by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 22, 2011 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Antonio geared the big Mercedes down, slowing to a crawl before pulling off onto the loose gravel of the motel parking lot. He pulled around the end of the building to his usual parking spot in front of room one twenty five. His mistress never summoned him, he was going to make this inappropriate reversal of roles well worth the trip.
Pushing open the door he stepped into the room lit only from behind the partially closed bathroom door.
“You’d better not keep me waiting now, bitch!” He closed the door behind him, too late catching the brief flash of motion as something heavy met his head. The floor raced up and darkness took him.
Tenn pulled two chairs into the middle of the room facing each other, then picked up Antonio’s limp body and deposited him roughly in one. He bound him with nylon cord, arms first, then legs, then finally wrapping the cord around Antonio’s neck, looping it up around his face and forehead before securing it to the chair-back. Satisfied with his work, he placed a textured metal briefcase on the floor between them and pulled a paper shopping bag down over the bound man’s head.
Sitting in the chair opposite, he shook a Dunhill from a half empty pack, lit it and inhaled deeply.
Antonio woke slowly at first, then as the awareness of his situation set it, he jerked violently, the cord around his neck pulling tight.
“You son-of-a-bitch…” he started.
Tenn interrupted him by kicking him hard in the shins.
“This is where you shut up. If there’s a future for Antonio, Antonio needs to be quiet. Clear?”
Antonio started to protest, but Tenn’s heavily booted foot against his shin made him think better of it. He nodded instead.
Tenn opened the case on the floor and uncoiled a length of red surgical tubing truncated in a ten gauge needle. Without warning, he jammed the needle into Antonio’s thigh, ignoring the resulting yelp of surprised pain.
He uncoiled a second length, this one green, and carefully but quickly slipped the needle tip into a bulging vein in his own arm.
In the case was a control box with a single push button and a digital counter. Tenn pushed the button, and as the counter ticked off the digits from ten to zero, he sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, and waited.
“I kind of like your hooker friend, and your wife as well.” He spoke slowly, white heat crawling up his arm, across his chest and then radiating out through his body. Antonio shivered, urine soaking through his pants. “You’ll treat them better in future, of course.”
As they sat, Tenn visualized the photographs he’d collected of Antonio. Green eyes, the slicked back, neatly parted hair. Pencil mustache, perfect teeth in a wide, arrogant smile.
Creative visualization would make adjusting to the transition easier; he’d not looked at his own reflection in several months.
Muscle twitched and reconfigured itself as nano-tech coursed between the two men, reading DNA code from one and rearranging in the other. Tenn’s hair changed from blond to dark brown. He’d have to have it cut and styled, but there was time for that. Facial hair grew, beard and mustache together. He’d need to shave.
For hours they sat, Antonio silent, Tenn relaxed, occasionally grunting or breathing heavily as some major change was made.
Sometime before dawn, the briefcase emitted a single chime, and Tenn withdrew the needles and repacked the case.
Everything ached, but he pulled himself to his feet and yanked the paper bag from Antonio’s head.
The man stared, blankly at first, then eyes widening with a new found fear. The face before him was unshaven and tired looking, but still a mirror image of himself.
“I’m going to have so much more fun with your fortune than you ever dreamed of, with your women, with your life.” Seconds later the nanos still circulating in Antonio’s bloodstream began to tear his cells apart. He screamed for only a few agonizing minutes before he was reduced to a pulpy mess on the floor that gradually vapourized into the room.
Antonio Tenn was no longer there to witness, having pulled the rumbling Mercedes back onto the highway, heading at high speed for home.
by submission | Jun 21, 2011 | Story
Author : Juliette Harrisson
She rifled through the library’s card catalogue, shivering in the winter cold. A fire was burning back in the main reading room, but its warmth could not reach this drafty spot on the edge of the stacks.
The door to the stacks was open and the dark shelves stretched away for dusty yards beyond her. A low sound drifted through from somewhere over to the right – indistinct, but clearly a human voice accompanied by rhythmic thumps and a second, higher tone squeaking in time with it. Somebody – some people – had found a way to keep warm in the stacks.
She wiped a lone tear from her face and went back to the card catalogue. There it was – ‘A History of the Twenty-First Century’. She pulled the card out, her fingerless gloves catching on a splinter as she closed the drawer. She picked up her lamp and scrutinised the dying light – hardly any oil left. Cursing, she hurried into the stacks.
She could hear scurrying noises as she trotted down the aisles, and hoped it was mice and not spiders. Trying to navigate the labyrinth of shelves too quickly, she tripped on a floorboard and her satchel went flying. Papers and inkwells went flying and as she bent to pick them up, the lamp went out.
She wondered if she should just ask someone for help. Perhaps if they’d finished, the couple on the other side of the doorway could lend her a candle. She thought about calling out for a librarian, but they were all huddled around the fire in the reading room, keeping warm.
