by featured writer | Dec 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, featured writer
I hate psychologists with a passion, but when I saw the ad requesting lucid dreamers for research into the origin of dreams, I couldn’t resist. Besides, they’re offering stipends and I need the cash.
I stub out my cigarette and suck back their crappy coffee from a tiny styrofoam cup. At least it’s free.
“How long have you been a lucid dreamer?” the black chick asks. She isn’t half-bad looking for a shrink, but she’s still a pompous brain jockey.
“All my life.” I respond. I pull out another smoke.
“How much control do you have?” the other one asks. What a dweeb! I mean, come on, who uses pocket protectors anymore?
“I can do whatever I want.” I light up, inhale and wink at the hottie, then exhale my smoke at the dweeb. “I go wherever I want, whenever I want. I can fly, make it rain, say what I want, make love to – ”
“We’re not interested in your sexual fantasies,” the dweeb cuts in. “Just your range of control.”
“Whatever.” I sulk.
Brown Sugar takes over and asks the strangest thing. “If you were given specific questions, would you be able to ask them in your dream?”
“Ask who?”
“We’ll get to that. Just answer the question.” The nerdy guy is getting testy. I don’t think he likes me. Whatever.
“Yeah. As long as it wasn’t a bunch of whack, nerd lingo, sure.” They share some significant eye contact. Stupid skull fuckers. “So, what’s this study for anyway?”
Hotstuff gets a twinkle in her eye and starts yammering about how they’ve made some breakthrough concerning the origin of dreams. They’ve worked out that dreams are actually the brain’s response to an external stimulus, but they don’t know what the source of that stimulus is. Why? Get this – because it appears to be everywhere, all the time. Whatever this thing is manifests in each dreamer differently depending on their psychology. Some people respond with fear because they’re phobic, some experience joy and great sex because they’re “well adjusted”. I had to laugh at that part. Nobody’s ever suspected an external influence, except maybe native shamans who interpreted dreams as messages from Christ knows where. It all sounds pretty fucked up to me and I tell them so.
“Look,” Brainiac snaps. ”All we ask is that you allow us to take you into REM sleep. When you’ve established control all you need to do is ask some questions and remember the answers. It’s that simple.”
“What do you say?” Dr. Sex-bomb smiles. I think she’s warming up to me.
“Sure. What the hell.”
It’s a recurring dream. I’m in my mother’s house where I grew up, but my mother isn’t there. I’m alone. I search every room, but all I find is piles of junk. I open a door and I’m crushed by an avalanche of garbage. For some reason, I know it’s my garbage; hamburger wrappers, beer cans, cigarette butts, porn mags, televisions, DVD’s, ballcaps – everything I’ve ever owned fills the house to the brim. I’m drowning in it.
I look at my hands. Six fingers. Concentrate. Five. Good. I’m getting control.
I will myself outside and float toward a lime green sky.
“Can you hear me?” I ask.
“Yes.” The clouds respond.
“Where are you?”
“I am everywhere.” The air vibrates.
“What are you?”
“I am your Mother. Sky. Water. Soil. Home. I am Earth. I am death. I am life. I am dying. I am dying. You are killing me.”
“What do you want?”
“I need you to listen carefully…”
by submission | Dec 9, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“This time we’re done for. This is finally the end, I think,” said Triana. Of course, she didn’t really “say” anything. She communicated her thoughts to her husband, Loret, by modulating the zero-point energy that comprised her being.
“You say that every time something like this comes up. ‘This is it. This is the end,'” replied Loret. “We’ve been through worse than this. Remember posthumanism?”
“Posthumanism was nothing. That never worried me,” she responded with a submodulation of annoyance.
“That’s not how I remember it. You were concerned we wouldn’t really be the same people. Our consciousnesses transferred to organic metaprocessors. Synthesized bodies. You thought it would be two impostors waking up from the procedure with our memories. But, no, it was still us.”
“That didn’t bother me that much. The transition to full machine-beings was a little worrisome,” she said.
“I thought you’d liked being a machine,” replied Loret. “You used to love exploring the galaxy. Ah, those were the days, weren’t they? Spend a few years exploring a solar system, hibernate on the journey between stars, wake up a few subjective minutes later and explore another system.”
“We were little more than kids then. Less than 10,000 years old. When you’re that young it’s easy to think you’re immortal and indestructible,” said Triana. “But now…”
“There you go again, the eternal pessimist. You haven’t been this worried since the Plasma Revolution,” said Loret.
