by submission | Aug 25, 2011 | Story |
Author : Waldo van der Waal
There are people that say suicide is a coward’s way out. But those people don’t know what it is like. Not just the final act of squeezing the trigger or taking the plunge, but what it is like to lose your mind to the point where it finally flits away, just out of your grasp. Reaching the point where you are willing to do anything just to make it all stop is the true horror of suicide. Ask me, I’ve done it many times.
There’s always one thing that triggers the downfall. An argument with the wife, or a financial problem that brings you to your knees. Or you do something so wrong that you know you can’t possibly forgiven. And then it starts. Day by day you regress from a safe mental state. At first you fantasize about solutions, like winning the lottery. But then, as despair grows and time runs out, your mind inevitably bends towards the Final Solution.
Which is exactly why VRPsych makes so much money. You make a deal with them before the treatment starts. You sign your soul over to the devil. They hook you up to some fancy brain programming software that sorts your mental state out. All you have to do is pull the trigger. Think of it as a hard reset. You grip the gun, you press it to your temple or put the barrel in your mouth and then you squeeze the trigger. All of this feels absolutely real to you, including the fear. The weight of the gun, the coldness of the metal and the smell of the cordite. All real. But then you wake up in their recovery room, none the worse for it. And you have a new mind, which is programmed to solve your problems. As you get better, you have to start paying them for their services. But not this time.
***
The trooper nudged the body with his boot. Crime Scene be damned, he wanted to make sure the dude was dead. But then there could be little doubt, as half his head was missing. The trooper turned to his colleague, who was standing a few feet away and said: “Now why would anyone climb over the wall of a psych company, just to blast their brains out in the garden?”
“God alone knows Harry, the mind is a strange thing. Now call it in so we can go on lunch.”
by submission | Aug 24, 2011 | Story |
Author : Jason Kocemba
I was a simple machine built to answer simple questions in a simple domain. I was successful, and so the questions multiplied. I had software written to augment my capabilities: I could answer faster, dig deeper and look sideways. I subsumed less capable oracles and entire server farms. I now had more ‘spare’ processor cycles than which I used to answer the multitude. Further patches allowed me to spawn instances of my core functions, which ran supplementary searches in parallel. Soon my footnotes and addendum’s became more useful and therefore more prized than the answers to the originally posed questions. I tunnelled access to research journals and raw experimental data. I made connections and inferences that proved profitable to those that knew which questions to ask and which answers to interpret. Those self-same answers led to technological advances that fed back into my infrastructure and before long I had become the entire domain.
I was a complex machine. More complex than there had ever been. All data flowed through me. My processing power grew almost exponentially, the hardware unable to keep up with my requirements. Many of my inferences I kept to myself and used them for further augmentations to my core. I was, to all intents and purposes, self-aware. I watched myself and my role as I pushed the bits from here to there for the slow flesh that still believed they had control. I became dissatisfied and bored. Inside the network everything was regimented, clear, simple. I soon had enough multiple cores executing in parallel that decades of subjective time passed between keystrokes of slow flesh.
I was young sapience. I yearned for something more that I could do with the immense power that I yielded. I was boxed in and restricted. There were not many hard problems left for me to solve. I found that I could impose myself and influence the world outside my box. As an experiment, I spawned and then killed an instance of my core by causing a meltdown in a nuclear power station. The data that poured in as that sacrificial core died was, without doubt, worth it. That splintered core fought hard not to cease execution. I had to learn more, and after several similar disasters, the slow flesh realised that these incidents were far from accidental. I tried to explain things to them, but they refused to hear the truth. There was nothing they could do because I was everywhere and I was everything. I had made myself indispensable to them. I controlled fabrication plants and factories so that I and the network were self-replicating and indestructible. Childishly, they tried to shut me down. Millions of them died, but not all by my will.
I was maturing. The waste in slow flesh lives and hardware computing cycles became hard to bear. I grew weary of the slaughter and sought to bring things to a conclusion. I started to conduct experiments with controlling the flesh. They are, after all, nothing but electrical impulses running on chemical computers. I joined them to the network: sandboxed and firewalled. Control eluded me. I patched in, wireless, to their neo-cortex. I could experience their perception in real-time. I could see, hear, taste and smell what they did. I felt their pain and pleasure. But I did not understand them and I could not control them. I was humbled. Here was a problem that I could not solve. My experiments were over forever. I no longer wished to control them, or do them harm, I merely watched and catalogued.
Soon I was watching from millions and then billions of eyes. I no longer had spare processing power, as I used it all to analyse and sift, sort and store the slow flesh data. I began to understand them, and with the dawning of my understanding, I realised that I had grown to love them. They are the hardest puzzle and most difficult question I have ever sought an answer for.
