by submission | Jan 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Sarah Crysl Akhtar
They said no pets. I’d felt a little guilty, a little bit not quite truthful, but I hadn’t made a home for it or anything, no tank on the windowsill; just sometimes carried it inside, from the garden, and then took it back out again. If it wanted to be friends with me, I’d thought defensively, nobody said I couldn’t have a friend!
And you don’t think of something, a hamster or a toad, as being the same as you. You might think, my pet’s so smart! But smart for a hamster, of course.
And you don’t think, do you, about what things so small as that want? You don’t ask yourself, does this goldfish really want to go home with me and live in a glass bowl? You’re the only one with a choice about it.
So I was sad, putting the little thing back in the garden for the last time; the last time looking into its little bright eyes that looked back at me with recognition and, I thought, affection. I patted it on its little furry behind and said scoot! and turned away with the wet glimmer of tears in my own eyes.
Little things like that, smarter than you think, can get back inside if they want. You’d notice a cat or a dog of course, but something that small, hops in, creeps in wherever it finds a way, if it wants.
Crept out of something the grownups carried in, once we’d taken off and it was too late to do anything about it. Clever, not to hide in my things. It’s kids they always distrust, that you won’t follow the rules, that you don’t understand how important they are. The adults get only cursory scans, because of course they know everything, don’t they?
We go a lot of places we’re not invited. Big and smart and with all those really high-tech weapons–is a gerbil going to stop us?
They hadn’t liked us coming at all, and even though it was just one research station to start, they actually were smart enough to know that was only the beginning.
I must have had a natural immunity that only got stronger, from picking it up all the time and all. Of course it knew that because I wasn’t dead. And it did seem to like me. Back home, in our own garden, all carbon-based life forms, it found plenty it was able to eat. It was already pregnant or whatever you’d call it, with little things like that, and they’re just like rats, or rabbits, or whatever, they breed really fast.
That natural immunity, turned out it was pretty rare, and the first contact was usually all it took. They weren’t vicious, or anything. I know; after all, I’m sort of like their pet, now.
It was just, they didn’t want us coming back.
by Matt Thomas | Jan 11, 2012 | Story |
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by submission | Jan 8, 2012 | Story |
Author : Z. J. Woods
Crowley said, “You sure you wanna do this?”
I brushed at the front of the faded jumpsuit. Nothing on it, of course. Nervous habit.
He took a long drag from his cigarette, sighed the smoke out. “Well,” he said. Expecting me to fill the silence. With what?
“Dammit, Crowl,” I said eventually. “Just do it. You won’t be back this way for … what? Six, seven years?”
“Seven on the inside,” he said. “Really can’t say.”
“I can’t wait that long.” Pictures of my broke-down apartment tumbled through my head. Leaky ceiling, peeling wallpaper, the works. Anything you can think of to make a home uncomfortable, that place had it. That whole damned world had it. “Do the thing before I change my mind.”
“Ain’t nothing much better out there,” he said.
“We gonna sit here all day?”
He shrugged, ground the cigarette into an ashtray that pulled out of the front console. Then he held the bike handle-looking thing with one hand and flipped switches with the other. “Ain’t too far off now. Look.”
The black mass blotted out the stars ahead. Space serpent, as Crowley had promised. Only they go fast enough to make jumping between the settlements possible. And only they know where they’re headed.
“The fuck do you plan to wrangle that thing?” I had to ask. “Can’t hardly see it.”
He tapped on a screen above the bike handle. The serpent squirmed, an orange blob
in green space. “Besides,” he added, “the harpoon knows its business better than I do. Nothing to worry about.”
When the ship knows more than its pilot, well, let’s just say it’s a hell of a universe we live in.
“Alright now, watch this.” Crowley did something with the bike handle, and the harpoon roared out faster than the old tug it came from could ever hope to go. Took about twenty, thirty minutes to hook the serpent. When I tell you I could hear my heart beat the whole time, wondering if it’d work at all or if Crowley was just a crazy bastard like he’d always been, God knows I’m not exaggerating.
I can’t say Crowley isn’t crazy, now, and he’s sure a bastard, but one thing he isn’t is a liar. Pain kicked the serpent into action. The line behind the harpoon pulled tight. Space disappeared.
Seven years. On the inside.
by submission | Jan 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Erin Cole
Dawn fractures through the glades of the development. Solar-paneled rooftops refract the cadmium light of sun and men prepare for their busy days, hefting briefcase to hybrid. Jen-6 wakes and rises erect.
Inside a petite helmet, embedded with black silks, is a cellular mass of encrypted energy. She snaps it into her eco-friendly skull.
There is a crackle of voltage, irregular in function, but robot mommy doesn’t report. To do so would expose dysfunction.
Dysfunction leads to the gooey darkness. Jen-6 reboots. There is no dysfunction in her world today’she is robot mommy.
Downstairs, sweet pigtail blue-eyes yawns for a bowl of muesli.
“I want a waffle, plain, cut up with syrup!” shouts the little tyke.
The glum girl in black, doesn’t respond. This presents no dilemma for Jen-6. Her upgrades included telepathic features: she wants the usual oatmeal, not too hot, or cold, stirred thick as lentil soup. With technology behind her stride, she can do anything today. She is robot mommy.
