by featured writer | Nov 22, 2011 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, featured writer
I open my eyes and gasp aloud.
Where… is this? What… what day is… time is… where am I? Who… who… who… who am I?
Although my entire awareness is a swirling multitude of uncertainty, I know I am looking up at the sterile white interior of a… a lid, yes a lid… on a coffin? No, not a coffin… a… a… I just don’t know.
Then my stasis chamber’s computer, sensing my consciousness, begins to speak in a soothing female voice. “You are Cyril Brendan Thompson, citizen of Canada. Do not be alarmed. You have been in stasis.”
Like a punch to the face so much memory comes flooding toward my senses all at once. I hadn’t been ill? but what? Just… just middle-aged and sick of life; but what to do? Back then it was all the rage. All the aging hipsters were doing it, personally I didn’t care I just wanted the world to change.
So for a hefty sum I reserved a position in the well-sought-after fast forward limbo of the time skipper.
But why has my chamber awakened me now? This is the one thing still unclear. I decide to address the computer.
While my vocal chords are physically intact and have been, as I quickly discover, quite obviously well preserved, the sound of my own voice echoes back at me off the inside of the chamber lid with the dry complaint of a long unused musical instrument. “What is the date please?”
The machine hums and whirrs at me but the voice does not answer.
I try again, with more authority this time. “Why have you awakened me?”
Again the mechanical whirring, this time interspersed with a few plastic clicks and ticks. Still the machine says nothing.
“Computer!” I command dryly but sternly. “What is the current state of the world outside?”
Suddenly the mechanical hum of the chamber stops. Then without warning there is a dull metallic thud, as though an iron ball has just dropped and triggered a sinister mechanism inside my coffin-like prison. Then the soothing voice returns as if though nothing is amiss.
“Certainly Mr. Thompson. The date is 6289 AD by your Julian calendar.”
Then without pause it answers my second question. “You requested not to be revived until such time as the human population has been reduced to less than one billion persons.”
And then as I grasp for words but before I can effectively react it plods on mechanically to respond to my third query. “The state of the world outside is utter chaos. A comet approximately forty-two kilometers in diameter has impacted the planet. The shockwave has circled the earth seven times and is still moving. An estimated ninety-three percent of all Terran life is thought to be lost due to this event and its apparent magnitude.”
Shocked to my very core, I decide to ask no more questions for the moment. Everything seems still and tranquil. I am fairly certain my stasis chamber remains in its protective sarcophagus; surrounded by shock absorbers shielding me from the goings on of outside.
I finally decide to address the machine again. “Computer?”
This time she responds instantly.
“How may I be of service sir?”
“Do you retain a complete record of human activity dating back to my time of internment?”
A quick whirr and hum and then, “Yes sir.”
“Tell me then,” I ask with a faraway look of boyhood wonder on my face, “Did the Vancouver Canucks finally win the Stanley Cup?”
by submission | Nov 21, 2011 | Story |
Author : Huw Langridge
Carla’s hand retreated from the ON switch while the media wall flickered to life. The software programme went through its final initialisation stages, with lines of configuration code working its way up the screen. She waited.
ADAM appeared on the wall. ADAM, the shining humanoid avatar, the ‘physical’ representation of the Artificial Intelligence program Carla had been working on for so many years. So many years in this small garage behind her house. Beautiful code that was in the final testing stages. Soon she could patent the program, then release it to the world. Anyone who saw ADAM would be convinced that Artificial Intelligence had finally come of age.
“Good morning Adam,” said Carla when the voice parameters finally loaded.
“Good morning Carla. have you had a good rest?” said ADAM, leaning in towards the screen. Carla smiled, constantly astounded by the realism within the avatar’s movements.
“I did thanks. I had a beautiful dream.”
“Really?” said ADAM, “May I ask what it was about?”
“I was… dreaming about the past,” said Carla.
“That’s interesting. What aspect of the past?”
She looked around the garage, pondering the dream. She looked at the shelves with their old paint-pots, the tool rack of garden implements she could never remember using. Though she was a keen gardener she never seemed to have the time. Outside, beyond the trees the light from the sunrise shone pink through pastel clouds. A beautifully calming scene.
“I was young,” she said. “An infant, in the dream. It was strange because I only had a vague understanding of the world around me.” She smiled to herself, it was so interesting to be telling this to an AI program, but it would be even more interesting to discover what ADAM had to say about her dream. Some of the higher algorithms may struggle with the concept of dreaming, but it was worth the test. “My mother was helping me learn to ride my first bicycle.”