“We lost quite a few people going from machine to plasmatic beings,” said Triana. “It took them a few thousand years to get it right. Swapping your mind between brain tissue and metaprocessor tissue and molecular computer blocks is one thing. Mapping a personality and a hundred thousand years of memories into a plasma and keeping it stable is something else entirely. If more people had been concerned, maybe we would have lost fewer…”
Loret was no longer listening. He’d have rolled his eyes if he still had them. After several trillion years of marriage, you’d think I’d have learned not to have this argument, he thought to himself.
“Well,” Loret said, “here it comes. Get ready.”
“I’m scared,” said Triana. “A vacuum metastability event isn’t like anything we’ve ever encountered. The laws of physics themselves will be different once the false vacuum collapses. Life in any form might not even be possible.”
“If it’s not, we’ve had a good, long life. If it is, we’ll adapt as we always have.”
Loret modulated his zero-point energy field in synchronization with hers — the rough analog of an embrace for their current state — as they awaited the end of the universe.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
My mount is about an acre across from wingtip to wingtip.
I’m sitting between her eyes, up near the front. I have a windshield set up, sheltering my sleeping quarters, replicator, garden, fridge, toilet bag and pilot’s chair.
She’s the colour of sand stretching away on either side of me, the same colour as the sky.
This is an ocean planet. There are beings that spend their entire lives in the oceans and there are beings that spend their entire lives in the air.
I am riding the latter.
She coasts for weeks at a time around the air currents, eating the occasional minnowbird or troutflyer that crosses her path.
When she needs to really feed, she’ll angle down into a steep dive to the ocean surface. We’re so high up that it takes her half an hour to get down there. Her mouth opens wide enough to eat a small town on old Earth as she rips apart the waves on impact and dives deep to feed on anything moving.
I’m not there for this part of her life. I’d die in the chemical waters.
The beings that we ride need to sleep and mate before they feed.
I’m looking through the windshield and sitting in my chair. I can see on the overlay that a linkup is happening six miles from here.
She angles west through soft summer winds and clouds. She’s heading to that pack.
These beings meet up and extend small talons from the tips of their enormous wings. The interlock these talons and form giant islands in the skies. Fifty or sixty of them at a time.
She’ll hang onto her mates and close her eyes. During this time, mating fluids will pass between the couplings. It’s a giant orgy, to be precise, albeit one with no motion and almost entirely done while sleeping.
During this time, we riders have the chance to stand and stretch our legs. We walk across the wingspans to each other’s cockpits to chat and share stories. For some of us, it’s a chance to reunite with old lovers, catch up with stories.
We’ll set up camps on the strongest flyers and have small parties.
There are six hundred thousand of us riders. We’re linked by the windshields when we’re apart but it’s these gatherings that really define our lives.
One can never tell what people will be at a gathering, dictated as they are by the winds our flyers glide on. We count ourselves lucky if there are old friends.
One by one, the gliders will disengage and dive low to the ocean to feed. They’ll return when full, impatient to get back to flying the skies.
We get a signal when our mount’s biogram tells us that it’s time to disengage. We return to our mounts and strap in. Our mounts unhook their mating talons and we angle away, ready for another solitary chapter of gliding in the endless sky above the endless ocean.
This meetup is the first one I’ve been to in over a month and a half. My mount must be starving. From the pings I’ve receiving on my windshield, Jenna and Steve will be there. Sarah, too. She’s recent. I haven’t seen Jared in six meetups now and that makes me sad. I hope he’s there.
I can see it in the distance now, a horizon-smudge flatland in the sky where I’ll get to say hello to old friends and maybe meet some new ones.
by Julian Miles | Dec 4, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I am a rifle.
There are few like me, but I am unique.
I will fire true.
I will fire straighter than any other.
I know that only hitting the target counts.
I will maintain myself clean and ready.
I will defend my country.
I will master the enemy.
The creed runs through my frontal RAM as it always does, because they think it helps.
“Camera One, pan the crowd.”
That is my confirmation. I leave the gathering quietly, entering the stairwell using the card from the security guard I left sleeping in the toilets.
Letting the door close I kill the biomass masquerading as my heart and extend my tibia and humerus, then leap into the gap between the staircases and progress rapidly upward, something only my extended reach permits. Intense security leaves holes. In this case, detecting for life signs in the stairway and movement on the stairs, not dead things moving in the gap between them. Foolishly they considered a metre-wide, sixty storey drop secure.
I slide to the edge of the parapet and reform. My vertebrae alternately revolve ninety degrees to lock, while my head cants back and swings up to locate above where oesophagus-muffler has risen to align with spine-barrel, as my lower jaw bifurcates to become the bipod. My left femur rotates and swings back, feeding a 13mm long cartridge into the breech that forms my sacral curve, while my arms swing out to stabilise my incline, counterbalanced by my extended right leg.