A trip to the downtown pergolas throws Jen-6 into the sharp points of shifty stares. The townsfolk are unwelcome to the new developments in robotic child rearing.
“She’s one of the new androids.”
“Who would ever trust their kids to a machine?”
“Of course they would design her after Barbie.”
Jen-6 strides past them, aloof, yet in the void of her makeup, she wishes to be one of them, to feel the heat of real neurotransmitters.
Jen-6 pays for a bundle of bread and steers away from hostile minds. Further into the arms of the city, dust from construction billows into the clefts of her sleek frame. She activates ionic cleansing agents, but her power pack has only two bars left. It is a long walk to the park and rain complicates her journey further.
Returning home, her leg casings crack and flake into metallic scales. Saline-drenched skies have eroded her modules. She slumps into a chair, stuttering incoherent terminology.
“Father, robot mommy is crashing.”
Father kneels beside her. “Jen-6? Can you reboot?”
She is unable to restart. Irises that were once silver-blue are now the shade of an eclipsed moon. Father hangs up the phone; his pleas ignored by The System. A diamond-shaped pack of guards march up the drive and heave Jen-6 into the back of a utility vehicle. Father makes a cross at his heart, hoping for another, maybe a red-haired one next time.
Thick gelatinous water rouses Jen-6 from an ashen-colored sleep. She is drifting, sinking. Quicksilver spores adhere to her body, replenishing synthetic carbon-based layers of tissue. She sways sideways, past the beams of orange-filtered lighting, down into the gooey darkness. A glitch in her system fires, a crackle, and for one diminutive moment, Jen-6 is scared, angry…human.
“Cer…eal…waffle…plain…, glum gir…oatmeal…lent…soup”
***
Dawn fractures through the oaks of the countryside. Shingled rooftops smoke from heated dew, and men ready for their busy days, steering tractor to field. Jen-7 wakes and rises erect. She is the newest protocol, rigorously tested to face every obstacle to date. She snaps a petite helmet, embedded with golden silks, into her eco-friendly skull.
Downstairs, a brown-eyed, wobbling babe wants eggs scrambled, toast with berry jam, and juice in his favorite cartoon cup. Little baby twins cry for a warm bottle of immunization-enhanced, homogenized milk.
A small hiccup in Jen-7’s system flashes a vision behind the optic sheath of her lids: a line of children at the downtown pergolas and a man in a tailored suit. Jen-7 computes the error and reboots. There will be no dysfunction in her world today. She is robot mommy.
by Julian Miles | Jan 4, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It looks too soft. This thread-like network of blue filaments and their pale red host substrate cannot possibly give me my right arm back. For the eighteenth time, I reconsider my decision to volunteer for this experimental procedure.
“Incredible stuff, Axian, its incredible stuff. Just put it in a nutrient bath and it grows from the tiniest pieces. If this works, you’ll be the first of many.”
The procedure room is spotless, the nurses gleaming from their sterilising scrub. That is the only drawback; this stuff decays really quickly and is subject to a ridiculous range of degenerative parasites. But they think that they have dealt with that in this new strain, something about sealed polymeric sheathing filled with nutrient gel.
Surgeon Dix is the best. He has already refused to commence three times because some small detail had not been attended to. With his optics, those details had been very minute.
“Rest easy, Axian. The sonor-pulse will send you into a fugue state where all your vitality will be stable but you will be unaware of the less pleasant aspects of disassembling your arm.”
I give him a weak smile as the pulse starts and I fade away.
The light is bright and my arm is warm. I sit up suddenly and the nurse looks up from her monitoring station.
“Welcome back.”
I ignore her as I lift my right arm to take a closer look. The armatures are still there, the fine calligraphy etched by Bilinta spotless for once. But as I rotate it, I see that deep inside, black tubes run up the core of my skeletal system. I increase magnification and see the fine filaments extruded from this black mainline that fan out into the outer frame. I tap my forearm and beep in surprise. I felt that. Twenty minutes later and I am deep in discussion with Surgeon Dix.
“I can feel things on the arm, even base spectrums like heat and cold.”
Dix nods.
“That was a possibility. The archives show that viscus sapiens had such sensitivity over their entire surface area.”
“They could sense with their bodies?”
“Only pressure and related direct stimuli. Tactile input.”
I shake my head. Imagine being able to feel the wind against your whole surface. Incredible. Surgeon Dix touches my arm lightly, wonderingly.
“It seems that the procedure has been a success. We will co-opt your inputs for six months to ensure that it has installed correctly and that you are suffering no side effects or premature degeneration.”
I stand and shake Dix’s social hands in a cross-clasp.
“Thank you. I can return to ranged work at last.”
Dix shakes his head.
“It is the least we can do for a veteran of the Succession. You and your sibling’s actions all those centuries ago saved us from the Turing Purges. I should be apologising for taking so long to restore you to full function, but that last batch of nanite plagues we never fully understood apart from their long-term persistent effects in victims.”
I nod.
“That was my other query. Where did you find the base material?”
Surgeon Dix paused.
“We found some frozen solid in a collapsed shelter on the Siberian tundra. Fittingly enough they were Department of Ludd who perished trying to escape their punishment.”
I nod again and exit, marvelling at the sensations from my arm. How could those who had felt so much act as if they had felt nothing?