“What colour was the bicycle?” asked ADAM.
“Adam, you are aware it wasn’t a real bicycle? Just a dream-bicycle.”
ADAM nodded. His nodding seemed a little clunky, a little… unlikely. Carla made a mental note that she would have to play with that part of the code.
“It was yellow,” she finally said.
“I knew it would be that colour,” said ADAM.
Carla smiled. She wasn’t surprised. Yellow was the first colour she taught the ADAM program to recognise through its multiple high-definition cameras.
“Did your mother… say anything to you in the dream?”
Carla shook her head. “No but I was talking to her. At least, I was trying to, but I couldn’t find the words. I was so young, in the dream. Too young to articulate how much I loved her. I…”
ADAM interrupted. “Loved her? You talk about her in the past tense. Is she no longer with you?”
Carla felt a tear running down her cheek. She was shaking her head, knowing that ADAM’s camera could see and interpret her movements and gestures.
Adam triggered the OFF switch and rotated his bio-canister to look through the view-port at the parched planet below. “It’s so close now,” he said. “I hadn’t yet programmed in the concept of death.”
His great-great-great grandson stood up from the grav-seat and floated towards him, softly touching the metal surface of the bio-canister which preserved the old man’s brain. “You will never get those times back. I really think it’s time you let her go.”
by submission | Nov 19, 2011 | Story |
Author : Eugen Spierer
“Why do you want to work for Bosch paper mills?”
The question echoed distantly in my ears. I knew it didn’t matter what I answered, my future was being decided as we were speaking based on the blood sample I had donated five minutes earlier.
“I think the company can offer me a challenging environment to work in. One I can grow in, professionally and personally.”
This was of course, a lie. It didn’t matter what I said. The vice president of the company I was talking to just needed to pass the time until the results came in. My fate was fixed and not dependent upon this conversation’s outcome.
An awkward silence. We both knew what was happening.
“Look,” said the VP, “let’s cut the crap. Why don’t we start by you telling me about your family. What were your parents like?”
“My dad was a maritime engineer and my mother was a bookkeeper.”
“A book keeper, eh?”
I knew this would strike a nerve. Employers look for a pedigree of prestigious employment.
“Yes. She’s worked with Coen and Travis, the shipping company.”
The VP just stared at me with a face devoid of any expression. Probably assessing my value.
The lab technician’s echoing footsteps in the hall sounded like an axe wielder walking toward the hanging post. He came into the room and handed a small computer printout to the VP.
After staring at the bottom of the page for a few seconds, the VP fixed his gaze on me. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Jacobs, unfortunately your past experience is insufficient for us to hire you.”
This must have meant that I failed the genetic test. They probably found out that I had a heart problem that is going to kill me in a few years or that I have reached the peak of my mental capacity. I still don’t know what it was to this day. I stood up, thanked the VP and walked out of the room and into the elevator.
This was my fifth job interview and I had failed them all. The blood test did the trick every time. I would be considering a genetic shift treatment, if they weren’t expensive and illegal.
The elevator’s floor numbers raced by like my life.
The day light momentarily blinded me as I stepped out of the elevator and into the lobby. There was no one there but the security man who, from the look of it, had just finished his night shift.
“How was your interview?” The guard asked.
“It didn’t go well.”
He appeared unsurprised.
“I could have told you it wouldn’t go well,” his voice followed me as I pushed open the door and stepped out into the busy street, “they only like white people around here.”
by Duncan Shields | Nov 16, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The Introdus happened in late 2021.
Seven hundred thousand time travelers showed up around the world.
They showed up on fire.
They showed up in clumps in the larger cities and by the singles and pairs in rural areas. Most of them were burnt beyond recognition.
Only sixty-eight of them were saved and of those, only sixteen were able to maintain consciousness. Of those sixteen, ten of them were only able to scream and scream and scream. They were sedated into comas. The six that were left were able to talk.
It was hard to get intelligible stories out of them.
There was a lot of confusion at first. The fact that these people appeared out of the air was hard to make the public believe. It was thought that a worldwide firebomb campaign had begun until the corpses and survivors were examined and not a single one of them could be identified. They simply weren’t on our books.