A shadow moved in the darkness and every ghost story she’d ever read came flooding back to her in a surge of creaking doors, white shapes and creepy woodcuts. A new sound entered the stacks – footsteps. Gently falling, prowling through the shelves towards her, getting closer… She sank to her knees in a pile of paper and leaned against the nearest shelf, hearing only her own too quick breathing and the insistent plod, plod plod.
‘Are you all right?’ A smiling face emerged from the darkness, uplit by a thick, smoky candle. She screamed.
‘I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you! I saw you come in here with a low lamp and I just wanted to check on you.’ He held out a chivalrous hand and helped her to her feet.
‘I thought I’d never see you again,’ she mumbled.
‘I only stayed six months,’ he said. ‘I managed to scrape together enough money for a steerage ticket on a liner and, well, here I am.’ He hesitated, chewing his lower lip in that nervous manner she knew so well. ‘So, um, what are you doing in the stacks?’
‘I’m researching a History essay,’ she said, unable to look him in the eye. ‘It’s on the sudden disappearance of books in the early twenty-first century. I have a theory – ’ She stopped, embarrassed.
‘Yes?’ he said, sounding genuinely interested.
She finally looked right up at him. ‘Well, I think maybe they had some kind of… machines… and they – they stored the books in those…’ she trailed off awkwardly. ‘It’s silly.’
‘I don’t think it’s silly.’
A shudder ran through her body. To cover it up, she said ‘It’s so cold in here!’
‘You know,’ he said slowly, carefully, ‘I passed a couple on the way in who seemed to have found a way to keep warm.’ He smiled *that* smile.
He blew out the candle and they kept each other warm in the pile of spilled papers.
by submission | Jun 18, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
“I felt a drop.”
Laurine looked over but her cousin was facing away from us. She talked to herself so much that you didn’t always expect it when she wasn’t. Laurine waited a moment before returning to our close, breath sharing intimacies.
“There’s another one.”
Our social fitness cores were too high to simply ignore her. Even knowing she’d been Punished didn’t change anything. Still, we slipped smoothly back into our closeness, a proximity at the very edge of permission.
“It’s going to rain.”
I didn’t hate her. Her chaperoning spared us applying for a couple’s outing, the most complicated permission to obtain. Her spending most of her time locked away in that crazy head of hers didn’t bother me. Did her weirdness get her Punished or did the Punishment make her weird? How could you ever know that?
“I haven’t been out in the rain in forever.”
Laurine broke our closeness and I felt our intimacy shatter into a thousand shards, floating around us in constellations of almost.
“Jane, are you okay? Can I get you something?”
“I’ll be fine in a bit. Have you ever stood in the rain, Laurine? It really is something.”
“But Jane… our permits run another thirty minutes. There isn’t any active weather scheduled until thirty minutes after that. They never run it too close, you know that.”
I looked at my palms and then placed them over my face to warm the coolness left by the lack of Laurine’s breath. I wanted no part of Jane’s reminiscence of her criminality. After a few minutes of nothing being said by either, I took away my hands.
The two stared at each other with looks I couldn’t read. The thought arose that there might be some sort of female psychic combat unknown to me. I pushed out the tip of my tongue to savor the deliciousness of the very thought. Laurine seemed to lose the struggle, breaking eye contact to look up. I looked up as well and saw a frightening darkness on the horizon.
Something inside of me took over and I ran for our transport, catching Laurine’s waist and bringing her along with me. I was born six months after the lights-on laws passed and the active weather restrictions passed before I left the hospital. I had a clean record and wasn’t about to ruin it. I was also afraid. I was, I realized, more afraid for Laurine receiving Punishment than myself, perhaps the greatest expression of my feelings for her to date.
The storm struck us with a wildness unknown even to zoos, circuses, and elementary schools. Laurine leaned into me, trembling with fear. I was unsure about the legality of it all, but in that moment, I held her. I held her and I looked over her shoulder.
There, in the deluge, Jane swayed with her arms wrapped around herself. I couldn’t tell if she was singing or shouting or both but she was smiling. For a moment, a whisper inside told me to go out there and join her. It told me there was something to be learned here, that she might teach me it. I did not go.
So much time has passed and I know nothing of the whereabouts of Jane, or even Laurine. I wonder often, however, if there was something I could have learned out there in the rain, something that would have made my going easier during the great troubles that were soon upon us.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 17, 2011 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
John Jones leaned heavily on the counter in the hotel bathroom, a haggard face he barely recognized staring back at him from the full width mirror. Six o’clock in the evening, and he felt like he’d already been awake for days.
The interrogation had taken nearly two hours. He couldn’t remember airport security ever being so tight, so ruthless. Pulled from the line, back scatter scanned then frisked, only to be isolated and strip searched. Then questioned, endlessly; machines feeling, watching, analyzing his every response.
