by submission | Mar 9, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
“No, no, no!” he said. It just won’t do.” He looked at the workers and shook his head. “Do you call those hands?” He motioned toward the thing lying on the slab in front of him. “And feet? Those look more like claws!” He shook his head again. “It just won’t do….and we’ve got a time line to keep!”
The workers cowered away from him. In a way, they feared him. But, they also respected him. He was, after all, the head cheese, the Big Guy, the Big Kahuna, the one who ran the show.
Not a one of them spoke.
He looked at the lot of them and took a deep sigh. This was important. This was BIG. It was the biggest project he would ever undertake, and they didn’t get it. Maybe he was unclear? He had provided them with blue prints, schematics, DNA samples, but no go. They didn’t understand. They were set in their ways, and he was being original. He wanted to create something new….something fresh….and they just weren’t getting it. How hard was it to follow his instructions? He wondered. The blue prints were cut and dried. They were simple to comprehend. All they had to do was follow it. Create what he wanted from what he showed them.
But, they just weren’t getting it.
“You,” He said, pointing at one of the main workers. “Come here.”
The worker came forward. There was fear in his expression. The creature was shivering. He could see that and, being the kind soul he was, He felt bad for yelling at them.
By the time the worker reached him, his anger and frustration had changed to something more constructive. “I’m sorry,” He said, “but I’ve got a time line. It can’t be broken, do you understand?”
The worker nodded.
He looked at all the other workers. There were so many of them. He had never worked with so much help before. He wondered why he had taken on this insane task. Wouldn’t it just be easier to leave things as they were? Why break the status quo?
Because I can do better, He thought. I can correct all the things I did wrong the last time and make things better.
He patted the worker on the back. “Go back to your friends there,” He said, smiling kindly. “And don’t be afraid…there’s still time. I don’t need this”—He pointed at the thing lying on the slab—“for another six days.”
He turned to the congregation. “I’ll be back on the sixth day,” He said, “and I want a new prototype—this one to the specifications I gave you.” He held up his hands. “Like these,” He said. “Their hands need to be like these.” He kicked off his sandals. “And the feet….they need to look like mine. Understand?”
The workers all nodded their heads.
He drew in a deep sigh and turned away. He knew when He started that it would be an almost impossible mission to complete, but He had already set things in motion, and He wasn’t about to stop things now. But, on the seventh day, he was damn sure going to take a break. He was exhausted.
“All right then,” He said. “Get to work. Time’s a wasting, but tomorrow will be a new day…and I’ve got a universe to create.”
“Yes sir,” they replied in unison.
Good, He thought. Now to go figure out this night and day thing.
He reached out his hands and began.
by submission | Mar 7, 2014 | Story |
Author : S. L. Gilbow
Nancy is running late again. Not surprising. She’s the type who shows up after you’ve already decided the movie you wanted to see isn’t really worth seeing or after you’ve figured out that the dinner reservation you’ve had for a week was a mistake in the first place.
“After all,” she says, “reservations are so confining.”
But she told you she would be on time today. Time machines, after all, run on a tight schedule. At least that’s what Nancy tells you, and she’s the expert on time travel. She’s the one who works for Timely Vacations. She knows all about time travel, and she knows this time machine is going in five minutes, with or without her.
“Your friend, she’s coming, right?” asks the attendant. You and six other travelers are crowded together in a small waiting room decorated with pictures of notable moments from the past. Washington crossing the Delaware. Napoleon at Waterloo. Shakespeare on stage. They’re all photographs.
As you wait for the time machine doors to open, the attendant looks at his watch, really just a show for you. An old couple stares hard into your eyes. It’s that disconcerting look strangers give best. Scornful and disapproving.
“She said she would be here in time,” you whisper to them. But you aren’t so convinced.
Really that’s too bad. Nancy is the perfect person in so many ways. Nice looking. Raven hair with a tinge of red. A lower lip that quivers with incessant conversation. She’s the one who convinced you to take this trip, a popular vacation package she’s currently marketing.
“I’m just not sure about time travel,” you told her.
“You’ll love it,” she said. “Everyone should try it at least once.”
“What if I meet my grandfather?”
“I recommend you be polite.” She smiled.
“What if I shoot my grandfather?”
“You’re not going to shoot anyone,” she said. “Just have fun. Relax a little.”
So you agreed to go on this trip, your first trip together. Now you’re thinking about not going at all, canceling the vacation to reschedule when Nancy can be more dependable.
“Your friend, I don’t think she is coming.” says the attendant.
“Of course she is,” you say, but you’re not so sure now.
Nancy said the trip would be a blast. A real blast. Going off to see Ireland and spending a few days on the Titanic. Those good few days before that iceberg thing. It’s a popular destination, and you’ve had this trip booked for a month.