Scientists measured closer and verified that on a quantum level, the bodies were not from ‘here’. No one could confirm that they were from the future but that was the story those survivors told in slivers, gasps, and broken metaphor. Through shattered teeth and pain medication, though burnt faces and time-jumbled brains, through hand signals and languages evolved further from our own, they told us when the universe would end.
The invention of time travel triggers an event, they said. Once a switch on a time machine was thrown, the universe took notice. Some of them said that it was God, the Devil, Shiva or a giant mouth of fire descending through the clouds. The images they provided were delusional ravings. Entire continents becoming open sores, tentacles reaching down from the stars, the air shattering impossibly like glass, and dimensions bifurcating like paper being crumpled into a ball. No two of them were alike save for the fire at the end and a horrible universe-wide sentience saying “NO”. A combustion not just of the body but of the entire existence of a dimension.
Each of the six survivors claimed to be from a different time and each one claimed to have invented time travel on their own with no help. If that was true for all seven hundred thousand of the travelers, then they all came from different Earths. The odds of them all discovering time travel independently on the same planet were too high.
They all had tried to escape the cataclysm that had suddenly appeared by using their invention. Some of them had fled to the dinosaur times, some had gone back two or three years to warn themselves, and some of them had set their dials to the far future.
But they’d all ended up here, burning and screaming, at September 18th, 2021 at 9:18 PM Pacific Standard Time.
The theory being introduced by the Pope is that the travelers have been sent as messengers. That whatever force destroyed them and sent them here in suffering did so in order to tell us that time travel must never be invented.
For once, the church and most scientists seem to be in total agreement.
By papal decree, UN Security Council ban, and unilateral G20 accord, research into time travel is prohibited and strictly enforced.
by submission | Nov 13, 2011 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
“Five minutes, General.”
“Thank you, Gunner.”
Anywhere else in the fleet she would be an impossible escort. Her dull-black skinsuit was topped with a spiked leather jacket, her hair gelled into liberty spikes, her face painted like a skull. She still showed her rank and rate, but the only name was the one tattooed on her forehead. Her child perhaps, a lover, a sibling. All that mattered was that anyone she killed would be able to see why she was doing it.
He followed her down to the assault bay, to the raised platform at the edge of the deck. His command was waiting for him, ten thousand variations of the Gunner, uniformity thrown aside in favor of anything that would scare the enemy, or give voice and strength to the rage they all held inside. All had names tattooed on their forehead and elsewhere, even him — ten years of war, a hundred names, a hundred strikes to his soul etched in his skin. These were his brothers. Time to get them ready.
“You know why we’re here. PUD’s, all of us — Psychologically Unfit for Duty. Pulled from the line because we could not follow the rules of command, of war. Because none of us could see past our need to immediately kill as many of the fuckers as we possibly could. We didn’t want to leave — they made us. Today we’re back. Today is our day.”
“HOO!” The sound rang through the chamber.
“A few minutes ago, you all felt a bang, felt the ship veer onto a new heading. That bang was simulating a malfunction, and since we have not taken any fire it appears the bastards think we are out of control and falling into atmosphere to burn up. In another minute or so a big chunk will do just that, but this lander, this big stealthy armored rock, will drop right down in the middle of their field command. While the main strike force sets the beachhead in Switzerland, we will occupy and destroy as much of their command as possible. We will today kill as many of the fuckers as we possibly can.”
“HOO!”
“We’re coming in hard, no jets until absolutely necessary, so even with the dampers this is going to be a hard ride. We hit hard, the shocks raise the ship, and this deck is left on the ground. The gunners take out the hard targets from above…”
He paused to nod at his escort.
“…while we go after the soft targets below. We have no meaningful intel on their actual deployment. There is no plan, other than mayhem, destruction, and death. Give it to them.”
“HOO!”
“They are not like us. They are clinical. Detached. To them, this is a business, our oppression their right. They can handle the Fleet, the Army. They can’t handle us.”
“HOO!”
“Our own people called us flawed, called us broken. When we planned this mission, they called us ‘The Legion of the Dead’. They knew us better than they thought. We are dead. And we are legion.”
“HOO!”
“We will kill a hundred of them for each name we bear, and we will break their spirits so that the Living can break their backs!”
“HOO!”
“No mercy. No surrender. Only RAGE! From each of us, they have taken something. From them, we take EVERYTHING!”
“HOO! HOO! HOO!”
The General stepped down, walked to the number ‘1’ blazoned at the edge of the deck. Ten thousand knelt down as one, grasped the handholds, and waited.
It was going to be a good day.
