by submission | Feb 23, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
He opened the door. He stood there a moment before he turned on the light. On the far wall, opposite the door, he saw the picture of Jane Russell. He stepped into the room, and placed the bag and the roses on the bed. The bag was heavy, and he wasn’t as young as he used to be.
His arm ached.
He walked around the bed of Room 137 and stood before the picture. She was dead now, but he remembered watching her on the Saturday afternoon movies when he was a boy. She was so beautiful; so elegant.
He looked at the picture a moment longer, then turned to the bag on the bed.
He bent over and a wicked cough shook his body and burned his throat. In a moment it passed, but his chest ached from the exertion. The cancer had eaten him down to a stick of a man. The doctors had given him six months to live over eight months ago. He was living on borrowed time.
He opened the bag and took out the four tripods. He placed the mechanisms on the tripods and set them on the four corners of the room. When done, he sat on the bed, out of breath, and looked at the picture of Jane Russell on the wall.
“See you soon,” he said.
He had lived a long, rich life, but his time was at its end. In his day, he was considered one of the top physicists in the world. Upon retiring, he turned his attention to the concepts of time travel.
He held the remote control in his sweaty hand. Should I? He thought. He snickered. What do I have to lose? I’ll most likely be dead this time tomorrow, anyway.
It was a morbid truth.
He looked at the remote. He had never taken a wife, never had children. He was alone in the world with only his video library of Jane Russell films like The Outlaw and Hot Blood to keep him company. He had watched them all a hundred times over and, in his own way, he loved Jane Russell.
But, would she understand?
He hoped so.
He reached out and picked up the bouquet of roses. He knew that she was beautiful, that men swooned for her. He decided he would write a note and leave it, along with the rose, beside her bed. He didn’t want to be a burden.
He went to the desk and penned the note, doing a dozen rewrites until he was happy. He folded the note and tucked it in the roses, then he stood by the desk, hoping that nothing physical occupied that space back in 1986 when she had spent the night there.
He took a deep breath and punched the remote.
It wasn’t a bright flash, not a spinning multi-colored tunnel. That was all Hollywood glamor. Instead, it was like the blink of an eye. One moment, he stood in the motel room in 2014, the next, he was there in 1986.
It was dark in the room, but he could hear soft breathing.
She was asleep.
His eyes adjusted and he saw her. She lay there. Alone, like he was.
He stood there awhile.
Then, when he knew he could stay no longer, he placed the flowers by her bed.
##
The cleaning crew found him the next morning on the bed, a single rose in his hand. He had died in the middle of the night with the picture of Jane Russell next to him.
No one noticed she now held roses in the picture.
by submission | Feb 21, 2014 | Story |
Author : Deirdre Coles
The key is, you never take anything from really rich people. They’re paranoid, and they often have their own kinds of security. It’s much better, usually, to aim lower.
Jackson had gotten four decent cameras from the wedding of anxious, pregnant young bride and a sullen groom on Friday evening. With all the booze and bonhomie in the hotel ballroom, nobody was keeping a close eye on their stuff.
As he walked past another reception room, a flash of peacock blue caught his eye, a woman twirling around in a long glittering dress, and he stepped inside.
The room made him nervous right away. He didn’t look toward the woman in blue. In a long-practiced maneuver, he scooped up a serving tray, brought it over to the nearest table, and picked up a few empty glasses, a couple of plates, and a camera, with a napkin draped over it.
Back at his apartment, he decided not to sell this one right away. The camera was really beautiful. It was a very pale iridescent yellow, with intricate sculpted buttons with no words.
He experimented with it a bit, and figured out how to take a picture of the two sugar maples across the street outside his window.
But when he looked at his photo, the trees were scorched and ringed with litter. The pavement was cracked and buckled, the buildings in ruins., with broken glass everywhere.
Jackson was starting to get a bad feeling. He took a deep breath and took another picture, this one at an angle of the street corner. On the camera’s screen, the building on the corner was gone, with only one partial wall remaining.
Nobody like Jackson survived for long by being stubborn, or ignoring their instincts, so he didn’t waste much time arguing with himself. He walked down the street to a playground and took a picture of a toddler in the sandbox. Never a good idea to take a picture of a kid, but Jackson was in no mood to be careful. He heard an exclamation behind him and walked swiftly away.
As soon as he got around the corner he took a closer look. The chubby toddler with her Viking-blond hair had become a gaunt, sunburned preteen. So, not much time, then.
