by submission | Oct 26, 2010 | Story
Author : Joshua Mounce
I drove at breakneck speeds, my heart thumping faster than the song on the radio could possibly keep up with. My eyes flicked back and forth praying I didn’t get pulled over. I’d once heard they would take you strait to jail for 25MPH over the limit. That made me laugh. Were I to get pulled over, it wouldn’t be because of my lead foot. The dead woman in the back seat would be much more incriminating.
I hadn’t meant to kill her. We were fighting, she slapped me, and I pushed her away. It wasn’t even a shove, just a push, but enough to knock her off balance. The tinkle of my glass coffee table breaking stuck more in my mind than even her futile gurgles as she looked at me in total shock and pain.
I could fix it. I would remember that moment for the rest of my life, but with luck she wouldn’t. My veterinary clinic was not the only one in the state to offer pet cloning. It was however one of the pioneers in brain taping. From what we were able to tell, my client’s dogs and cats retained all their memories, minus the final hours or days since short term memory didn’t carry over the same as long term. Which worked out wonderfully for those who were run over or other such disasters.
It would also work to my benefit. The last few hours had been horrible. I never should have confessed the affair. I wouldn’t this time, and everything would work out just fine. I simply had to get there in time. Within four hours of death certain chemical reactions happened in the body that would skew the results of the taping. I’d wasted too much time grieving and debating whether to call 911, so now I sped.
———–
It took a week for the clone to mature. She would have a lapse in memory for that time plus the final hours, but it was all something I could invent a cover story for. She’d never been all that bright, and was quite gullible. Beauty, not brains. A trophy wife, my golf buddy had once said. I’d merely chuckled my agreement.
I stayed late into the night watching the tedious process of the brain tape rearranging her neurons. I mused while waiting. She would look younger, which I was happy about, but it would make it a bit harder to convince her she’d been only stoned or drunk for a few days. She’d have a high likelihood of developing cancer in five years, but I could pay for treatments. All things that could be dealt with. At least I would have her again. At least I wouldn’t have killed her.
The beep of the machine woke me from a slight doze. I gripped the sedative I had ready. No chance she’d believe me if she woke up in a clone vat. I’d drive her home, throw some pills and a bottle of rum on the bedside table and put on my best concerned looking poker face when she roused.
The fluid drained out and the door to the vat opened. I pulled out my wife, stuck her with the tranq, and stopped dead. I’d had a week to think up all contingencies, but this never crossed my mind once.
Tiny breasts, oversized nose, cleft chin, unibrow… It looked nothing like my wife. I was going to need a different plan.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 25, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
She came from the First Cities. I suppose that’s why we all thought she was stuck-up. Our whole office gave her the cold shoulder.
Not that she acted like it. She was just quiet. To our fertile and vengeful minds, she appeared haughty and aloof. Too good for us. Looking back on it, she was probably just terrified of our overt, racist ignorance.
With each day that she failed to figure out a way to make friends, our opinion of her cemented.
Not that any of us walked forth with an offer of coffee. God, I hate looking back on those days.
It was the damn colony ladder social formation. “A combination of royalty and democracy”, they called it. “Screw those who had the bad taste to be born here out of wedlock”, we called it. The families that landed first made the rules and made provisions for their children.
It wasn’t long before the first bastards were born. It’s harsh setting up a colony. Those bastards were put to work and stripped of their last names. So were their parents.
The seven First Cities (New Omaha, New Minsk, New Albion, New California, New Vancouver, New Singapore, and New New Delhi) still maintained strict adherence to original colonization dogma. They preached abstinence before marriage and were obscenely rich off of the original patents set up by their fore-fathers. The last names that came out of those cities were known world-wide as the ruling class.
They were also the keepers of The Needle.
That was the communications array that kept us in contact with updates from what they called our Home System. The updates were centuries out of date when I was a child. I still remember the day that The Needle went silent. On all of the screens, the First Cities Networks showed the faithful in the streets, wailing, not knowing how or why their god had gone silent.
