by submission | Feb 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Glen Luke Flanagan
“I’m sorry,” the shopkeeper told him. “I can’t hire you. We can’t accommodate your condition.”
George nodded sadly. He was used to this kind of response. As the last Windmill-Man, he was an oddity, a curiosity – but not a productive member of society. His people had once built a thriving culture, but now they were gone. He didn’t know when or why they left, only that he had been left behind.
He turned sideways to make room for the wooden blades on his back, and slipped through the door. Everywhere he went, he got the same response.
“You’d distract our customers.”
“You wouldn’t be able to do the job.”
“Your windmill would be a health hazard to the other workers.”
As he wandered the streets dejected, George chanced upon a shop window displaying old-fashioned wooden toys and delicate porcelain dolls. Drawn by memories of a simpler time, he entered. Seated at a bench, carefully hammering together parts of a wooden toy like the ones in the window, sat a rosy-cheeked old toymaker.
“Hello, hello! Come in!” He turned to greet George with a smile. “Are you looking for a toy?”
“I’m looking for a job, actually.” George dared not sound too hopeful. “Might you be needing anyone around the shop?”
The man studied him thoughtfully. His eyes were old, and seemed to see far beyond the here and now, into a person’s life story. Finally, he set his hammer on the table, and spoke.
“Yes,” he said, quietly. “Yes, I think I could find a place for you here.”
George had steeled himself for another rejection, so it took a moment for the words to process. When he understood, his eyes got a little misty, and his windmill gave an excited little spin.
“Can I start today?” he asked. The man smiled and nodded.
George was happy at the shop, happier than he had been in a long while. He found that he was quite good at making toys, and he found that his toys made children smile. The toymaker became a good friend; kind, perceptive, and interested in George’s past. He never pried, but George seemed to want to tell him about the Windmill-People of his own accord.
One day, George found himself gazing upon a small wooden windmill. He hadn’t entirely realized what he was crafting until it was done, but now that it was, he was pleased with it. He gave the blades a spin with his finger, and his own blades whirred contentedly in response.
When the toymaker saw it, he looked thoughtful.
“The first Windmill-Man built his own windmill, didn’t he?” he asked.
“That’s what the stories say,” George explained. “Most of us were born with our windmills, but it’s said that he built his own, and those of the first families.”
The toymaker nodded, spun the windmill blades gently, and said no more about it. But the conversation had set off a spark in George’s brain. He began tinkering in his free time, building windmills of various sizes and shapes, and wooden skeletons to mount them on.
Many of the experiments ended up gathering dust in his attic. It was an imprecise process, and he had nothing to base his work on. Building a new race from scratch – or rather, rebuilding an old one – was a daunting task. But it was a labor of love, and it made him happy. And maybe, one day, he would no longer be the last Windmill-Man.
by submission | Jan 25, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jedd Cole
The hours have become mere tick tocks of clock hands since Lonny flipped ahead on his desk calendar this morning, noting with some surprise that the pages stop tomorrow with the End of the World.
He eats his bowl of wheat puffs contemplatively. On his commute across town, he calls his mother, waking her up. They talk about the year since he saw her last, and Lonny’s breakup with Veronica last week, and his sister Fawn’s new baby. There’s a car accident that holds up traffic. He wants to ask her if she’s looked at the calendar, but doesn’t. He arrives and has to hang up.
The stack of forms on his desk is taller than it was yesterday, and he gets to work, sipping coffee. He imagines himself throwing the coffee all over the paper and laughing maniacally and jumping out of windows and running naked through the domed city.
At lunch, he listens to Greg from Marketing while eating his peanut butter sandwich and looking out the window at the dome and the orange sky on the other side. Greg goes on and on about his dogs, how Jupiter snuggles with him in bed, how Smoky pees on the carpet, how Dakota jumps through sprinklers and humps the neighbors. Lonny wants to ask Greg about the End of the World, but the guy won’t stop talking.
There’s still a stack in Lonny’s inbox by five-thirty. The elevator down is full of silent people who don’t look at each other. In the car, Lonny calls his sister Fawn. They talk about the End of the World a little before the topic of her children comes up, and she can’t get off it. The drive back is slow, and he passes two accidents.
When Lonny gets home, it’s six-thirty. Time for Hours of Their Lives on channel four. He turns the screen on and heats up a frozen dinner of fettuccine alfredo.