Jackson sighed as he turned the camera around and took a picture of his own face. He thought he’d expected the bare, grinning skull looking back at him, but it came as a shock all the same.
He walked slowly back to his apartment. The first thing to do, he thought, was to get far away from all the big cities. And the camera might help him figure out where.
Back in the hotel, a creature who now looked not at all like a woman in peacock blue frowned at her companion.
“I thought you said the human would get rid of it, if it foretold his death?”
The other creature shifted uneasily. “It seems they may have changed since my last visit. Or maybe this one is different than most.”
“Perhaps we should prepare for a longer visit, then. It seems we have a great deal more to learn.”
by Julian Miles | Feb 19, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It took me twenty years. I mortgaged everything I had, including family, friends and the love of my life. But G-Nano was worth it. A revolutionary method where leading-edge technology would restore the Earth’s damaged biosphere as a side effect of improving everyone’s lives. The adaptability of the code allowed scalability that ran from going one-on-one with disease organisms to cleaning the plastic islands at the ocean gyres. I submitted the patent request along with the gigabytes of proving data, then waited for the calls to start.
After a month, there was only one: “Professor David Adams? This is James Rufford of the Ministry of Defence. A car will be outside your block in two hours. It will bring you to discuss your patent application.”
The driver was courteous, as was everyone I met on the way to the nicely-appointed office where James Rufford waited. He looked up as I came in, his wall screens displaying the highlights of my work.
“Professor Adams. Firstly, may I compliment you on the genius of your work. Secondly, may I apologise for the fact that it is about to be classified beyond public scrutiny forever.”
I just stood there, my mouth hanging open. He gestured me to a chair.
“You cannot be serious.”
He smiled: “I am. Let me show you why.” The wall screen showed a grainy, scanned photograph of a group of bearded, top-hatted gentlemen standing next to a wooden frame that supported a tall, naked being with hourglass-shaped openings where its eyes should be.
“In 1754, a Dakerda scout crashed in the Lake District. While computers were unknown to the gentlemen of the time, the mechanicals salvaged from the wreckage were revelations to them. What the only survivor told them before he died was an epiphany. The Dakerda were looking for a new planet as theirs was ruined. Earth fitted the bill: clean with a primitive civilisation. At that time, the gentlemen involved rightly concluded that we could not withstand the Dakerda. So they came up with plan.”
I raised my hand. “The Industrial Revolution. Mechanisation to evolve the technologies we needed.”
He shook his head: “Nearly right. They decided to make Earth unappealing.”
I slammed my fist down on the table: “Surely it is time for that policy to be reversed. We have the technology now.”
“In 1947, another Dakerda scout came down in Roswell. Analysis of that vessel against what little remained of the 1754 wreck showed technological advances on par or exceeding our progress. Their computers took us thirty years to crack.”
Rufford looked at me: “The Dakerda remain so far beyond us that it is doubtful we would even slow their invasion of Earth down.”
I just stared at him. The implications were horrific.
“Professor Adams, we cannot ‘clean up’ Earth. The moment we succeed, the Dakerda will invade and wipe out humanity. We must keep the pollution while we work on expanding into space. Our only defence is to become a star faring race so we can flee. Of course, if we fail, the polluted Earth will eventually spell our doom anyway.”
Twenty years. I mulled over what he had told me to work out why I had been brought in. With a smile, I extended my hand: “How can I help?”
He looked relieved: “Your designs bear similarities to the architecture of some Dakerda systems. We’d like you to discover how they work.”
“I would be delighted.”
by submission | Feb 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Daniel R. Endres
The glasses gave her a headache. With clenched teeth and a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking she put the neurolenses down on the coffee table beside the sofa that served as her bed. Her chest burned again and she cursed not for the first time her inability to resist the allure of cheap Mexican fast food.
Donna had been there again. She’d deleted her over and over again, erasing her from every preloaded dream-sim she owned, but she kept popping up. More often than not Donna was nothing more than another face in a crowd that just happened to stand out a bit more than the others. While she might be playing out the role of a police officer on patrol or a bike messenger handing out parcels, Donna would be on the street, watching with the same cool grey eyes that had defined her in Nancy’s mind.