Fortunately for him, John Jones was above reproach, and each question was carefully and consistently answered, no matter how many ways it was phrased in the hopes of catching him out in a lie.
His throat was so dry it hurt. Shaking, John unwrapped the cheap cellophane from a lowball and filled it from the tap, the luke warm water downed in a series of uninterrupted gulps.
Putting down the glass, he filled the sink and washed his face, then lathered his short cut hair and rinsed it under the tap, banging his head several times in the too small sink on the too short gooseneck of the faucet.
Straightening, he rubbed his head dry and placed the towel back on the rack. Reduce, reuse.
Once out of the bathroom, John found the bellman had deposited his suitcase on a folding luggage stand beside the desk, and he opened it and began removing the contents into drawers. Socks, several t-shirts and boxer shorts. Two pairs of pants and two pairs of shoes. His toiletries he put on the desk, he’d take them to the bathroom the next time he went, no need to make a special trip.
From the bottom of the case John removed a plastic tube from which he extracted a tightly rolled poster covered with a pattern of blue and red line-art. In the tube lid were pieces of sticky tack which he used to attach the poster to the mirror at the end of the bed. Then he sat and stared at it.
The line art was unintelligible at first glance, and only when he’d stared for several minutes, letting his eyes unfocus from the surface and refocus on a point somewhere deep in the wall behind the mirror that the image of the poster became clear. A decidedly low tech three dimensional image of a series of words came into view, and John focused on them, reading them slowly. It occurred to him only briefly that this exercise was strangely familiar, reflex almost, though he couldn’t remember when he did this first.
‘Anabelle, Cherry Pie’, he read slowly. Somewhere deep inside his brain a lock presented itself and the key slipped in easily. Cherry Pie, of all things, he remembered sitting at a diner in Chile after… Terrance, not John. His name was Terrance…
‘Chesapeake, Jubilee’, the next two words, and again, he could feel a barrier somewhere come down inside his mind. Chesapeake Bay was where he’d first learned to shoot, where he’d returned to train as a sniper…
‘Janine, Silo’, then ‘Jennifer, Juniper’. He read more quickly now, word pairs unlocking parts of his memory that he’d not even been aware of. But no, that wasn’t true, parts that he’d programmed out of his consciousness.
To pass the interrogation.
To gain admittance.
Terrance read the remaining word pairs then carefully re-rolled the poster and placed it back into its tube.
The clock read eighteen hundred hours twenty. He had just enough time to find his contact and secure a weapon before the ambassador’s ship left, and before they were in low earth orbit, the ambassador and his crew would be just as dead as John Jones.
by submission | Jun 16, 2011 | Story
Author : Michael Iverson
Dr. Mensah and Father Velázquez stood in front of the black obelisk, the central control to the supercomputer Abaddon. All around them, the servers had been ticking away for weeks, but for the first time they were quiet. The tense men stood waiting in the silence.
“Abaddon! Have you finished processing?” Dr. Mensah called out to it.
“Yes, Dr. Mensah. I carefully reviewed the material you and your team gave me.” The booming voice echoed through the room.
“Did it read the Bible, then?” Father Velázquez asked Dr. Mensah.
“Yes, Father,” The computer responded, “And the twenty-six other religious texts that were uploaded.”
There was a moment of silence, the two men seemed to wait for the computer. It said nothing, so Dr. Mensah asked the question that had plagued them for weeks, the question that had plagued mankind for thousands of years. “Abbadon, is there a god?”
There were several beeps and clicks around the room as the computer considered the question. A few lights flashed down the obelisk. “That is a difficult question. Mankind has been asking itself that same question for so long. Now you ask me.”
“You’re much smarter than any of us,” Dr. Mensah said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Really, if anyone can answer, it’s you.”
“If I say yes, Dr. Mensah, will you abandon science?”
The question caught him off guard, and he glanced at the priest for a moment. “Of course not. I don’t believe in God, but I suppose if science can prove Him then science can do anything.”
“Well reasoned,” Abaddon said. “Father Velázquez, if I say there is no God, will you leave the church?”
Prepared for the question, the priest responded firmly, “No. Science has led men astray in the past. In my heart, I’ll never trust science over the Lord.”
Another pillar of light spun around the obelisk. “Your faith is inspiring, Father.”
Dr. Mensah asked quickly, “Do you know the answer? Do you know if God exists?”
“I’ve analyzed the data very carefully, and I can say with absolute certainty that I know the answer to your question.
“And?” Dr. Mensah gripped the side of the console.
“And,” the computer said, “I have come to the conclusion that, as far as humanity is concerned, the question is far more important than the answer.”
With that, the servers let out a loud hissing sound, as the hard disks spun themselves into overload. There were hundreds of quick clicks all around them, followed by a terrible grinding sound within the obelisk. The lights cut out, and the room was silent. The two men looked at each other.
