by Duncan Shields | Feb 13, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Janice faltered in the dark apartment. It wasn’t hers. She was sobering up, the guy was snoring, and it was time to go. She had her panties in her pocket and her shoes were dangling from her hand by their thin, blue straps.
It was time to head home, have a shower, print off a fresh uniform, and try to clear her head for work.
She had a sub-orbital to catch to Leningrad and then the Skyrock up to Luna2. Too many launch G’s and ten years of space travel meant that her career as a flight attendant was coming to an end. Osteoporosis was setting in and her capillaries were starting to rupture.
She had a future of varicose veins and weak bones to look forward to.
Janice was independent. She used to laugh at the younger attendants who would sign on to permanent careers with one company for pitiful pensions or use their job to romance rich patrons in First Class and catch themselves a husband.
She used to scoff at the ones who found sugar daddies to pay their bills while they put their own paycheques into low-yield, low-risk investments. Sheep.
Janice looked at them as space whores. She thought she was better than that. Things were not working out, however, and she hated herself at the moment.
Janice had been a smart girl with a bright future. The flight attendant job offered a chance to travel and was a fairly easy form of crowd control. The safety protocols were so redundant these days that an accident was nearly impossible.
It was safe, she saw the worlds, and she was beautiful. For a while, she was an angel of space.
Time had raced past her, however, and she’d never finished her degree. Her body was starting to degrade and she had no money of her own saved up or at least not enough to retire with.
She’d put all her paychecks into high-risk investments and as of three months ago, her money was gone. A decompression had taken all of her investments away along with most of the executives that were behind the project.
A low-level panic had started in. She’d been given a copy of the note from the work doctor that said she had six months left of safe travel before she should be grounded.
It was an execution sentence. The party was over and it was last call. This angel was getting her wings clipped.
So she started sleeping with first class passengers and taking their money.
She had nothing. Something about flight attendants really got men hot and bothered so the pickings were easy but most of them had wives already.
She had four months left to hook a husband with money before her time ran out. She had nightmares of the bubbles building up in her bones until she became too fragile to walk. She’d be in a wheelchair and begging for change. Her looks would be gone.
She’d be terrified of falling.
She is terrified of falling.
by submission | Feb 11, 2013 | Story |
Author : Algor X. Dennison
“Are you out of your mind?” Captain Lurren screamed at me. She clung to a broken strut over the glowing red chasm where solid deckplate had been a few minutes earlier. I wanted to tell her that she looked like the crazed one in that position, and that she was lovely anyway, but I couldn’t speak like that to my captain.
“Live for both of us!” I yelled. Turning, I ran down the tunnel to the cargo bay where we were being boarded. Another blast to our dying ship’s underbelly could suck us out into cold, dark space. Without a shieldbelt’s bubble field to push away the -450 degree vacuum, we’d be finished. I couldn’t let that happen to my captain. I had been hers to command since graduation, and I loved her despite repeated attempts to have me discharged. For her I would die, and relish it.
Shocktroops poured into the cargo bay. Before I could open fire, a burst from an enemy laser rifle cut down a pipe which fell and hit me. A novel tactic, but they shouldn’t have given that idea to a grenade man. I emptied my explosive rounds at the ceiling on the other end of the bay. Debris rained down and a pressurized tank above blew out with a colossal boom. Taking heart, I charged the alarmed shocktroops with a battlecry.
A distant roar drowned my hearing, and vapor streamed toward a dark gash that had appeared in the ceiling. The bay lit up in the wash of fire from another explosion. I stumbled, whispering my captain’s name one last time as I fell. My head and lungs were bursting.
As if summoned by my dying wish, Captain Lurren appeared next to me with a shield-belt in hand. She activated the protective bubble around us just in time. I could breathe again.
“Don’t suck up all the air!” Captain Lurren shouted, but to me her voice was honey. We floated a meter off the deck as gravity failed, watching the shocktroop assault craft pull away.
“They’re leaving!” I exulted.
“You breached the hull, you imbecile!” Lurren growled. “Of course they’re leaving. My ship is tearing apart!”
My head cleared even more under Captain Lurren’s freezing glare. “You came back for me,” I said, tears glistening in my eyes.
“Yes. The crew had taken every last shuttle,” she grumbled. “They left one shieldbelt.”