My Zeiss-lensed eyes feed compensated targeting data to the dedicated math processor that handles all the windage and other variables in less time than it takes Senator Lindham’s bodyguard to open the door of the limousine.
As his head rises into view, I wait until I see the carotid pulse in his neck in my holographic cross matrix. I exhale death and his head explodes. I use the recoil to slide back, letting my head drop forward as I disengage my osteo-locks and deform. I roll off the parapet and sprint across the roof as alarms start. I dive from the back of the building, sixty storeys up giving me the angle to plunge into the deep end of the public pool across the road and a block down. Water pours from me and startled lovers exclaim, but I am gone over the fence and into the bushes. As I climb the tree by the next road over, the evening run to the recycling plant is passing. I leap from the tree into the back of the truck, amongst metals and electricals that will mask my presence, just as the pool eradicated all detectable miasma of rifle shot. I may have left some pieces of overskin, but it leads back to the only man who had cloneable cells, like every other piece of vatflesh on this planet.
On the slip road to the industrial estate that surrounds the plant, a rescue and recovery hauler sits. I drop from the back of the recycler and roll under the hauler, pulling myself through the belly hatch into my residence.
William says: “Fine work, Swan.”
He means it. He only ever uses my nickname over my designation, S-One, when he’s exceptionally pleased. Which means Ruger-Sony are paying him a lot, again.
I settle into a solvent bath and idle my processors. After I’m clean I’ll upload the mission log. As I am scoured, I run my creed in private RAM.
I am Sniper One.
I never miss.
by featured writer | Dec 3, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Featured Writer
“That’ll be two-thousand kilowatts,” the droopy eyed clerk said when he finished scanning Sarah’s purchase. She held out her debit battery, which was running depressingly low; prayed she had enough. The clerk barely looked at her as he snagged the black, glossy storage unit and slid it into the transfer terminal. A light blinked momentarily then went solid green. She breathed a sigh of relief.
Sarah retrieved her depleted battery, packed her purchase carefully into her backpack, shouldered it and stepped outside into thick, muggy air.
The treeless streets were crowded with a shuffling throng of pedestrians and commuters on bicycles. Very few internal combustion autos were on the roads these days since fuel prices had skyrocketed. Electric vehicles were also rare, used exclusively by obscenely wealthy power brokers. Since electricity had become the standard currency, it was considered frivolous to use so much energy to commute. Even the most efficient electric automobile consumed enough kilowatts in a short fifty kilometer trip to buy a family food for an entire week.
Sarah glanced up at the sky. Overcast. Again. Which meant the solar collector on her patio would barely be charging. Sunny days were rare, but when they happened, the whole world was rejuvenated, basking in the sun’s generous outpouring of energy. Pale faces showed a hint of color. Batteries charged. Pennies from heaven.
But today, the slate grey sky was reflected in the slack faces of the desultory mob, which moved like an ocean, flowing in strange Brownian currents to myriad destinations.
She passed a communal dinning hall where she would normally have eaten a meager dinner, but she was low on kilowatts. The smell of spiced lentils made her stomach growl. She moved on.
She passed the crowded mag-rail station and envied those who could afford to ride it. She felt the weight of the parcel in her pack and fought a brief pang of guilt. If she hadn’t spent so much on a frivolous luxury she could ride home. Her legs ached after a long day pedaling the bicycle which powered the lights at the slaughterhouse. Perhaps tomorrow she would find a better job. A waitress in one of those fancy restaurants. Or a garbage collector. Anything but pedaling for ten hours. She shouldered her bag and continued walking.
It was dark by the time she got to her tenement building, a towering, terraced honeycomb of concrete. She didn’t bother with the lift. It was usually out of order anyway. Instead, she slowly climbed the winding stairwell to the tenth floor feeling the inert weight of her precious bundle in each step.
“I’m home,” she trilled softly as she closed the door to her tiny darkened apartment. The air was cooler here, fresher, smelling faintly of lemon and roses. Her sanctuary.
She checked the apartment’s battery supply. Less than 15% capacity, but she dared to turn on the full spectrum fluorescents. Just for a little while. They would need it.
As the lights flickered on, the room blossomed into a lush riot of verdant foliage. Ivy clung to the walls and spilled out the open window. Vibrant flowers, spiky dracaenas, broad leafed rubber plants, variegated hostas and herbs all vied for light; a veritable oasis of life.
She dropped her pack, withdrew the heavy bag of fertilizer and soil amender and began tending her tiny, luscious garden. Here, within her cocoon of life, she found a wealth greater than anything electricity could buy. She found peace. She found hope.
