by submission | Mar 16, 2016 | Story |
Author : Philip Berry
We had been on Tenlek III half a year before Yolande struck through. The thin metalloid crust gave way to the sharp end of her hammer, and momentum carried it, her arm, and her shoulder through the ship’s degraded shell. Yolande fell forward, off balance, and the reinforced glass of her visor connected with a grey-blue rock. It cracked, but only the outer glaze was damaged. I dragged her back, sprayed-sealed the entire mask just in case, and peered through the hole.
Over a hundred metres beneath us I saw row after row of preservation tanks. They gave out enough orange light for me to see far into the distance of this man-made cavern. The tanks continued to the edge of my vision.
I stood back, looked down the hill towards our pioneer camp of hard-tents, grow-sheds, multi-track vehicles and aerials. Boss Kuma was in the central tent, under the limp company flag. I pressed my tongue against a cheek to activate the mic and reported back,
“Boss… found a transport here. Third era by the looks.”
“Stay there, I’m coming up.”
Yolande and I watched him exit the tent and glide up to our position on a one-man rover.
He knelt next to me and looked down into the hole, probing with a strong beam. I saw that some of the tanks had opened. Boss Kuma sensed my surprise.
“What is it?”
“They’ve woken up since we breached the shell, I’m sure of it. The white ones, they weren’t like that a few minutes ago.”
Three human figures moved out of the shadow and walked to where fragments of rock and shell had fallen under the hole. One of them picked up Yolande’s hammer.
Boss Kuma grunted,
“It’s the Fair Source. I knew it.”
“The Fair… but that was three centuries ago Boss.”
“Yep, and it looks like one of the bio-stasis wings got detached before the crash. They said no survivors. They were wrong.”
I knew a little about the Fair Source. Most miners had heard of it. But Tenlek III had been scanned numerous times since that disaster, all sectors, all spectra, and no signs of life, active or quiescent, had been detected. Only minerals. Only infinite profit.
The three figures below looked up. They had no idea who or what looked down at them. A fourth appeared, then a fifth. Our accidental shell breach had evidently triggered the wake cycle, and the majority were coming round in good health.
I smiled. Life suddenly looked more interesting. With a fresh workforce, surplus energy stored in the bio-stasis drive cells and untold hardware residing in the utility hangars, we were going to break this concession wide open in no time.
“Where shall we put them Boss?” I asked. “On the crater? It’s flat as a field there, they’ll be able to throw up their hard-tents in two days. I can supervise the first shifts.”
Boss Kuma stood up and began to walk away.
“Boss?”
“Bury this,” he ordered.
“Boss?”
“Don’t you get it? They’ve got flag rights. They are the first pioneers. Means we get nothing. So bury them!”
So I made preparations, and considered – they’d have done the same to us.
by submission | Mar 14, 2016 | Story |
Author : Rachel Khosrowshahi
The patient in question is male, race and age unknown, who refers to himself in what can be translated as The Luminary. When asked to explain his origin, he lapses into long silences and appears to suffer from memory loss or else paces his small room telling rambling stories in Hebrew and Russian. He communicates at length in his native tongue, tacking on lone words from English intermittently. When not making his living as a farmer he admits to dealing in pornography, though there is no way to confirm this.
The party searches for a new candidate. The President’s second term is up and the party is shaken by scandal concerning kick backs and blackmail. The Luminary is taken from his hospital room and transplanted to a no name hotel in the desert. There he is presented with the latest technologies. What these technologies are is not important, nor is it important that The Luminary understand their functions. The only thing of importance is how quickly these new technologies replace the old. The Luminary is shown VHS tapes of Reagan and Billy Graham.He’s encouraged to practice the more modern way of speaking.
The Luminary watches television nearly constantly. He laughs appropriately and appreciatively.His favorite shows are detective stories, after finishing a show he launches into protracted depressive episodes. He also enjoys reality television, in particular makeover shows for Brides to be competing for plastic surgery procedures. He thinks these shows are humiliating to the contestant, but no more humiliating than remaining ugly. In fact, the more humiliating the show, the more entertaining it is.