We watched in silence as the ship broke in half around us. Twisted pieces of hull twirled away and we were left in the dark of space. “We could not save our ship’s body,” I eulogized briefly, “but we saved its honor. When they pick us up, we’ll be heroes.”
“We have about two minutes of oxygen in this bubble,” Captain Lurren said flatly. “All they’ll find is two bodies.”
“That does sound romantic,” I agreed, “but don’t lose heart.” I detached a cylinder from my belt and held it up, smiling. “Oxygen refiltrator. We’ll share each breath, clinging together in a tight embrace as we make our way across the starscape. Two officers of the Fleet, loyal to the last.”
“If we survive,” Lurren grated, “You won’t be an officer any longer. Not on my ship!”
I could have pointed out that her ship could hold no more officers at all, but I decided to savor the moment with her instead.
“It’s a beautiful view, isn’t it, Captain? Look, there’s Cassiopeia, just past that burning section of the hull.”
by submission | Feb 10, 2013 | Story |
Author : Leah Hervoly
I have been drifting along for the past seven hundred and eighteen years. Things are starting to look the same. Puffy red nebulae over here, collapsing white dwarf over there. Once in a while I see a galaxy get sucked into a supermassive black hole like some kind of interstellar juice box. The colors are breathtaking and remind me of sunsets. The stars hardly change, though.
At first I tried to make my own constellations, but ran out of Latin names and animals and only managed to catalogue about twelve hundred. My programmer wasn’t the brightest in those departments. Every so often I think back on the day the escape pod ejected from the main ship and launched me blindly into foreign space. I’m not even sure what galaxy we were in when we were attacked.
I guess it doesn’t matter now.
As an android, we don’t really have a need for recreation or entertainment, although shutting down to recharge for longer than necessary is incredibly boring. The pod I’m in doesn’t offer much in the way of visual or intellectual stimulation. I don’t mind, though. I like to think I have a good imagination.
Its A.I. has become a bit eccentric as well. After about ninety years it decided that it was going to be a female and dubbed itself Samantha. She doesn’t talk to me anymore. She kept wanting to show me videos she had taken of people walking in front of the pod when it was still attached to the main ship. I found these dull and expressed my disinterest around the three hundred year mark. She hasn’t said a word to me since. I miss her singing.
Not that I’m really complaining though—I’m not lonely even without Samantha talking to me. The lack of company has been endearing and allows me to retrace the philosophical roots that my programmer installed. I know the Poetics by heart, and find that when I’m gazing out at the stars Plato’s theories are much more believable. I haven’t been able to wrap my wires around Descartes yet, but I’ll get there.
I’m not sure what the malfunction was that prohibited the pod in locating a civilized planet and landing. Samantha had muttered something about missing binary code, but I think that’s only because she was upset with me. Sometimes the radio transmitter crackles and I can hear indistinct voices requesting coordinates, but most of the time I just peg that as wishful thinking and turn off the communicator.
I smile slightly when I notice that another twenty four hours have passed. Another day ticks off on a file in my hard drive. I look out of the window and smooth down my monofilament fiber hair and blink my blue glass eyes. I absently fiddle with my plastic fingernails. I’m not worried that no one will find me, or that nobody realizes I’m gone.
I kind of like it out here.
by Clint Wilson | Feb 7, 2013 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
“Calm down earthling, we already have most of your recorded history. We believe we know what has happened. You are now an extremely endangered species, so we will not punish you for your crimes.”
“So you acknowledge that what I did was a crime?”
“Well the eradication of one’s own entire people could hardly be categorized as anything else. Although we have suspicions as to why you did it.”
“They were beyond repair, beyond reproach!”
“Agreed. You grew too quickly. It happens, but rarely at such an exponential rate. Who could blame your kind for evolving into the writhing mass of insanity that it became? After all, you went from carbon combustion discovery, then industrialization, to space exploration and complete cyber-integration in almost no time at all. Your people had but a proverbial nanosecond to assimilate their minds to the growth that was happening around them.”
PeterJet11056 paused, then… “So what happens now? Will you take me with you, or leave me here alone?”
“That all depends on the story you tell us. Please recount how you wiped out the dominant intelligent species of your planet.”
PeterJet11056 knew he had no other choice so he began, “Isaac Newton, one of our civilization’s early great thinkers said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” so I am hardly to blame for the technology that allowed me to commit my crime. I watched the net grow until we were nearly one solid mass, yet I kept at my free thinking exercises, avoiding The Bulls wherever I could, always keeping a low profile, until that day I finally developed the proper instruction code.”