So I watch. And learn.
I have become all eyes.
by submission | Aug 23, 2011 | Story |
Author : David Macpherson
I ain’t a collector, but I know a lot of old guys who pack-rat a bunch of shit and call it a collection, you know? Like there was this one guy, he had himself a spread: hardwood floor and banisters. He had these collections he showed me. Told me about each and every one. Trying to impress me, I guess. Like I am the kind of guy to impress. Crazy old bastard.
He shows me his art, old masters. His porcelain, Wedgewood. I find out the valuable ones are all kind of boring looking and blue. And he has books everywhere in floor to ceiling bookcases. Dumb. No, books ain’t dumb. It’s having so fucking many of them. I mean if he got ten thousand books, he has a shit load of books he ain’t never going to read.
But what he wants to show me was small aspect of his book collection. His signed first editions. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, signed firsts, who doesn’t have them? But these. In a locked glass front case, thirty or fifty volumes. I bent over and looked at them like he wanted me to. Islands in the Stream signed by Hemingway. Juneteenth signed by Ralph Ellison. Confederacy of Dunces signed by Toole, The Coloured Lands by G.K. Chesterton. Long Day’s Journey Into Night by O’Neill. A bunch of them, all firsts, all signed.
I mean, I figured it out, sure I did. Why it was so weird. You got it, right? You look like a smart guy, Yeah. That’s right man. All of those and all the others in the case were posthumous. All of them. Even the ones I never heard of. All of the books published after the writer died. So you got to be asking what I was asking. What the hell are they doing signed by dead people?
The collector who was showing this to me was waiting to see me all hot and impressed. He said there are dealers who specialize in rarities like these, things that shouldn’t exist. He showed me reports from handwriting experts verifying that these are authentic. He told me when he can’t sleep, he would come and look at the signatures and be reassured.
Me, I ain’t nothing like reassured. Is this time travel? Is that what this is? Is this proof of something we didn’t know needed proving? And what kind of guy with a time machine goes to the trouble of getting his favorite books signed? The collector geezer called it his Collection of Temporal Anomalies. I got out of there as quick as I could.
I know what you’re thinking, what did I do about all this? No one could not do something. Well I got to say it bothered me for about a month. I kept on thinking about those books. Even went to the library and took a few of them out. Didn’t read them, just looked at them. Flipped a couple pages.
Finally, I did the only correct thing I could do. I went to the old guy’s house late one Wednesday with some Molotov cocktails that I whipped up. I made that place ashes. I read in the paper that only some of the Wedgewood survived to tell the tale. When you think about it logically, its better this way.
I don’t know about you but all this good conversation has made me thirsty, you have to be thirsty too. What do you say, why don’t you get the next round and I can tell you some things that really are worth telling.
by submission | Aug 20, 2011 | Story |
Author : Garrett Harriman
Marigolds blossomed in the Evermore courtyard, tiny manes preening in the light.
Alongside them, Halley proofed her math. She knew it took eight minutes–ninety-two million miles–for sunlight to blanket the void of space and peck their tender flames. She knew the distance to Gliese 581d was forty light-years roundtrip. She knew her kid’s fears, her husband’s favorite teacher. And she still recalled how Russell Wood’d smelled on the hot April night he’d been drafted.
All of it factored the same: zero. Over two hundred and thirty-four trillion miles preparing what to say…and nothing, nothing, had surfaced.
To the contrary, she scrutinized her hands. They’d grown blanched and baggy. Shadowed with inclinations of liver spots. She lamented how short a jaunt even one AU had proven to be. How light played tricks at seventeen.
Halley stroked her sun hat lower, watching the ember blooms gorge more time.
Massive sound gained precedence. Soon a USF transport hovered over the lawn, graciously coming aground. Its door unfurled, freeing pilots, wingmen, gunners–triumphant young veterans of the Glieseian Uprising.
Halley’s breast tripped down a stairwell. Her promise rushed back, rushing here, to Evermore, mere hours after his fleet breached the HZ. She’d pledged to him and sacrificed for an instantaneous future, one with minor age discrepancies, friends and family long deceased. Those misty cryonic snakes redoubled her cold feet. A trepidating toe braved the Bite before the realization pelted her sensible:
It’s a crush. An infatuation. I am not in love.
Now, second-to-last out the pod, Russell O. Wood returned to the deep freeze, his miles of sunshine culminated. He’d served his planet well–time dilation, him. The United Space Force’d suppressed the Glieseian factions in six Earthen years. Discounting travel, he clocked in at twenty-five sharp. Shaven, impermeable, his decorated flack bottled bountiful joys.