Sometimes however, the encounters were more intense. In the sim she had just closed, she had been a professor of metaphysics at Campton and Donna had appeared as one of her students. By the time she’d pried the lenses from her head in the real world, things had progressed to a situation better suited for cheap freebooks than for her dream-sims. Even at their most exciting, her friends had often teased Nancy for the dullness of her scenarios. While they lived out imaginary adventures full of fantasy and action, Nancy’s sims were simple lives most people would find mundane… unless Donna was there.
She was a virus. Nancy knew that. There had been a real Donna once, sure. Hell, somewhere there still was, but she hadn’t been a part of Nancy’s quiet life for years. This Donna, the Donna that ironically enough wouldn’t leave Nancy alone even when she wanted her to, wasn’t real. After this encounter Nancy knew that she was more than just an unfortunate glitch that’d latched onto one of her memories. This anomaly had purpose. She would keep coming back no matter how many times Nancy deleted her profile from memory. It wanted something.
This last time, when Donna had pressed her too comfortably tight against the desk of her imagined office, she’d whispered something into Nancy’s ear. In the moment, Nancy hadn’t given the words much thought. Her mind was too torn between wanting the lenses removed as quickly as she could tear them from her face and wanting to see just how far things with this phantom Donna would go. Now though, with time to reflect back on the experience, she could recall exactly what she’d said.
“Meet me at Baker’s.”
Nancy didn’t know anyone named Baker, and even if she did was she seriously considering taking directions from a virus? It was absurd. No, this had gone on long enough. As soon as she could motivate herself to throw on her blue sweats she was going to Tommy’s. He’d sold the neurolenses to her in the first place. He’d gotten her a discount through his job and had insisted she buy a pair. If he couldn’t fix the piece of junk, then maybe he could replace them. Her warranty was still good for another two months and despite her initial protests against buying into something she saw as a fad, she’d grown fond of the simple little fantasies she could come home to. As boring as they may have seemed to her friends, they were an absolute vacation from the soul crushing data entry work she did from home.
by submission | Feb 15, 2014 | Story |
Author : Mark Gorton
London’s High Court has been hearing how a dream timeshare holiday turned into a nightmare for two senior citizens.
In return for £15,000, Bob Plain, 83, and his wife Betty, 82, were promised a luxury fortnight break in the computer-generated splendour of aristocratic Victorian England. Instead, the elderly couple had to endure two working-class weeks at the height of World War II’s Nazi Blitz.
Mr Plain told the court that virtual tour operator Past Times had offered a low price and also tempted him with the promise of lavish gifts that never arrived. “They told me we’d have a holiday we’d never forget,” he said, “and they were right.”
According to their contract the Plains’ trip of a lifetime to 1840 should have seen them mingling at a Buck House garden party thrown by a young Queen Vic, and also given them the opportunity to meet dizzy daffodil loving poet, William Wordsworth. Other highlights included a hot-air balloon flight over the capital, a ride on a train powered by steam, and helping Rowland Hill invent the postage stamp.
All of this was to have been a gift from Mr Plain to his wife. “I wanted to surprise Betty,” he said, “and surprise her I did. But not in the way I had planned.”
The Plains’ journey downtime left them a century short. Instead of Victoria’s England the Past Times server sent them to Brick Lane, London, in October 1940. Here there were no palaces, poets, aristocrats, inventors, champagne or caviar – just sub-standard accommodation, ordinary people, dried milk and powdered eggs. And one of the most ruthless bombing campaigns in military history.
Mrs Plain, who is still being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, described how their holiday began. “Two of the houses next to our timeshare were blown to pieces during a midnight raid. There were dead bodies stinking underneath the rubble. And despite being almost 84 years old my Bob was arrested for being a Nazi spy and put in solitary confinement and given a beating. I’ll never go back there! Never!”
Server problems also meant that the Plains’ minds could not be withdrawn from this environment until their two weeks were up. In that time Mr Plain suffered severe bruising and lost 10 kilos in weight, while a shell-shocked Mrs Plain was committed to a local asylum. “My holiday was complete Bedlam,” she told reporters later.
Expert witness and top Oxford historian Professor Richard Fothergill stated that, in his opinion, there had been a material change to the couple’s holiday plans. “I have researched this period of 20th century history for many years,” he said, “and I have no doubt that the London Blitz is not the sort of thing any normal couple would deliberately choose to experience.”
Lawyers representing Past Times told the court that the server error that blitzed the Plains was a one in ten million accident. The Plains’ lawyers agree – they are seeking £10 million in damages. The hearing continues.
