by Duncan Shields | Apr 20, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The pins and needles stopped caressing her body. Her muscles twitched to life as she took her first gasping steps out of the cryotube and lit a cigarette from the pack beside her clothes. She tossed back the two whiskey shots provided by the rider in her contract. After she had picked up her guitar and tried out the fine motor control tests on the chords, she noticed the red envelope taped to the small desk in the middle of her waking chamber.
She opened it:
October 20th, 2344
Dear Janey Starr (nee Alice Winthrope)
Further to a shareholder’s/publicity meeting held on January 16th, 2337, we regretfully confirm that your employment with us is terminated from October 20th, 2344 with immediate effect.
This is due to your position having to be made redundant, and in no way reflects your performance of your job, which has been entirely satisfactory/excellent.
The last ‘Legends of Yesteryear’ concert was not entirely sold out and as you know, popular music has continued to evolve as the decades go by. In a ranking of longevity popularity, you have come to be on the bottom of the list. We’ve had to add higher-grossing artists to the top of the bill and remove the least popular acts from the bottom. (see attached studies and lists in appendix 1) That was you and three others. The other three are not from your time frame so their names will not be familiar to you. It’s a testament to your talent that you’ve lasted as long as you have with us.
As stated in the minutes of the meeting (included here), the terms of your redundancy are as follows.
A payment to the order of 800 NWD dollars adjusted for deflation (see appendix 2a for your time frame equivalent). An iStar credit rating boost of 11 per cent (see appendix 2b for your time frame equivalent). Class 4 mating, smoking, and drinking privileges. (see appendix 2c for your time frame equivalent). Free access to your savings from your initial investments with your original bank. (see appendix 3 for changes to your bank’s interest rates and company holdings during your storage).
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for a letter of reference. Please vacate this cryochamber immediately. Make sure to take all your personal belongings. Temporary housing and employment options will be provided for you for one month.
A representative will be waiting outside the chamber for you. Have an enjoyable life.
Yours sincerely
Acquisition Entertainment Star Services Incorporated
Well, thought Janey Starr, it’s not the first time I’ve hit the ground running. All I need to do now was write some hit songs and sing them. Find a few bars close to where I live and show them my stuff.
It was time for a comeback tour.
by Stephen R. Smith | Apr 19, 2012 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
“That suit’s not safe on my dock,” the voice boomed across the row of vacant lifter pads to the mezzanine, “who gave you clearance to come out here?” Horik’s visor was up, the bulky exo-suit exaggerating his movements as he marched across the deck.
“You must be Horik,” the taller of the three men stepped to the railing, gripped it in both hands and grinned, “just the man we wanted to see.” Behind him, similarly clad in dark matte-fabric three piece affairs, the man’s companions unbuttoned their jackets exposing large handled handguns tucked in their waistbands.
“Horik, my good man, we’ve come to improve your working conditions. We’re bringing your High Mars Orbiteers into the fold of the Dock Workers’ Nine Three. Wage protection, health benefits, job security, everything the working man could wish for.”
Horik stopped a few meters away from the trio and surveyed the slick figure, grinning as he was like the Cheshire cat.
“We’ve already got that, without paying percentage to you, so why bother?” Horik unhitched an arm from within the rig and scratched absently at the crisscross of scars across his scalp.
“Security my good man, there are dozens of recruits landing here every week, any one of them, should he want your job more than you do, could render you redundant by simply performing better and you’d be out of a job. No security. No second chances. What work for a dock hand on Mars who’s been cast out of the dock yard?” He spread his arms wide, his grin equally so. “As part of the nine three everyone who’s started since you lifted your first load would have to be let go before you had to worry about your job. Isn’t that what you really want to know? That you’re guaranteed employment for as long as you wish it?”
Horik unhitched his other arm and began cracking his knuckles one by one.
“I didn’t catch your name.” Horik looked up and paused.
“You can call me Mr. Patroni.” Again with the Cheshire cat smile.
Horik chuckled and returned to his knuckle cracking.
“Suppose Patty, that one of your cronies there, obviously not with your outfit as long as you, seeing as they’re backup and you’ve got all the big lines, suppose one of them could do your job better than you.” He paused, flexing his fingers and began hitching back into the exo-suit. “Suppose you no longer are convincing in your sales-lady role. By your rules, your boss would have to fire both your boys there and likely a good number more before he could fire you. Then what? Your outfit’s had to give up the young talent, the up and coming, the future movers to cut out the festering boil that’s your sorry ass. That doesn’t sound very efficient to me.”