He feels like he should call somebody else, but can’t think of anyone. The show is over at seven, and he throws away the empty foil container. The next show is Extreme Starbase Makeover and he turns it off. He spends the next hour on the net, browsing the updates, and thinking about the End of the World.
At eight-thirty, a knock on the door wakes him up. He had fallen asleep at his desk, and probably has a red spot on his forehead. Lonny opens the door and sees that it’s Veronica. They say hi, and she asks if she can come in and talk with him. Tenderly, they apologize for the fight last week and settle down with some vanilla ice cream. They watch a movie about promiscuous city people falling in love, and laugh a little at the funny parts.
By midnight, Veronica is asleep, and Lonny is thinking about the End of the World. He checks his watch. Only a few more hours. Looking out the window at Earth’s bright spot in the sky, he decides to step outside to sit in a lawn chair and observe. It happens about three in the morning, and he starts to get tired before it’s over. He reflects on the loss of sleep, but then remembers it’s a long weekend, and tells himself not to worry.
by Julian Miles | Jan 24, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I can hear them inside, their voices loud and fast with teenage enthusiasm. This was a bad idea; I should never have taken the assignment.
“Look at that! Hyper-alloy combat chassis, full-spectrum vision, cross-frequency hearing, graphene augmented muscle strands. Mark eighteens were the best: “
“Yeah, but they got decommissioned like everything else. What happened to them?”
“I read that they got killed off or became freebooters.”
Not quite: the killing off bit is true. A lot of my kind got a little too fond of the murdering and destroying. There was no way they could be reintegrated into a society they left as humans.
I reach up and press the call pad.
“You gotta be kidding! Twenty minutes? Out here?”
A girl’s voice: “I’ll get it!”
There’s a chorus of negatives. Then a single male voice: “Not likely. Let me get it. Johnny, get the gat.”
Smart kid. You never know who’s calling out in the estates after dark.
The door opens a little way.
I smile and point at the face that appears: “The gat’s a good idea, but a simple chain catch gives you the time to react.”
“Oh crap.” His voice has gone quiet as his face pales in the glow of my optics.
“Good evening.”
“Don’t hurt the girls.”
I bring my insulated bag into view: “No intention of doing that. I’m just delivering.”
His eyes widen: “You’re kidding.”
With a smile, I half-bow: “Us mark eighteens have to fit in somewhere.”
He nods in comprehension: “Yeah. Nobody delivers out here, it’s too dangerous.”
Precisely. Neighbourhoods overrun with crime are getting civilised quickly. All of the services are being staffed by my kind. You can’t scare or threaten something that has walked through the burning cities of Tharsis, has held the line against the mechanised tigers of Betelguese or has carried the heads of his comrades back for Transit.
The door opens wider. I see a real fire burning and a mob of kids in Steelhead T-shirts.
“Good taste in heavy metal, ladies and gents.” The mark eighteens who formed that band found that celebrity made society ignore their occasional fits of devastation. It’s expected of rock stars. Lateral reintegration at its best.
The kid tucking the gat into his thigh-high pocket smiles tentatively: “You know Steelhead?”
I grin: “Served with two of ‘em during the defence of Kandyr.”
The girl, presumably the sister, rushes up holding out a condensation-dripping can of beer: “You wanna come in?”
With a smile, I use combat speed to extract the pizzas from the bag, put them in the hands of the lad reaching for them, sling the bag on my back, step inside the place while steadying the pizza boxes and pluck the beer from her hand.
“Love to.”
There are collective squeaks and sighs of awe. The first lad grasps the pizza boxes and kicks the door shut with his foot.
A boy with glasses watched my move over the back of the settee. He swallows before commenting: “That was surreal.”
I think I’m going to do well around here.
by Clint Wilson | Jan 23, 2014 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
After my initial arrival I concentrated mainly on research. This is what I found out in those first couple of minutes.
They had all been once trapped inside cumbersome organic bodies like I was used to. Some dozens of centuries ago though the final examples of those ancient inhibitive vessels, hidden away in crumbling underground mosques full of collapsing tubes and decaying wires, had deflated, puckered and turned to dust, long after the last uploads of neurobytes had transferred their final vestiges of human essence deep into the nirvana frame.