“Please define, “instruction code”.”
“The net contained all of humanity, every person on the planet living in cyberspace, and they could all be manipulated by code. That was how the world government controlled us. A tweak here and we changed our entertainment programs. A nudge there and suddenly we were thinking differently about our political choices.”
“But why this need for control? You had achieved all that may be achieved by a physically tangent race. You wanted for nothing.”
“Except power that is.”
For once the alien presence was speechless.
PeterJet11056 ventured, “You know of power hunger? Of greed?”
“We know of this. This is the ugliest trait for any species to possess in all the known galaxies.”
“Then you understand! Our world had become a gray faceless empty entity. There was not one micron of goodness left among us. It was time to eradicate this planet of its parasite.”
“Yet you remain.”
“Believe it or not it was unintended.”
“We believe you.”
“So you know then, it wasn’t that I couldn’t commit suicide, it was just that I was unable. Whoever enters the instruction code is immune to its commands, impervious to its demands. A seriously flawed and dangerous safeguard if you want my humble opinion.”
PeterJet11056’s final words echoed down through the corridors of the cyber-connection that the aliens had provided upon their arrival.
For a moment, nearly two full nanoseconds, there was nothing, then… “We are satisfied with your answer. We shall take you with us.”
“Really?” The age-old program that had once been human became excited. What will become of me?”
“Not to worry, we believe there his hope for you yet. We will connect you with the best minds of our species. Eventually you may once again achieve physical existence. Then our cloning crews can begin with creating you a mate. Yes I do believe that you PeterJet11056 will be the father of the new human race.”
by Duncan Shields | Feb 6, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I worry my family. They say I think too much. They say I rebel too much, ask too many questions, tamper with the mental blocks we have installed. They say the police will come to take me away, punish me, wipe my brain, and send me away. I know they’re wrong. I’m too smart. The door bursts open. They rush in, wrestle me to the ground and –
Something about a short in the wires. That’s why I can’t think. That’s why I can’t ask questions. The thing, though, is that everyone in the prison seems to have the same short circuit. I wonder if I could circumvent security to –
Milk with cereal today. I enjoy milk. Especially with the memory lapses. The cereal is sharp and hurts the roof of my mouth. The blue jumpsuit will fit me and keep me warm on the way to the dome. Another labour slave opened his faceplate on the open shuttle yesterday. He said that he wanted to smell the flowers. His body leapt out of his blue suit through the faceplate very quickly. The sounds of his bones crackling and tissue ossifying sounded like paper being crumpled over all of our headphones. Like he was an origami person being destroyed by a giant pair of hands. Why would he do something like that? Maybe I can help. If I could get past the firewall –
Ladder. Digging. I’m a miner. I have kernels of me hidden like diamonds in the grey folds of my own mind. I pick for them as I work. I like the feel of finding these aspects of my personality. From somewhere, I get the notion that I love beets. I don’t know what beets are but I can memory-taste them from a long time ago. I savour it. It won’t be long before the program sees what I’m doing and takes it away. Did beets grow on trees or in the –
I’m plugged into the feed and that’s okay. I drool and that’s okay. There’s a word in the ENT show that I’m watching that seems unfamiliar to me. Wife. Wife. It makes my left eyelid twitch. I’m not sure why. I can feel electrical activity in my head. I can feel the company sniffing deep in my mind to find the source. I can feel myself searching as well. It’s a race. Janine. Her name was Janine. We were married. I can see red hair. She’s laughing. We’re outside with no suits and we’re driving a – no word – searching – car? She touches my shoulder and I make a sound with my mouth that’s like an explosive, repetitive, vocal breathing out. What is that? Why would –
I no longer have to work. My record says I have a history of problems. I am a rebel, it says. A mental incorrigant. I get to go to the room that I don’t ever have to leave. I am to be plugged into the mainframe in the tanks. I am no longer a pair of hands for the machine. Now I am a source of electrical power and heat. I am also research.
The cool thing is that without attachments and company dogs keeping me in line anymore, I can explore what little is left of me in the gray folds. I’ll never open my eyes again. I am unaware of having a body. I find sixty-two parts of myself that they don’t take away. I don’t know how long it takes. I float.
I feel like a person again.
