by submission | Oct 19, 2012 | Story |
Author : Nathan Martin
Jev killed a cop. Technically, he pushed an undercover narcotics agent into an airlock and blew the outer hatch. Technically, it was the loss of pressure and lack of oxygen that killed the cop. Jev just pushed the button. Would’ve gotten away with it too, if the sun-burned corpse hadn’t made half a stable lap around the earth before smacking into Orbital Main station. Some luck.
He reached out and tapped a button on the console. The image on the main screen of Earth, slowly passing below him, blanked out. He was sick of looking at it. Six days since the launch, and still he sat there in his little ship, not quite ready to jet off. “Execution, or space mining,” they told him. It was an easy choice. Still, he missed the drugs.
He closed his eyes and stretched, unable to avoid brushing some portion of the ship’s interior no matter what angle he chose. When he was finished, he tightened his seat mesh to restrain his floating. He looked down at one of the screens; several windows were open, none of which were the tutorials he was to spend the next six months of flight time studying. A pop-up was on the screen, an override from Orbital Control. They were becoming more frequent, now that he was closer to overstaying his welcome. The latest pop-up informed him that he had, “12 hours 37 minutes 32 seconds to vacate Earth orbit or be terminated.” This one was bright red. He closed it and unhooked his seat mesh, floating free.
Grasping the overhead wall rungs, he moved hand over hand to the small cold box at the back of the cabin. He pulled out his last beer bulb, bit the tab off, and put the nipple in his mouth. He wondered if he was the first to drink the whole supply before leaving orbit. It was nice and dim in the cabin with the main screen off.
“Why am I still here?” He thought. “What the hell am I doing? I can’t go back down. There’s no way. I’d be dead as soon as I set the course.” He scratched the new tattoo on his wrist that marked him as a convict-miner. It itched. “I could say, ‘fuck asteroid mining, I’m going to Mars.’” He finished the beer bulb in two more gulps, and realized that he was speaking aloud; he hadn’t noticed the transition from thought. He continued. “They wouldn’t take me there, either.” The ships transponder was hardwired from the outside, marking him for what he now was.
He handed himself back over to the seat before the screen. There was only one thing left to do. He tapped a button and turned the screen back on. Earth burst over him, and he found himself missing it for the first time. Ice cream. Couscous with tomato sauce. Gravity.
“Fuck it,” he said. He tapped into the navigation system and activated the presets. The engine behind him began to roar, and he barely remembered to re-hook the seat mesh before he was tossed back into the cushions. Earth dropped out of view and was replaced by a slur of stars, drawing him away.
by submission | Oct 18, 2012 | Story |
Author : Robert White
“Wait. I don’t get it. I thought transit was supposed to be instant”
“It was. It is.” The scientists are always so snarky. “We did all the tests, sent animals and clocks back to the beyond and everything was instant. So this here cannot be happening.”
“Look, I may be a glorified janitor on this ship, but I know ‘happening’ when it happens.”
“No you don’t. This isn’t technically happening. We are experiencing it, sure, but time isn’t really passing. We are experiencing the passage through space as if time is passing.”
“Okay, Scientist Guy, if you are so smart, how long will this not be happening?”
“About three hundred and seventy light years.”
Scientists never answer simple questions simply. “How long will that take? I still see earth like we haven’t left orbit and it’s been like a month already.”
“Every Planck distance is taking up one Planck time.”
“Translation, forever, am I right?”
“More or less.”
“And the things?”
“These ‘things’ as you call them are hallucinations made manifest. Our perceptions are dictating the configurations of mater, but it’s all transient. When the ship arrives it will all disappear. It has to do with the plasticity of distance and perceptions when delta-t is zero.”
“Yea, okay, sounds like you don’t really know.”
“Well there is no control here for proper experimentation.”
“Okay, you said something about a ‘spatial distortion wave’. What’s that again?”
“The projector compresses space around the ship and then the ship coasts through the distortion.”
“How big is this distortion?”
“I takes up zero distance, It’s a threshold. So essentially the front of the ship is already there while the back of the ship is still where we started.”
“But we’re moving around on the ship.”
“Well… maybe.”
“And the livestock isn’t here, and didn’t have the problem because…?”