“It’s Mr. Patroni,” the grin cooled into a tight smile, “and you’ll find I can be very convincing. Your workers will sign with the nine three, and you can be on the inside or the outside, that’s entirely up to you.”
“Well Patty, it’s kind of funny you say that,” Horik fired up the suit’s comm’s system as he closed his visor, the remaining words blasting amplified through the loudspeaker on his shoulder, “I warned you about suits and safety on my dock.” Red lights started strobing along the length of the loading bay as the atmosphere was evacuated and the outer doors began to rumble open.
“In our world, Patty my dear, if you’re a screwup – you’re dead, and if you’re deadweight, you’re on the street. You can be on the inside or the outside yourself, also entirely up to me.”
He paused, relishing the panicked looks as he closed the distance and navigated the stairs. By the time he reached them, their mouths were opening and closing like dry fish, weapons forgotten. They couldn’t hear him explain why he threw the gunmen out the doors before Mr. Patroni, but he figured they’d appreciate the union protocol.
by submission | Apr 17, 2012 | Story |
Author : Jason Frank
Breikf was heading back with a fresh beer and he looked over where they had the lead space man all trussed up so anybody wanted could get a kick in. Everybody got in a bunch, looked like. Breikf sure had, but just then something in the cool of the evening and the beers got him thinking. He set down by the space man.
“You understand me?” he asked.
“I do,” the space man said.
“You know this is all your fault, right? All this that just happened and all that that’s going to happen now is your fault.”
“I most assuredly do not know that. We simply came here_”
“We weren’t always this hard. It was you all made us this way.”
“We have had very little contact with your people.” the space man said.
“You know what a dog is, right? I’d call my pup on over to show you up close but he’d damn likely try to get his share of you.”
“We are familiar with your companion species.”
“That’s good, you being familiar and all. That helps me get this story across. See, my dad always said there was one sure way to turn a dog mean. You start with a free dog, one can go anywhere any time and do what it wants. You make that free dog a chained dog, twenty foot of chain. Make that twenty foot chained dog a fifteen foot chained dog. Make that fifteen foot chained dog a ten foot chained dog. Make that ten foot chained dog a five foot chained dog and that five foot chained dog’s a mean one, no doubt about it. Now see, what you all done, what you started on long before you came down here, was cut down and cut down how much we could get around. You blocked us off at the end of the old Milky and then pushed us back till we just had this solar system. And now you come on in here? That was a mistake. Didn’t work out too well for you, did it? You ain’t dealt with dogs as mean as us.”
The bound and bruised alien said nothing.
“And now you see over there, you see that big ship of yours, biggest we ever seen? See that taking off? Well we stuffed that ship wall to wall with the meanest dogs we got. Now they’re heading back to whatever kind of fleet you got out there with their distress signals all on blast. We’ll see what happens up there now. Dog will hunt.”
Breikf set a short spell but didn’t talk more. He finished up his beer and got up to get another. The captive didn’t talk either. He imagined the fleet’s reactions. It was likely that their plan would succeed. Little preparation had been done for situations like these. No standard responses to unreasonable barbarian advance had been formulated. He thought about this wild horde tearing out across the civilized systems he had loved so well. These images did what a hundred some steel toed boots couldn’t; the space man quivered with weeping.
by submission | Apr 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
A thin cloud of red dust trailed behind Orton’s motorcycle. I’m running out of time, he thought to himself as he rode across Cydonia Mensae. The temperature was already down to -40 degrees Celsius and continued steadily dropping. The sun would be setting in less than an hour and it wouldn’t be safe to be outside after dark. Even after almost two decades of economic malaise, political disintegration, and finally open warfare, Orton had a hard time believing how seriously the situation on Mars had deteriorated.
It hadn’t always been that way. After the Nanotech Revolution of the twenty-eighties, space travel finally became cheap, fast, and safe, and while habitats in Earth orbit and on the surface of the Moon had their appeal, Mars was the true frontier. The cycle from flags and footprints missions to destination for wealthy adventurers to scientific outposts to genuine communities had progressed quickly, catalyzed by inexpensive and reliable space technology and the promise of a new beginning.
Orton slowed his motorcycle to a crawl and looked behind him. No sign of pursuit, he thought. A sensor sweep would have been much more accurate and comprehensive, of course. But a scan would have given his position away instantly. Even with the motorcycle’s stealth devices operating, it was a miracle he had eluded detection this long. He could just make out the dome in the distance. It would be so easy to simply upload the information he was carrying. It would be equally easy for any number of rival factions to intercept, decode, and quickly act on that information. He thumbed the accelerator and made for the dome.