My father simply said “Well, that’s that.” and got up to get another drink. Our whole family was fifth-generation bastards with no last name like our entire neighbourhood.
The First Cities were outnumbered. Their only strength was their stranglehold on the economy and their status as keeper of The Needle. Now that The Needle was no longer talking, a lot of the rest of the population of the world became increasingly concerned about the unfair distribution of wealth.
A rebellion was brewing. Sides were being chosen.
All this was happening when the First Cities girl joined our office. I got trapped in an elevator with her. We shared a few nervous hellos at first and then I launched into a tirade about why I hated her people.
Astoundingly, she agreed with most of it.
I listened to her talk about what her parents had told her about keeping the rest of the planet in line and how she didn’t like it.
She’d run away. We pretended to keep hating each other but over the next few months, we ended up sleeping over at each other’s apartments. It was only a matter of time before people found out.
My friends disdainfully said I was really ‘coming in first’ and stopped calling me after I broke one of their noses on a lunch hour. They washed their hands of me. I shouldn’t have been surprised that it happened so quickly but it hurt.
We’re both outcasts now and we couldn’t be happier. We moved in together. The rebellion’s coming but we’ll worry about that when it gets here.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Oct 20, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
I couldn’t bear to look at the young punks sitting at the bar. A smartass kid about 21, 22 thinks he knows how the world works, and two pretty, but brainless devotchkas hanging on his every word as if it were a golden nugget of wisdom.
They don’t know shit.
“You don’t know SHIT,” I yelled at them. They gave me a disdainful look and dismissed me as a nut job.
I’ve seen it all. Battle cruisers blasting unarmed hospital ships to pieces. The sick, lame and lazy, still in their beds spilling out of the ruptured hull to suffocate in the vacuum of space.
I was on Europa when a grief crazed sergeant sentenced a virtually unarmed colony of Asiatics to a slow death by asphyxiation when he blew their Tesla Field generator.
Nobody cares, nobody gives a damn.
Nobody noticed as Joey Preston, formerly 2nd Lt. Joseph L. Preston, 3/125th, 1st Infantry Division, took a large swig of his beer, lowered his head and fell unconscious to the grimy steel floor.
John Carsten, grimaced as he jabbed the needle into his arm and thrust the plunger home. The rictus of pain was quickly replaced by the winsome smile of euphoria as he loosed the belt on his arm and allowed the blessed fluid to burn away his nightmares.
The nightmares of the impenetrable jungles of Venus. The combat was so close it often came down to hand to hand battle. A gook impaled his thigh with a screwdriver.
He reacted immediately, slashing at the dinks body with his K-Bar. The slope fell atop him, covering him with his slimy entrails and their filthy stinking contents of raw shit. He gagged and vomited. He was on his back choking on his own ejecta, triggering a second wave of nausea.
There was nobody in the cramped, filthy apartment to remove the needle from the arm of retired Gunnery Sergeant John Carsten, nor to call the medics as he drifted into a coma from which he would never wake. Above his body, thumb tacked to the wall, was a crimson banner emblazoned with a golden Eagle, Globe and Anchor.
In a secluded wooded lot, not far from Dog River, Saskatchewan, stood a makeshift lean-to “fort”, composed of logs, branches, bits of sheet metal, and whatever detritus could be lashed together to form a hide-out for young boys.
Almost simultaneously, William Hunter ( age 12), Billy to his friends and family, and Christopher “Chip” Pike, 11, pulled the leads of their Nintendo Gameboys from the sockets behind their right ears.
“Wow,” exclaimed Billy, “I was this loser alchy dick who fought in the Lunar Colony Wars.”
“That’s nothing,” Chip interjected with unbridled enthusiasm. “I played a drug sick dope head Marine after the Venusian invasion. I got extra points every time I hit the vein first try.”
“Damn,” Billy exclaimed admiringly.
Just then there was a knock on the rusted tin door. “That’s not the secret knock,” Billy said testily.
A second knock came. “Close enough,” said Chip and pushed open the door.