“Animals don’t really experience time the same way we do. They don’t understand the idea of ‘now’ being a different thing than ‘before now’ and ‘after now’. They just have ‘now’.”
“Even though my cat remembers me?”
“Yes.”
“So your solution is…?”
“Well we aren’t really aging, so we just wait it out.”
“Forever?”
“Yes.”
“I think I’d go mad.”
“Probably we both will.”
“No deal.”
Stress, they say, is what happens when the body resists its natural desire to beat the hell out of someone who really deserves it. I hate stress. I cold-cock Mr. Scientist and he drops like a rock to the deck.
“You people make everything so damn hard.” I haul his behind straight to forward observation. “Here is what’s really going to happen. I am going to look out that window and see the target buoy. See! There it is. And that means that that window and that part of the ship is already ‘there’.
“So I figure I’m gonna draw a line across the deck, and wait a second for me to really see that everything on that other side of the line is already ‘there’.
“Then I am going to throw your dead weight over the line.
“And now, since you are ‘there’ and I know exactly where the bunched up space is, I am going to take a running jump…
“And here we are.”
The translation engines spin down immediately as space expands behind us.
I look down at Mr. Scientist and his bloody face. “I may just be the glorified janitor on this ship, but you know what? You people think way to hard to ever really get anywhere.”
by submission | Oct 16, 2012 | Story |
Author : Alex Grover
He breathes in with speckled time undivided, and he breathes out with golden dust. His body is bulbous, a multicolored neon affair, reds and greens and blacks all in lines like that of a heated circuit board, charred from overuse. His beard is human flaw grown down past his chest, and his eyes are weary. His hands are frozen jelly on the levers, yet his arms still move according to the sun. Every second requires a quartz twitch, as his veins are plugged into the machine’s juices, the golden orb’s halves soldered together around Gamberol a long time ago. The face outside reads 34:25 to the 70-hour day.
When a rapping comes from beyond the golden hull, he doesn’t halt his work. His eyes glance to his right, but his hands, fused with the levers, continue to move. As he continues his work, a fiery light—light Gamberol hasn’t seen in eons—races along the half-line of the orb. It runs to the side, sparking fission fireflies as he twitches the clock along. As soon as the alien grasp sinks in on that fault line, the orb collapses in two directions. Gamberol is alone, exposed to a world he hasn’t seen in years.
The two engineers, scaly lizard men that are more hunched shadows than people, quickly run behind a platoon of other lizards, who are their superiors. They’re much taller, covered in sleek white armor, sporting gun-like weapons the size of their massive forearms. The engineers wait. The lizard at the forefront, possibly a captain, moves towards Gamberol, who watches in a blank stare. The captain edges closer, seeing the smoldering fires of the human city in his periphery.
He speaks in a strange tongue, and he knows this. However, he doesn’t know if Gamberol can hear the sounds of his life anymore. Making a clicking sound with his free hand—nails very, incredibly sharp—the captain confirms Gamberol’s deafness. He clicks once in Gamberol’s face, and the old and weary human blinks. He can see. The captain looks to his platoon, then looks back. Gamberol wears a multicolored jumpsuit with an armband, which bears the symbol on the fallen city’s banners. They’d crumbled easily, those who followed the banners.
The captain gestures Gamberol out of the clock and onto the war-torn pavement, to leave the clock, his fingers outstretched as if saying, “You’re free. You’re no longer your race’s slave. We’ve liberated you. Live life in freedom.”
But Gamberol doesn’t move. He looks around, seeing the city he once knew, maybe realizing that he’d lived there once before, maybe forgetting he’d been imprisoned for an arbitrary fault. Something inside halts his motion, if there were any drive within at all, and he remains in his clock.
It lasts for minutes. The platoon stands at command as the captain mediates with Gamberol boldfaced. Inside he sees Gamberol and he knows pity. But he can’t show pity. He can only show efficiency. He’s the captain. So he shrugs and shoots Gamberol. The old human slumps to the ground, the needles pulling from his arms, his body cradled in the one of the half-orb platings. The captain never looks back. His platoon follows him, and the subservient, whipped engineers look to each other, hunched over, backs sore, wondering much about Earth.
by submission | Oct 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Rachel Verkade
The killer told me he’d had a turtle in his head.
