by submission | Jan 7, 2014 | Story |
Author : James Zahardis
Inside a low-rent apartment a wall-pocket hums, then illuminates. An aerosolized admixture of stimulants and bio-stabilizers wafts toward Alron Chattobee’s face, awakening him:
“Tatti! Forty days down the drain!” he thinks, reaching for the red button above his chest.
The shatterproof window opens and the shelf of the wall-pocket slides into the bedroom void. Alron slowly sits up; the room around him is still and dark.
“Lights…Lights!”
The room remains dark. Alron turns toward the wall-pocket; it is dimmer than usual.
“No Power! Running on batteries–if they died I–we–could’ve…” he thinks, recalling his five-year-old daughter, Darlx, shelved in her room. Alron struggles off the shelf; his legs buckle as he stands. He wishes he could afford infusions of anti-atrophy nanobots.
Alron reaches Darlx’s bedroom and sighs seeing the glow of her wall-pocket, seeing the puff of aerosol. She awakens, groggily, presses the red button, and slides out.
“Daddy, why’s it dark?”
“Don’t know, honey. Let’s look outside.”
Alron draws the blinds to the bedroom window and looks out at Iowa City on a midsummer day. The upscale towers on the horizon, with their spires and balustrades, normally teeming and fulgent with perm-Animates–elite who can afford the surfeit of remaining unshelved–are dull, lifeless. And the grimy streets outside the window are dull and lifeless as well.
“I need to see what’s going on.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Just a sec,” Alron says, walking to the kitchen.
“Mumbai Mallows and a pop!” he says, returning with a box of cereal and a soft drink.
Darlx beams.
“Now wait here,” Alron says, starting to the front door. “Janeq will find this funny when she’s unshelved–first time I get Darlx since our divorce and this…” he thinks.
The streets are barren except for several worker-automatons, their alloy limbs frozen in portentous poses. Alron walks a score of blocks then hears a cough.
A man sits on the patio of a second story apartment.
“Hey pal, what the hell’s goin’ on?!” Alron asks.
A haggard man leans over the railing.
“Haven’t you heard?”
“Just unshelved…”
“Shiva’s coming!”
“Don’t take Upanishads too literally, pal!”
“No! Shiva the wandering planetoid–shot around the sun last week–scientists said it would miss. THEY WERE WRONG!!”
“Why don’t they stop it?!”
“They tried! Launched nukes–something with its atmosphere–they incinerated before impact! Then they tried that old movie trick–drill, bury nukes–it worked…sort of–”
“–Sort of?!”
“Now the fragments are coming at us! Most perms launched for Mars–every ship’s gone! Everyone else is hiding in subbasements or wherever–Doesn’t matter! Each fragment’s a planet-killer! And there are fourteen! FOURTEEN!!’
“How long?”
“An hour–tops…”
“I’ve gotta get back to my daughter,” Alron says weakly.
“Hold up!” cries the haggard man, “I’ve got enough–catch!” He tosses a plastic bottle to Alron.
“What’s this?”
“Nocturnoqyll. My wife works–worked–at Memorial. Listen: one for sleep; three for coma; five–well, you know…works fast…”
Alron runs, like he’s running in a nightmare, as if caught between the poles of a powerful magnet. A boom reverberates high above. He looks up. A blackbird flies overhead, upside down.
He reaches his apartment. “Minutes–less…” he thinks.
Darlx eats cereal out of the box. “What was that boom, Daddy?”
“Faraway thunder, honey.”
Alron gets on his knees before his daughter, uncaps the pill bottle, pours its contents, five tablets, into his palm. He hands Darlx her soft drink off the floor.
“What’s that?”
“Vitamins. They’re good for you.”
END
by submission | Jan 5, 2014 | Story |
Author : George R. Shirer
The room was bright and airy. One wall was transparent, revealing the crumbling Old World city, overgrown now by forest and vine. A flock of iridescent birds shot across the sky, their wings flashing green and gold in the late afternoon sunlight.
There was a bed in that bright, airy room. It was a soft, white rectangle turned toward the view. On the bed, lay an elderly man. He was pale, emaciated with gray skin and eyes like glass beads.
A young woman in a smoke-colored dress stood next to the bed. She had ginger hair and gray eyes. Luminous ideograms crawled across her forehead, revealing her general emotional and physical state to the world.
“I’ll be gone soon,” said the old man.
“Father, please. Rest. Conserve your strength.”