A United Mars, he thought as he cruised across the rough terrain. That had been the dream. A global republic? A confederation of domed city-states? A true and literal democracy? It was strange how the past’s vision of the future seemed so unforgivably naive. As the sun descended deeper into the horizon, Orton noticed tiny flashes in the distance. In the thin Martian air, nearly microscopic machines were surveilling and, when opportunity presented itself, attacking. All the major factions had fleets of these innumerable, artificially intelligent drones. The flashes were drones being destroyed by a rival’s countermeasures. This microscopic, airborne war raged round the clock, as the tiny, flying robots fought, were destroyed, and were replaced minutes later by new models with revisions and upgrades based on their predecessors’ failure. It was this front in the vast, internecine conflict and not the engagements of men and their bulky vehicles and weapons, some argued, that would determine the outcome of the war.
Arriving at last, Orton piloted the motorcycle into the dome’s narrow airlock and breathed a sigh of relief. In ten minutes time, the data he carried would be scrutinized by military intelligence. Would it make any difference? Time would tell. The interior door of the airlock opened with a click. Orton stepped through. The atmosphere was only marginally different from that outside the dome. He took off his respirator and inhaled tenuous air into lungs engineered to extract oxygen directly from carbon dioxide. He withdrew the translucent, nictitating membrane from his eyes and hurried to deliver his report.
by Patricia Stewart | Apr 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Shortly after 13:30 on 11 April 2112, the HMTS Temporal Voyager left Roches Point in Ireland. Its mission: to resolve some unanswered questions concerning the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
“Time flows like a river,” lectured Dr. Cassandra Simon to her lone passenger, Dexter Hollenbach, a reporter for London’s Daily Holograph. “You just can’t sit in the lab and say ‘I want to witness Abraham Lincoln’s assassination’. You have to set up the Temporalgraph within a few kilometers of Ford’s Theater. Even closer if you want to pick up audio. That’s why we need to start this temporal journey at Roches Point, it’s the last time that we knew the exact location of the Titanic.” The large monitor above the control panel showed an image of the Titanic weighing anchor on its way to the North Atlantic. “You see,” continued Simon, “despite the fact that there are 200 years separating us, if we can maintain identical spatial coordinates as the Titanic, the Temporalgraph can stay focused on her as she sails east. A sort of cat and mouse trek through time.”
“But you said we could hear conversations on the bridge,” noted Hollenbach. “That image is hundreds of meters above the funnels.”
“True,” conceded Simon. “That’s because navigation is being controlled by the computer, for now. It’s programmed to keep us close enough that we won’t lose the time-stream. When we get nearer the collision event, I’ll transfer navigation to my control so we can sync-up spatially. It takes intense concentration, so I don’t want to have to do it too long. Be patient Mister Hollenbach, you’ll get your story.
***
The chronometer read 23:25, 14 April 2112. “We’re ready, Mr. Hollenbach,” announced Simon. She reached across the navigation panel and pressed the manual override button. “Okay,” she said, “I have control. Now, let’s get onto the bridge.” As Simon simultaneously fine-tuned the navigation and temporalgraph controls, the image on the monitor zoomed downward past the forward funnel and penetrated into the bridge.
***
Captain Smith confronted his first officer, “Will, I say it’s too dangerous. Bring her to a complete stop. You can set the trans-Atlantic speed record next trip, when you’re in charge.”
“But Captain,” protested Murdoch, “the Titanic is unsinkable. Think of your reputation. The world is watching us.”
***
“Why is Murdoch pushing so hard?” asked Hollenbach.
“The 1912 Disaster Hearings discovered that Murdoch had bet 20,000 pounds that the Titanic would set the trans-Atlantic speed record on her maiden voyage,” replied Simon. “That was a fortune back then. But nobody thought he’d risk the safety of the ship over it.”
***
Captain Smith stood his ground. “I won’t risk the lives of…”
“Has old age softened you that much, Edward?” retorted Murdoch as he saw his life savings disappearing. “Or are you just a damn yellow bellied coward.”
“I am not a coward, and I won’t be mocked by the likes of you. I’m in command…”
“Save your excuses, Captain Smith. It’s probably better that King George knight me for bringing glory to the Kingdom, than some tired old man whose time has long passed.” Murdoch turned and left the bridge, shaking his head in disgust.
Captain Smith pondered Murdoch’s words for a minute, and then turned to his chief officer, “Full speed ahead, Mister Tingle.”
***
“That’s unbelievable,” said the astonished Simon. “Are all men that egotistical? Are they so wrapped up in their self-centered lives that they’re willing to risk…” Simon’s tirade was cut short when the HMTS Temporal Voyager slammed into an iceberg and sank within seconds.