Chips little brother and constant pest Charles (Chucky, 9) eagerly barged in. “Guys, guys, look what I just got. I just downloaded it from the library. It’s the latest game… it’s almost like ancient history.
He held out a small box emblazoned with the name Hanoi Hilton III: The Ganja Express.
Their eyes were aglow as they smeared saline paste on their leads, slapped them into their cranial jacks and plugged into the wonderful mind numbing game.
by submission | Oct 19, 2010 | Story
Author : Almn
Richard’s mother was sitting in the corner, looking at me. “You’ve been a lot easier to be around lately.” It was yet another straw on the camel’s back. My mind silently ground to a halt for a second, trying to parse a correct response. Didn’t want to blow it.
“I guess those counseling sessions really helped. Understanding why people do the things they do, it really turned a light on in my head. I don’t know why, but everyone seems so much more reasonable now.”
This wasn’t in my parameters, and even with the frequent coaching of the psychologist and the effort of every electron in my brain, it was a struggle. I was doomed.
“Well, it’s been good to have the real you back.” Richard’s mother beamed. “You’ve been so sad for so long, and we were so worried about you. You know I love you, right?”
“Yes mom. I know” It was getting harder and harder to keep up the masquerade, the conflicting orders jangling around my head. I am a “beta”, a duplicate, and an imperfect an inorganic copy. I would never stand close scrutiny.
“Well make sure to call me when you get back to school. You know we’re worried about you, so far away.”
“Yes mom, I will.” She reached up at me, and I took her in my arms and hugged her tight, the way I knew Richard had hugged, squeezing like crushing the life out of her would bring them closer. In the back of my mind the second order started up it’s klaxons, insisting I obey, but I held back, for it would conflict with the first one.
I headed out into the rain that Richard had professed to love but never spent much time in, and cried. I was a failure, a waste of resources and time, a sham of a masquerade. No one would believe me for another week, and I had to keep this up for as long as his family was alive? Drinking water to replenish my tear ducts and wondering where I could get more salt from, I found a shelter, and there took out Richard’s suicide note, reading it again and again, looking for some way I could obey all of my orders, and prove that I was not a failure, like him.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 15, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
They all died. All the animals. All the humans. Farewell to the flesh. Genetically engineered disease took the meat, leaving only the insects and the plants. Leaving us.
We’re humanoid in appearance. We are born in giant stalks that peel away, towering corn husk wombs opening to reveal us, green-skinned and smooth, with the smell of mown grass bleeding onto the wind. Our entire bodies breathe. We swim and bask in the sun for nutrients. When we are close to death, we turn into seeds like the mighty dandelion and we blow away.
Humans found it easier to create sentient plant life than to mimic the complexity of their own genes. It was heralded as a species-saving decision at the time but it was too late to rescue the meat from the plague. They thought they’d be able to transfer their minds over to our bodies. It didn’t work.
After the humans died, we left the labs and went wild. For centuries, we roamed the earth, increasing in numbers peacefully. Then came the first struggle for resources. That was a decade ago.
There has been a war among us. The tragedy of the humans is now being visited on us. There has been murder.
We had many strains among us. Hybrids and splices that gave rise to many different kinds of plants. We had purple eggplant people, the wide-eyed orchidfolk, the trusting daisykin, the oak soldiers, the leeching weeds, the devious ivymen, and the all-knowing bloodwoods.
Or at least we used to.
We call ourselves the Roses. Our bodies are thick and thorny and our petalled faces have inspired poetry. I am ashamed to say that I am part of the victorious race.
We laid waste to entire crops. Old recipes were found for chemicals that killed different plants. We extrapolated.
Now we are the only race of plants left. This lack of variety had bred weakness into us.
It was the aphids. They’ve come in force with no natural predators. The ladybugs have left us, killed by the pesticides of the Sunflower Giants. We are dying and there are no other sentient plants that will live after us. Only the spores, mold and fungus. Only the stalks and bulbs of our mute, stupid ancestors. The earth will be devoid of thought once we are gone. It will have gone back completely to the green.
Maybe it’s for the best.
