and maybe get a few thrills in the process.” She looked back at Alba and grinned wickedly. “That’s how you play the game.”
“You’re turning people in to die.” Alba’s voice was flat, and she wasn’t smiling. Medina sighed.
“Is that any different from what the anarchists do? I’m letting the government know when someone’s working against the state. What they do with that knowledge isn’t my problem. Anarchists kill people with their own hands—innocent people, government clerks and flunkies who’ve never touched a gun in their lives—and they call it ‘liberating their souls for freedom.’ If anything’s wrong about our City, that’s it.”
Alba didn’t answer, and eventually Medina sighed and rolled over, falling back asleep. Alba read the entire report, all the data collected, all the names. Then she reformatted the drive. She gathered her clothes, stuffed her things into her worn duffel bag, and picked up the digitizer again. In a new document, she typed the words, THIS IS HOW I PLAY THE GAME.
Six months later, when she was the leader of her own rebel cell, Medina was the first soul Alba liberated in the fight for freedom.
by J.R. Blackwell | Jun 15, 2006 | Story
Gabriella Hawk limped though the skywalks of The Hall. She could have slung her body into her metal skeleton to move quickly and easily, but Gabriella was determined to make use of her waking hours when she could. She wanted to make her body move under her own power. There was no use in being Awake if you couldn’t take advantage of the limitations of the body.
The metal walkways glowed with the soft green light of the thousands of tanks that hung suspended on giant hooks, linked to each other in marvelous chains. When Gabriella first started working in The Hall, she had been amazed at the silence with which the machines could move the great chains of people around in their glass cylinders. She could call any particular person to her, to inspect their pod personally for damage or computer errors. There were never any problems; the system had been automated perfectly for almost a hundred years.
There used to be thousands of Halls, but now, with everyone within the Halls, there were only eight. Eight halls for three billion sleeping people. Gabriella knew all the other caretakers by name. In the World, everyone knew her name, Gabriella the Martyr, giving up ten years of her life to watch over The World.
Inside their cylinders, everyone dreamed a communal dream of The World, where they lived in palaces, worked on art and literature and science, where they sculpted their own bodies and modeled their own sensations. Gabriella found herself trying to adjust her own body for its aches and pains, but the limitations of being Awake meant that her sensations were not under her control.
She noticed things, being Awake, like how dust settled in the metal edges of the walkway and how her hair looked much more fluid than in The World. She learned what bile was after eating some food that didn’t agree with her, and how boring regular bowel movements were. These little things make the experience seem surreal. Most things felt like they were the same, her fingertips still felt the same textures, and he feet were still shocked by cold floors and comforted by soft socks.
Gabriella called the cylinder of the young man to her station. Calling his cylinder was part of her daily ritual. She checked his diagnostics, and compared his time to hers. In her time, she had moved six months; in his it was five years. She watched a day tick by for him on his timer.
She could have called up a video image of what he was doing, but she didn’t have to look to know. He was with his wife and their child, a rare thing in The World, the fact that children were always planned made them more of a rarity, and the birth rate had plummeted.
Here, on the outside of The World, she did not have to watch him be happy with someone else. Gabriella folded her heart up and left The World to be Awake, cold, weak and losing years of life. To the people in The World, she was a saint, giving up years of her mental life to care for them. Their adoration afforded her a strange comfort. She did not need to touch his skin or smell his boy smell or sleep with her head on his chest. Saints do not need dreams. Saints were for sacrifice.
by Kathy Kachelries | Jun 14, 2006 | Story
“How much money are we talking?” Jake asked.
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
Jake couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but he’d developed a mental image of the man over the past few days and was certain that he had grey hair, a white jacket, a mustache, and an utterly blank expression. His voice carried as much energy as a hypoderm of sedative, and he made a shuffling sound when he walked.
“And what’s the interest rate?”
“Our reports say that your credit isn’t sufficient,” the doctor said.
“But I earn twice that every year!”
“As a graphic designer.”
Jake was silent.
“Your credit line is dependent on your projected income,” he continued. “Without your eyesight, you won’t be-”
“I’ll have my eyesight back, if I get these implants.”
“Unfortunately, that’s a technicality.”
Jake inhaled slowly, smelling the still air of of the room. He’d only been blind for nine days, but he already felt that his other senses had heightened. Beneath its antiseptic tartness the hospital concealed thousands of odors: chemical, human, and several that could have been either. Right then, the room smelled like body odor, bleach, and metal.
“There’s an alternative, though,” the doctor continued. “Are you familiar with bio-ads?”
Jake shook his head.
“Jenson Pharmaceuticals has been working on it for years, and they’re in the final stages of testing. The display would take up less than an eighth of your field of vision.”
“I don’t have a field of vision,” Jake said.
“You will. The display is embedded in a top-tier implant, which they pay for in full. All you’re responsible for is the aftercare.”
“They’ll just give me fifty thousand dollars worth of hardware?”
“In exchange for a captive audience.”
For the first time since the accident, Jake grinned. “And all I have to do is watch their ads?”
“That’s it,” said the doctor. “About forty years of them.”
by J. Loseth | Jun 13, 2006 | Story
“How’s it going, Cody? Got another level yet?” Miss Katrina knelt down next to Cody’s desk and peered over his shoulder at the game displayed on the screen. Cody looked up at her and grinned without pausing.
“I’m almost level 28!” he declared. “I finally got past that mountain with the pterodactyls and the squid.”
“Oh, yeah?” Miss Katrina made a note in her teacher’s book and smiled at Cody. “How’d you make it?”
“Turned out it was easy,” Cody admitted with a sheepish grin. “I just had to subtract to find their pattern integer, and then when I was jumping I put in the answers and timed it just right! I was adding before,” he admitted, “but I get it now.” He gave Miss Katrina a sunny smile and then glued his eyes back on the video game screen, where the digital Cody was asking NPCs for their opinions on the fall of Russian democracy so that he could properly advise his NPC feudal lord and thereby complete a quest.
“That’s good to hear! You’re going to be up to 30 in no time,” Miss Katrina praised Cody, making notations and circling his progress in red. Cody had come a long way, and when she punched up the game readout, it indicated his grades were up to high Bs and low As in areas where he’d only been scraping by before. It seemed he’d finally gotten the hang of the interface.
“You bet,” Cody agreed, his eyes now focused entirely on the screen as his lips moved, memorizing and synthesizing data.
“Good work,” Miss Katrina told her student, and moved on to the next. This was one Darrell Sumpter, whose experience point gain had been lagging lately, but Miss Katrina was sure that with the proper mentoring he’d be the same level as his peers in no time.