You call Nancy one last time in desperation.
“Hi, this is Nancy. Leave a message. I’ll call you back.”
That’s it. You’re going alone. The doors to the time machine slide open. The passengers shuffle in, turn, and stare at you. You step into the time machine and wonder if you’ve ruined everything with Nancy.
As the doors start to close, you feel a tap on your shoulder. You turn around and there’s Nancy, standing next to a door labeled “staff only.” The door closes softly behind her.
“Surprise,” she says. “You didn’t think I was going to make it, did you?”
“Of course I knew you would make it,” you lie. “Where did you come from?”
“Next week.” Nancy smiles at you. “I caught a ride from next week.”
You smile back at her and take her hand. You squeeze it and it feels good. It feels warm and nice. But you can’t help wondering, wondering about the other Nancy, the one who’s out there somewhere, doing something, running late.
by Julian Miles | Mar 6, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They put me in a mansuit again. I objected until the Hnth decreed and I had to comply. Then to my surprise, they acted upon the other half of my request. The Krntch dropped me on a beach. I stood there, watching men of both genders flee in terror, their scanty environmental suits adapting badly to the sudden change of behaviour.
Their negotiating men would take a short while to arrive. In that time, I had to change the environment on which they based their diplomacy. All I needed was a man with a projectile weapon. As if to order, a man in the uniform of a lawgiver charged through the retreating men and pointed his weapon at me.
“Don’t move!”
I raised my upper limbs quickly. It was enough. His training made him shoot me and his fear ensured he shot me several times. I felt the projectiles pass through the suit and let myself fall, gravity flattening the suit and propelling me out through the holes. I reformed in the air above the suit and he fled.
“You’re beautiful.”
My perception shifted and I saw a man with pronounced suckling attributes standing barely a drift away. I modulated my waft and squeezed words into being.
“This is our natural form. We only want to visit your planet to ride the meteorological gases. They are like no other planet we have encountered.”
It nodded and I felt resonance with my desire. An understanding at last!
“You want to surf the wind. I can dig that.”
I ran through the available language I had to find the words: “We only want this. Your elders present us as a threat to further their own aims. I need to speak to the people. To tell them the truth.”
Again, I saw understanding and belief.
“The media! There should be a news chopper here soon.”
That word for hazard I knew: “No! The wind of a chopper will injure me.”
“Oh, yeah. I should’ve guessed, you being a swirl of glowing gold gas. Sorry.”
“Is there any alternative?”
It reached behind itself and pulled a communication device out.
“I can call them. Can you move or do you just drift?”
Obviously some local meaning to the word ‘drift’. I drifted to be beside it. It looked almost reverent as I did so.
“Oh, wow. You have rainbows inside when you move.”
‘Rainbow’? Another new word. They have so many here.
“I presume this is what you mean by ‘move’?”
“Yeah. Follow me.”
“We are interrupting this program with breaking news. This is Kirsty Walters, live from Surfrider Beach, Malibu. The incredible glowing cloud behind me is a real, live Srssn’n. This is what they look like outside of the suits that their leaders make them wear to the diplomatic sessions. Next to it is Suzy Masters, a PA on vacation whose quick thinking allowed this historic event to occur. We’ll talk to Sh’rr, the Srssn’n, in a moment. But its message needs to be stated now. The Srssn’n are not invaders. They want to be tourists, to surf the winds of this planet, and are prepared to trade technology to be allowed to do so. We are being lied to.”
by Clint Wilson | Mar 5, 2014 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
Time travel has always been possible. We’ve been doing it for centuries. Even the most archaic craft in our earliest space faring ventures used to bring back brave voyagers aged a fraction of a second younger than they would have been had they never left.
But to really traverse time, to cover a temporal distance that can be measured in actual years rather than fractions of seconds, would take some extra ingenuity. And consequently the first singular photons were successfully sent back down the time stream in the early spring of 2240. Initially it was just a few seconds, and then minutes, and then hours. And then pretty soon those seemingly insignificant tiny travelers were spanning the years at our command.
But when it was suddenly discovered that we might be able to actually infiltrate antique fiber optic cables and send our own messages back into the past, we all hesitated, and approached this realization with extreme trepidation and concern… and then we plowed on ahead anyway.
We still weren’t able to boost the signal enough for video, but audio was working perfectly, and that was just fine. The newly targeted period of the early 21st century was a time of almost complete global coverage by audio communication systems.
We continuously searched for a likely subject in the archives. “How about this?” said my assistant Harland one afternoon.
“What do you have?” I asked.
“An old 2D site run by an early 2020s woman. A Beatrice McLean of eastern Canada. Her society called, simply enough, ‘The Time Travelers Club’ once celebrated the possibility of, and more importantly, its members’ belief in, time travel.”