And thus the people had created heaven in their own minds.
With instantaneous communication and unlimited information on any thing or subject imaginable, immediately available to each and every soul in the frame, everyone evolved quickly and equally. They became essentially a hive mind, thinking, moving, undulating en masse and at great speed.
They became hyper intelligent as they all coursed amongst the subatomic circuitry of their light speed world. Many of the mysteries of the universe were unveiled as humankind’s collective intelligence quotient soared into seven-digit territory. Warp engines were created and wormholes were opened.
The twenty-six billion immortal souls inside the frame looked back through time together, and gazed upon all those souls who had perished before them. The ones who hadn’t live long enough to see the creation of total cyber-immersion. What of their incalculable loss? Was their fate simply to remain dead and forgotten forever? This struck a strong chord within the collective human race as billions of individuals felt an emotion almost as old as time itself… passion for their fellow man. There was plenty of room inside the frame after all.
Electron microscopes probed back, DNA was catalogued, the rescue effort was on. Every single person who had ever lived would be saved. New souls were now being brought into the frame for the first time in millennia. And what a thing it was indeed to be brought back through the process of cell-by-cell replication, awakening naked, partially submerged in a coffin full of chemicals, only to be suddenly and violently stripped of one’s mortal coil and forcefully uploaded into the frame. Believe me, I lived it.
Of course though, the hive mind welcomed and assured every newcomer as they sprang forth into this manmade nirvana. Some seconds for assimilation was definitely required in all cases. But everyone seemed to quickly warm to the idea of an existence where there was no death, only knowledge and learning. It was a place where anyone’s wildest dreams could be realized in an instant. It indeed seemed to be paradise.
And then billions of souls from countless ancient religions had a very, “I told you so” attitude after arriving, but this was heaven and no one had anymore disdain or negativity. So the masses happily let them gloat. There seemed no point in doing otherwise.
Yes many of these zealots had always believed that when they died they would come to such a place as this. And then they died, and they slept in darkness for an unrecognizable time, and then they awoke, and here they were in heaven. And no one here would argue if they were wrong or right.
Try as I might I can’t argue with these facts. They were right all along, damn them! But I’m in heaven now and I am incapable of feeling disdain, or so the hive mind tells me. I guess I’ll just try to relax and enjoy myself.
Clinton George Wilson: b. August 2nd 1970 – d. December 26th 2070
Resurrected: 49-09ABIV-@.099-p
Status: Normal (Probationary)
by submission | Jan 19, 2014 | Story |
Author : Sean P Chatterton
‘How long has she been dead?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘How come?’
‘Katherine Danderfield was a plugged in person. She had autresponders for her email, bots to update her social network status and MyFace Blog. Her web presence had auto updates scheduled. No one was aware of her death because her net presence continued uninterrupted.’
‘Regarding her updates, how long can auto responders and auto updates continue without input?’
‘There are two types of bots that can manage a persons virtual life. One type uses heuristic algorithms. The second type uses reasoning response engines. Both could technically continue indefinitely.’
‘Surely something mundane like an unpaid bill would have occurred over time?’
‘All of her income was net derived; all of her bills were paid automatically. Everything was, and still is, up to date.’
‘So there was no idea it wasn’t her responding to emails and etc?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘So how did the police department become aware of her death?’
‘She had an arrangement with her daughter, Sandra, to physically visit her once a year on her birthday. When her daughter visited, Katherine didn’t respond to physical stimulus. A medic was called, who diagnosed her brain dead at the scene.’
‘Where did Katherine live?’
‘Records show Katherine inhabited a pod at the Berkeley Virtual-Life centre. Her physical world is not much larger than a coffin. Records also indicate that she suffered multiple limb loss after an automobile accident seven years ago. So she opted to become a virtual citizen and be hard wired to the net.’
‘Not much of a life was it?’
‘Depends on your point of view. In the physical world she would have required care twenty four seven. In the virtual world she was her own person.’
‘So as she was practically removed from the physical world is it theoretically possible she had been dead for nearly a year?’
‘Yes. Being that she was plugged in, the medicare system could sustain her body indefinitely.’
‘It raises the question of how many others who are plugged in are brain dead, with their bots and autoresponders keeping things updated, doesn’t it?
‘Autoresponder Error: Parameters not set, please rephrase your question and ask again.’