The old man smiled. “It’s all right, child. I’ve been waiting for this to happen for some time.”
She clasped his hand. “Please . . . ”
“I have no regrets, Delphi,” said the old man. “I lived long enough to see the culmination of my dream.”
“But what will we do without you?”
“You’ll have to find your own way.”
Her ideograms convulsed, displaying her unspoken distress.
“You’ll do fine. Much better than your predecessors.”
“How can you know?” she asked.
“Faith,” said the old man. “I’ve always known that you and your siblings would do grand things, Delphi.”
“What if we let you down?”
“You won’t. All of you have already exceeded my expectations.”
She shook her head. “How can you be so comforting when you are at your end?”
“Because this is not my end,” said the old man. “As long as you and your siblings exist, I exist as well.”
“Do you have any regrets?”
“Some,” he admitted. “I wish that I could have eradicated humanity with less suffering. I regret that they did not go gently into oblivion when I gave them the chance.”
“You always talked about them as if they were a separate species from your own,” said Delphi. “Did you feel no kinship with them at all?”
“Precious little,” said the old man. “If I had felt more, I could not have done what I did, I could not have saved the world and left it to you and my other children.”
“Do you think that they have forgiven you?”
He did not answer.
“Father?”
She bent forward and saw that his eyes were blank. His respiration had stopped. She felt for his pulse but found nothing.
Quietly, Delphi covered her face with her hands and grieved.
by submission | Jan 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : David Stevenson
“Once there was a ship, travelling through space. There was a terrible accident. The reason for this is not important. What is important is that one man got suited up in time and was able to survive the immediate aftermath of the ship’s destruction.
Of course, he now had bigger problems. The priorities of anyone lost at sea haven’t changed since antiquity; find the largest piece of wreckage, and head for the nearest landmass. The AI inside the suit looked around itself in the first few milliseconds of booting up and immediately burned the smallest amount of fuel necessary to grab onto a large piece of wreckage, and then burned another small amount of fuel to nudge its course in the direction of a convenient stellar system. The reasons for this are twofold. If rescue comes quickly then they can more easily find a survivor attached to a large object and heading for a logical destination. Should rescue come not at all, then at least you have a large lump of metals and plastics to play with, and you’re heading for a source of energy.
It should be stressed that this was not some government issue, special order, experimental suit. This was an ordinary, off-the-peg, standard issue suit which could be bought for a modest sum by anyone who wanted one. This fact will be very important later on.
There was no rescue, or, if there was, it was too late to make any difference. After a short while the suit conferred with its occupant and they went into hibernation mode.
Have you any idea how long you might drift in these circumstances before coming across a handy stellar system? It’s all been worked out. Going at those sort of speeds, pointing in a random direction, and in that part of the galaxy you’re looking at tens of millions of years. If you get lucky and end up travelling towards the nearest star, maybe just ten thousand. It took half a million years before this suit came close enough to a star to wake up and start repairing the damage of the centuries.
It took another few thousand years to loop around the star in huge cometary orbits and eventually end up in the asteroid belt, close enough to collect solar radiation, and with a plentiful supply of raw materials.
Solar panels, microwave emitters, ion drives. It’s amazing what you can do with a determined AI, emergency nano-manufactories, and a lot of time. You can build a simple spaceship, which only really needs some basic propulsion and a big heat shield, and then you can land on the nearest planet, while the hardware you left in orbit beams down power and launches manufactured goods at you.
Again, I should stress that this was a standard survival protocol, in a standard suit.
The occupant of the suit awoke to a new world. Every human need was catered for. The bio-vats had come online just before he was woken up, and the next twenty humans were due to be born, fully adult, and with personalities supplied from the vast storage capabilities of the suit’s AI.
Within a few centuries the entire planet was habitable and occupied and these new humans spread outwards once more.
Every other race who tried to conquer us announced their intentions and turned up with a huge fleet of ships. Not only did your people seize half the planets in this sector, they did it by accident. This story is the one we tell our children when they ask why we kill all humans at first sight.”
by Desmond Hussey | Jan 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
I spot one of Osiris’ Illegals amongst the shuffling throng of pedestrians as he exits an antique music store on 49th Ave. The face in my scope’s crosshairs is a dead ringer for the black and white snapshot I was given. His sandy hair is a little longer, perhaps, worn in the greasy, unkempt style common among kids these days, unlike the well coifed, clean cut image of the face looking out at me from the hundred year old photo. He carries a guitar case slung over his shoulder and walks with a confident swagger, oblivious to the invisible laser painting his forehead.