He seemed perfectly calm and reasonable about it. A turtle, living nestled in his brain. I asked him if the turtle was what had made him kill. He didn’t know. If it did, he didn’t hold any ill will towards it. He seemed to feel a good deal of affection for it, in fact, or at least as much affection as a man like him could feel.
I asked what had happened to it. Shrugging, he told me that when they’d caught him, they’d cut into his head. To see what had made him the way he is. He told them not to, he said, but they didn’t listen. He was mentally incompetent, after all, committed to a state hospital for treatment, and that gave them all the power over him that they needed. So the surgeons came, and they strapped him down, drugged him, cut him. They’d found the turtle, and they’d removed it.
I asked if that upset him. Not really, he replied. He’d been sorry when it died, of course, but he’d thought that might happen. How could an animal so used to the warmth and wetness of a man’s brain survive in the cold and the dryness of the air, after all? Anyway, they’d let him keep the body.
It was hanging outside his cell, just close enough for him to touch through the bars. A red-eared slider, male, a good size. The killer brushed it with his fingers, making the limp little head sway. I asked him how it could possibly have fit in his head and left room for his brain. He didn’t know. Not how it had gotten in there, nor how it had survived, nor how it kept getting out.
Getting out?
Oh, yes, he said with a smile. At least once a week it would go out, never for more than a couple of hours at a time. It always came back, so he didn’t mind. And anyway, he confided with a wink, it was because of the turtle’s little sojourns that he now had his secret. He gestured me closer, and I approached despite my better judgement.
Crawling around his feet, paddling through a little bowl of water on the stone floor…a clutch of tiny hatchlings. He didn’t know how big they’d have to get before they could enter his head, but he was willing to wait.
by Julian Miles | Oct 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The elegant décor did nothing to lift the atmosphere in the room as the small group of officers and dignitaries parted to let Inspector Carbeth through. He strode up to the sprawled body and rapped his cane on the parquet flooring to prompt his man’s report.
The detective spoke without looking up from his analyser: “His work, without question.”
“What was it this time?”
“A celery stick restructured to consist of tungsten-carbide.”
Carbeth scowled. The man was making a mockery of his department. Twenty-eight assassinations in nine weeks. The Council was gone. Only His Excellency remained. Drastic measures were required.
A polite cough from the entrance of the room caused all to bow as His Excellency sauntered in.
“My dear Carbeth. This is somewhat of a trial, is it not?”
“Excellency. The man known as the Alchemist is a coward. He slays and then disguises himself as a member of staff, uses his unique molecular manipulation techniques to shape a weapon from a household item, then kills his target without warning or mercy. We are now sure that he remains amongst the staff the following day and escapes in the evening.”
His Excellency looked perturbed: “You mean to say that the Alchemist is amongst the staff here, as we speak?”
Carbeth smiled as a notion became an idea: “Indeed, Excellency. And that is exactly where we want him.”
“Really? Do tell.”
“Please order the entire staff to assemble in the ballroom. I shall demonstrate.”
The ballroom was abuzz with muted conversation as His Excellency, Carbeth and twenty Pacifiers entered. Carbeth received confirmation from the seneschal that all were present.
He drew his flechette pistol and then nodded to the Pacifier Captain: “Kill them all.”
The spasmic grunts of unexpected death were drowned out by the crackle of twenty kazers. The silent aftermath was torn by the syncopated hiss of Carbeth’s flechette pistol as he shot the seneschal in the back.
“Good god, Carbeth! Are you out of your mind?”
“No, milord. I am killing the Alchemist. For the death of one such as him, the loss of eighty-five serving class is a bargain price.”
His Excellency gathered himself.
“Quite exemplary, Carbeth. You might give thought to a Council seat. I find myself in need of men of decisive mien.”
His Excellency was less sanguine later, missing his courtesans. Ah well, a couple of bottles of vintage red would tide the night over into the following day and the excitement of getting more staff. He always loved shopping.
Pleasurable anticipation was halted by the sight of a cracker lifting from his caviar, steaming and glowing as it was transformed from foodstuff to molybdenum. As the restructured wafer approached, a dulcet feminine voice spoke from the air to its left.
“It never ceases to amaze me that you are all so fascinated by the technology I use to make my weapons, yet never seek to question the simple ruses I perform to conceal my invisibility.”