“Interesting,” I admitted. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes.” He looked back at me, one eyebrow raised. “There’s a phone number.”
* * *
Brrriiiing… Brrriiiing…
“Hello, Beatrice speaking.”
* * *
I yelled into my cheekplant. “It’s time to open our trap and see if we’ve caught anything. All associates into position please!”
As we pushed forward down the long hallway Harland led the way with his Eyepiece’s strong flashlight. According to our research the old New Brunswick family had owned this place for centuries, but the power had now been off for decades. At last we came upon the ancient storage room.
They had all waited for me. The two maintenance workers had their prying tools jammed into the cracks on either side of the crumbling cinderblock. I stopped, took in the dusty scene for a brief moment, and then nodded toward the workers. In unison they wrenched the old block loose.
It came crashing down and fell into near powder. I stepped forward, waving the cloud away, and covering my mouth I coughed several times. Then through the dispersing fallout I saw it.
It was a flat rectangular piece of white plastic, nearly upright, leaning ever so slightly in its cubbyhole, extremely non-biodegradable, as per our original instruction, perhaps the lid of an antique food storage container. I had a dozen team members standing behind me shining their lights over my shoulders. As I pulled it free from its hiding place and shook the centuries of sediment away with a flick of my wrist, we could all now read the message that had been faithfully carved deep into the plastic with a 350-year-old wood burning tool, by a staunch and serious practitioner of science and science fiction, all those years ago.
The message read…
“2370 Code
XX2D338CG.
Hello future,
Love Beatrice”
by Desmond Hussey | Mar 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
“Who am I?” Karen asked the reflection in her bathroom mirror. For years now she couldn’t shake the feeling that the face looking back at her was somehow alien, not really a part of her. As usual, the unspoken response was instantaneous, “Karen Lynn Warden, son of Greg and Laura Warden. Age fifteen.” Despite the obvious truth of the statement, a nagging doubt tickled the back of her brain like a hard to find radio station, there for a second, then lost to static.
Karen, like all privileged children born to the ruling class after the Revolution, had two brains. Two months after conception, prenatal Karen was introduced to her secondary brain, a nano-implant nestled into the tiny space next to her hypothalamus. As her brain grew within the womb a secondary brain grew along with it, grafting fine filaments of artificial neurons alongside organic neurons via self-replicating nano-bots. By the time Karen was born, her brain was more powerful than any pre-revolution infant’s by a factor of ten.
“How are you feeling today?” Karen’s on-line tutor, Mrs. Perkins asked before their daily lesson began.
“I’m well.” Karen responded mechan cally. She wanted to say something else, but the words never fully formed.
“Excellent!” Mrs. Perkins smiled broadly. “Are you ready to begin?”
Karen nodded.
For the next hour Mrs. Perkins rattled off complex algebraic equations, which Karen answered effortlessly while idly fidgeting with her stylus. Her secondary brain, linked to the DataNet, was able to perform even the most esoteric mathematics within seconds. It seemed to Karen as if she wasn’t even really participating in the process. She simply watched with her inner eye as numerals and symbols danced around her mind until her mouth emitted answers. They were, invariably, the correct responses.
Next was history and social studies. Today’s topic was the Revolution of 2023, which brought about the current utopia of which Karen and her remarkable brain were both products. While a part of her mind responded to each question in fluent and accurate detail, another part of her was dimly aware that her hand was sketching an image on her tablet.
When Mrs. Perkins asked about the Final Conflict, a war which had been waged both in the digital world and in the very bloody, very real world between the AI known as Ozymandius and the rebel Freedom Fighters led by General Kim, Karen finally glanced down to see what it was she’d been doodling. She froze in horror at the image glaring back at her.
“I repeat,” Mrs. Perkins was saying, “Why was it important for our Glorious Leader to imprison and rehabilitate General Kim’s Rebels rather than simply execute them for treason?”
The shock of seeing the sketch had apparently disrupted even Karen’s superior cognition, because for a second all her mouth could formulate were unintelligible syllables.
Once again, Mrs. Perkins repeated the question, her tone and rhythm identical to her previous attempts, making her sound like a skipping record. Or robotic.
For a brief moment there was an internal struggle within the teenage girl’s cerebellum; a miniature, yet desperate war raged like an echo of the Final Conflict as identities battled for supremacy of Karen’s fractured mind.
When it was over, the victor spoke. “It was necessary to rehabilitate the Rebels to demonstrate to humanity the compassionate generosity of Ozymandius and the futility of resistance.”
With the casual flick of a hand, the defiant image of Karen’s hate-filled facsimile was erased from the tablet forever, along with all trace of Karen’s original brain.