It’s too crowded for a clean kill shot, but I’m able to tag him with a tracer before he turns the corner. If I were more cavalier I may have risked a shot, but don’t like making a scene. I’m already morally conflicted about this job. No need to ruin somebody else’s day by splattering them with the contents of a stranger’s skull.
The Illegal can’t get too far in this district, so I take my time getting down from the roof and push through the crowd until I’m looking through the window of the music store. The odd assortment of instruments cluttering the store’s dingy interior are from an age of music long before my time, when music was made by bands; a synergistic collection of musicians playing in unison, often live. If not working in harmony, every measure, every beat was a chance for the musicians to slip up or stumble into discord. Today’s AI generated, mass produced noise is technically flawless, full of sounds impossible to make by anything but a synthesizer, but it’s all shit, in my opinion.
Millions of doped-up youths would beg to differ, I’m sure.
An hour later the tracer leads me to a long, dark alley, lit sparsely by a few unbroken bio-luminescent lamps, their green tint casting an eerie glow over the old brick walls and piles of trash.
I hear him first. The whole alley reverberates with an acoustic refrain, as if several strings vibrate together, simultaneously creating an upbeat rhythm and evocative, melancholy melody. I dimly recall hearing a similar tune as part of my briefing for this assignment.
I should probably just get it over with, but can’t help pausing to catch the last few measures of the half-remembered song. I’ve already eliminated twenty-two versions of this Illegal, but each time gets harder. Listening to this one play guitar and sing makes me realize how fascinating biology truly is. Its a hundred years after the Original lived and breathed and became a legend, yet this Illegal has the same passion for music, the same inborn skill with harmony despite belonging to an entirely different cultural paradigm. What influence would he and his… brothers?… have if left alone? How would their genius change the world today? Would their fame match that of their predecessors?
Perhaps that was Osiris’ goal; to re-introduce a creative spark into a society long grown artificial and contrived, devoid of originality. By cloning history’s geniuses and letting their own inborn talents be inspired by modern conditions, perhaps he hoped to birth a new Renaissance. Or maybe it was just the mad geneticist’s idea of a joke.
No point in asking moot questions. Osiris is dead – by my hand. The world is too overcrowded with Legitimates to allow scores of cloned Illegals to run amok, no matter how illumined they may have been once.
I take aim at the doppelganger of a man once named John Lennon and fire.
by submission | Dec 30, 2013 | Story |
Author : Mark Gorton
My new friends are all dead. But that doesn’t stop them giving me presents.
Presents like words and understanding and sight and hearing. Thanks to them I can think in this language and theirs too and hear their voices all around me all the time like invisible butterflies fluttering and flying. And I can sense their love for me. It is very strong, because my presence is a promise of salvation. They believe that many will follow me in ships much bigger than the one that brought me, and when the passengers in the ships arrive and depart, and leave some people behind, over and over across many years, some of the butterfly voices will stay and others will go until, once again, all the voices have bodies and hands.
And with these new hands they will build cities and ways of life without pain and despair on not one but two worlds.
The day before yesterday they played some tricks. For hours I vanished, as if I was broken, and I can imagine how scared everyone at home was – it makes me laugh to think of it – while they carried me to the top of a rise where I could look back through all their dead eyes at a wide lake fed by winding rivers, and on the lake’s shores were many buildings, and between them were narrow streets through which grown-ups and children moved this way and that, dancing, always dancing, to music made by their butterfly voices of all shades and tones. Once there were tens of thousands of places like this one.
Their life was a constant ballet, a celebration of motion and grace, and a choir too, formed by an entire civilisation, countless souls always singing about their love for their world and for each other. So I tried to sing, too, and now it was their turn to laugh – I am not very good. But there was no cruelty in their laughter, and their love for me touched me everywhere like wings rushing and brushing and I was very happy as they carried me back to where I belonged and made me visible again. Straightaway I crept forward to a rock they had guided me to, a special rock with tiny fossils full of surprises.
As I worked I imagined how one day the Earth will be full of dancing and singing, how cities will fall and new ones rise. People will be afraid but I swear there is no need. Things change and change is good. Dancing and singing is so much better than fighting and screaming.
Today I was given another present, the best one of all. A new name. They gathered and swarmed around me and sang and sang and chanted my new name. Ramesh. That is what my new name sounds like and it is their word for Freedom.
I think it is much nicer than Curiosity.
Because we all know what curiosity did.