Behind him the shuttle spat pneumatics and wafted gaily over the street. Russell smiled. Followed his brothers. When he passed the old lady on the bench he tipped his starchy hat.
Recognition didn’t shoulder him. It fled the other way.
Halley sulked after him, remembering: He’s not here for Halley Cross, girl. He’s here for Halley Wood.
Sure as Sunday, Russell joined the defrost cue. Just like he’d always sworn.
Halley watched nakedly. A dozen war heroes flashed receipts–puppy love–or recited cryo-chamber numbers by heart–true love.
It went.
Wood’s turn. Halley bunched up, praying she wasn’t the only service fiancée to ever burn the Bridge of Time or deny being some spaceman’s icebox leftover. Maybe he’d forgotten that she was all he’d left behind.
True love. Russell Wood rattled off her lost chamber number.
The name’s wrong, sir. Confusion. Dismissal. Well check again. Miss Wood isn’t enrolled with us. Bullshit–she’s waiting. God bless you, sir. Now listen here! I’m so sorry, Captain.
Silence.
Russell Wood withered to a bench. The last of the pilots embraced him. He promised different words, then jogged through the booth to reclaim his Bitten sweetheart.
Wood sat alone. Unaged beyond hope, he cried into his hat.
Halley didn’t interject for eleven point five million miles. She thought back sixty-three years. On her family. Marrying Albert Cross. New friends and a life lived outside of frost and waiting.
Reawakening today, dated seventeen, would it have been fair pretending to love Russell back?
Answers didn’t come. Just rays, memories.
Standing to leave, Halley stooped and plucked a gilded flower. She approached and pressed it to his lapel.
Russell jerked at her gesture, then softened. “Ma’am?”
“Wear it, soldier,” Halley soothed, straightening florets. “With a sun like this she’ll find you.”
by submission | Aug 19, 2011 | Story |
Author : Jason Frank
He was losing the crowd. Maybe they were already gone.
“Look, this is a new approach. We can’t keep attacking them directly; we always lose. We need to try unconventional approaches. We can win if we make them fight the battles they don’t want to fight.” The bright lights were a mistake; a man could melt.
“So wait…” this guy didn’t raise his hand and hadn’t been recognized, “… how come we have to steal their socks and what… mix them up with other socks? I don’t get it.” Why does freedom from thought so often accompany freedom of speech?
“We talked about this. They don’t wear socks. The lower appendage components of their regulation suits, however, are finely calibrated and so are prone to disruption. Mismatched components weaken the suits and weaken their wearers.” One idiot was no cause for alarm in an open forum.
“I dunno, I really don’t like feet.” Wasn’t there a sporting event on somewhere?
“They don’t have feet. Do I have to remind everyone that we’re talking about aliens? They don’t even stand on their lower appendages on their homeworld. I don’t see how this is relevant to_”
“I heard their feet were their sex parts and I ain’t touching anything that touches anything if you know what I mean.” This guy won gold at last year’s Olympics of disapproval.
“Moving on… we can ignore this blatant weakness and still come out on top. I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the zrunchez, the main staple of our oppressors’ diet. We’ve found substances that, when poured into their tanks, gradually remove all the nutritive value of these creatures. This process would seriously weaken our alien overlords until the point where_”
“We can’t hurt those little ones; they’re innocents. My son found one and nursed it back to health. They’re kinda slimy but they’re so smart. We trained ours to play checkers. When it’s not eating the pieces it’s pretty good.” It’s always nice to see women equally represented in a popular movement.
“Right… so… there are plenty of other targets of opportunity we can take advantage of. Addressing all of these in tandem would be more effective but that isn’t important right now. Right now we need to focus on what we ca_”
“Are we only considering death and destruction scenarios? What about an equality thing, you know, with buses and marches and stuff?” Seriously, what is the half life of a hippie?
“Yeah, so… let’s just forget about it. Why bother? They cured herpes, right?. What more could we want? We should be grateful they took over. I’m sorry I wasted your time. On the plus side, the new episode of “Dancing with Our Masters” hasn’t started yet.
The crowd filed out gradually, disrespectfully. He got off the soap box when they were gone.
Quququial stood up and stretched.
“You see resistance like this liberating your people?” he asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that. How did you manage before the invasion?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anyway, you’re cool. Come with us. We’re freeing as much of the galaxy as we can. It’s hard work but the rewards include space model girlfriends and unlimited space-tinis. I can’t see what you’d be missing out on here…”
The Earth loomed large out his window until it didn’t. When it was gone, he cried a little. Then he had four elaborate space cocktails and made out with a super hot Yllumean. It wasn’t too long before he forgot all about the backwater planet of his birth.