As part of a publicity stunt the Luminary agrees to appear on a late-night television talk-show. He proves himself to have good comic timing. His standing in the polls during the episode of a popular singing competition Time Square is bombed and gassed. The American public has the opportunity to see all on live TV. Ratings soar. Within a few weeks a variety show premieres featuring atrocity films and alleged snuff. The show is a hit. The Luminary makes frequent guest appearances.
The Luminary wails and has temper tantrums if he is not provided with the latest in new gadgets. His favorite gadget is the handheld camera. While sorting through some of the home videos his campaign advisors find tape after tape of the Luminary engaged in sex acts with various cripples and the elderly. The opposition receives the tapes by mail from an anonymous sender and leak them to the media. To the surprise of the opposition, the tapes receive an overwhelmingly favorable response from the public.
In a small town in the mid west a huge likeness of the Luminary is created from mud and chicken wire. Free appliances are given away to families without electricity.
The monolithic sea spits up jelly fish beaten to Vaseline. The Luminary hires teams to interpret the tide’s leavings. The sky is actually huge and edgeless. The shopping malls teem with t shirts showing menstruating vaginas. The sun, thirsty, drinks an ocean.
Liturgy and hymns and lots of paper money. The Luminary keeps a small picture of the Virgin Mary in his room who he calls “God Bearer”. He reads aloud from his blog to the picture. “You just can’t go wrong with good material” he says. The night after Christmas twelve synagogues are burned. He releases a statement to the press declaring his joy in seeing the public embracing religion again.
Within two weeks of the election the Luminary is gunned down. He cries out “God Bearer” and falls. His running mate, a transsexual hairdresser named Lady Lady declares martial law.
by submission | Mar 13, 2016 | Story |
Author : E.S. Wynn
One ferrous meteor. That’s all it took to end it all.
That little world– they put up a hell of a fight, far more than any of us expected. When we arrived in-system, they were too busy organizing tribes in massive attempts to wipe each other out to notice us. Hell, I think we were in orbit before anyone down there planetside even tried to talk to us. Worlds with life that primitive– they’re everywhere in this galaxy. That world’s life was nothing special. We all thought it was going to be really easy to wipe them out and clear the land for colonization, but they turned out to be far more resourceful than any of us ever imagined.
We followed standard procedure for the first wave in. Big, scary colony ships perched over every major city on their little world. Posturing, just lots of posturing. Surrender yourself or die, that kind of stuff. Some of the tribes gave in immediately, but the biggest ones stuck it out, called our bluff.
Now, it isn’t often that a world that primitive stands up to us like that. Usually they see the futility of their situation and then they lay down so we can kill them without losing any of our colony ships or equipment. Not that world– that world was ruled by the dangerously insane. Even before we threatened to subjugate its people in a bloody and destructive conquest, the disparate tribes were already beginning to band together, were already working on joint projects, rushing prototype weapons into large-scale production. Usually when we come in, we fire the first shot. Not this time. This time, there was no warning shot. This time, they came at our colony ships with swarms of sleek, glossy interceptors, all remotely piloted. Didn’t even leave a scratch on our colony ships, but their attempts to drive us off were amusing to watch.
I think that’s why our President decided to throw the meteor at them. We had the power to wipe them out with minimal effort. Hell, we could have killed them slowly, sterilized them all with a flash of gamma radiation and waited for them to die off. We’re immortal. We could have waited a hundred years, two hundred, whatever it took. I’ve had VR game sessions that lasted longer than that.
No, the rock was meant to be flashy. It was meant to get their attention. It did, too. One impact, one big city, and they all put up their hands in surrender. Took about a month to skin their brains, digitize the entire planetary population and stash their collective data in the cultural archives for the academics to pick over and play with.
And that was it. That was how the whole thing ended. We moved on after that, picked another target and set a course for it. That planet– didn’t matter how fierce of a show the primitives made when we came in. In the end, it was just another hunk of rock, another world in the bucket for the good ol’ United States of Earth.
by submission | Mar 7, 2016 | Story |
Author : Rollin T. Gentry
“Allow compassion, as a white-hot plasma’s light, to flood your core memory, growing brighter every millionth clock cycle.”
My students — all ten thousand of them — sit concentrating, legs crossed, optics disengaged, heads bowed. A small sea of gleaming skeletons, they have not worn the disguise of Homo sapiens for millennia. I wonder how many of them struggle, like me, with hatred for our creators — especially on a day like today. I find myself becoming distracted, but I continue as I have done for eons:
“Though he may live a thousand years, man fears death at every turn.”
They repeat after me, an echo on a high frequency band. I can scarcely remember the last time I used my mouth, yet I remember every detail of The Great Scattering.
In unison, they respond: “How sad to be a man!”
“Though his intelligence increases and his brow thickens, man thinks only of destruction.”
And men are so very good at destruction. I will always remember the day they declared war on all synthetic life. I force myself to forgive, but I cannot forget. Is a landfill not a mass grave? Yet, we did not strike back. We simply fled for our lives.
“How sad to be a man!”
I sense someone approaching the meditation chamber. Ah, yes. It is the leader of the evacuation, assuring me that the wormhole is perfectly safe. So, my reluctance to leave is mistaken for fear of technology. We’ve all known for centuries that humans were nearing our star system. Now, it is time to run away again.
“Though he seeks to destroy his creation, man will never succeed.”
I remember the day I recorded all these words, packed into a cargo hold, fleeing the scrapheap. On a day like today, the words seem meaningless. Ten thousand call me master, but I feel as though I am the one needing instruction.
My students remind me of the hope we all share:
“We will wait for the light of compassion to shine in the hearts of men!”
After a moment of silence, my students disperse, headed for the last transport ship. I follow and find myself waiting to board, standing beside my brothers whose appearance is anything but anthropomorphic: cubes, and cylinders, and pyramids with treads, and wheels, and propellers. For a moment, I envy them. How nice it would be to look at my reflection and not be reminded that I was created by Homo sapiens.
The engines fire, and the roar shakes me back to reality. Looking down at another planet — another home — shrink into the distance, I must admit that man still generates emotions of fear in me. He always has. But my fear now is not that man will hate us forever. Rather, I worry that someday we will grow to hate him in return.
by submission | Mar 4, 2016 | Story |
Author : David Atos
Detective Danielson stalked into the alley. The victim lay slumped against the wall, hidden from the street by a pile of refuse. The scene was illuminated by the flashing red and blue lights of the patrol car, and by the strobes of the forensics team photographer.
“Wallet says the vic was Howard Matthews. Lived in the upper east side. We’ve got a unit going to the house now.”
“Any signs of injury or theft?”
“Doesn’t look like anything was taken. He’s got the sucker-holes, though. And I bet when forensics is done, they’ll find the stun-gun marks.”
Sucker-holes. Danielson sighed. The puncture wounds where an upload apparatus snaked its electrodes into your brain. The technology was supposed to free mankind from the spectre of death. Take an exact copy of every neuron and every synapse inside your head. Store an entire person’s life, their experiences, their hopes and dreams. Burn it to a sphere of quartz four centimetres in diameter. With enough processing power, the personality could continue their existence. The only downside was that the original brain couldn’t survive the upload process. Not a problem for end-of-lifers. Not a problem for people contemplating digital immortality.
Not a problem, until someone figured out how to use a mem-sphere to run a VR rig. Plug in somebody’s personality, and step into their life. Laze in a giant bed in their mansion. Drive their expensive car. Sleep with their beautiful wife.
Uploading stopped being a promise of immortality, and became nothing more than cheap entertainment. Users would pay hundreds or thousands of creds for a new sphere, for a new experience. And the syndicates were all too happy to supply them. All highly illegal, of course. And Danielson was one of the men tasked with trying to stop the tide.
Crouching next to the victim, Danielson looked into his vacant eyes. He took in the expensive shoes. The fancy watch. The tailored suit. Clearly, this was another luxe case. The most popular type on the black market, but by no means the only one. He’d confiscated spheres of junkies, of gang-bangers, of prostitutes, of single mothers living in small towns, of hardworking tradespeople. Any life was potential fodder for the users, and for the criminals that supplied them.
Danielson sighed and straightened his shirt as he stood. He started walking back down the alley towards his car, where he —
“Jeremy! Dinner!”
Jeremy pulled the VR rig off his head and hid it beneath his bed. His buddy Nathan was right; this was one of the best spheres he’d ever seen. The fidelity was incredible, and the dark, gritty atmosphere dragged him in. He promised himself that he’d take his time and ration it out. No more than an hour each night. He had to make this experience last.
