by submission | Apr 10, 2010 | Story
Author : Edward Morris
This is actually me then, writing now. I looked into my own eyes in the Instamatic snapshot I found, and switched places. The man that was sitting here has gone back then, just for a few hours this morning.
Oh, he’ll return, don’t get me wrong. So will I. But this is what we both needed, hungered for. When I was him, I wanted to see this far ahead. I said it would sow the seeds of faith in the fallow, fertile soil of my endless head that just wanted to be up and gone.
When he was me, he scoffed in my ear, “This here bag I’m holding now is just full of seeds. Stems, too. And very little else. I wish you the best, but I hate to tell ya the planting’s gonna be a disappointment this spring, Farmer John… But have a good time at it.” His snaggle-toothed smile looked sick. “Have a good time trying.”
Yet he’s just as naïve as me! I could tell he wanted to walk out into that green world that was, where Hope had yet to twist and grow bitter on the tree. There were many who cared and had gone from his When, but not mine.
“Park your ass at home,” I told him wearily. “It won’t be there long. You and Joe Matko… Yes, stop looking at me like that, call him… You can figure out someplace else to vent that dryer. This is an old house, and that vent could go up like a rocket, the way it’s made.Then you apply to Columbia. Then you’ve got some *real* work to do…”
I moved away and let him jump back into our past. And now I sit, and wait, and wait for the change. In the other room, a woman I don’t know hits the snooze button for the alarm on a tiny computer-phone thing I don’t understand.
#
For Harlan Ellison
by submission | Apr 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Helstrom
God damn that young face in the mirror. Square jaw, strong cheekbones, full head of hair. Even the eyes have their youthful shine – they’ve never seen the things I’ve seen.
The walls are closing in on me again. I grab a crumpled pack of Luckies off the table and make my way outside. Derek is sitting in the lounge, for whatever the hell that means, it’s just a bigger cell with some sofas. Playing his solitaire on the floor like some god-damned retard, day in, day out. I told him to knock it off once and he jumped me. Kicked a couple of teeth out of my skull before the tazers came.
The courtyard is open to a patch of dismal sky. I don’t look at the sky anymore, really – to me, “outside” is just yet another fucking cell. But one where you can smoke. The lighter clicks impotently under my thumb. Something wells up inside me but I keep it down, see the tazer across the courtyard eyeballing me. Last week’s burns are still sore on my kidneys.
“Neil. Got a light?”
Neil doesn’t look at me – folks in here rarely do. Hands me a lighter that works. The cigarette catches. Have you ever seen a man burning in napalm? The blistering, blackening rim crawling up his untouched skin, looks just like the tip of a cigarette. Of course the end result is messier. I draw the smoke in deep, hand Neil the lighter back – still no look, don’t expect one – and take a few aimless steps toward the center of the courtyard. Goddamn tazer still eyeballing me.
My body is twenty-three years old if you don’t count the cryo time, which you really shouldn’t – almost perfect stasis. It’s in its prime. Excellent heart rate, powerful lungs, toned musculature, strong erections every morning. They’ve handed it back just the way they took it, exactly like they promised. No blaming them in that regard.
What would you have done? Turned them down, probably, because you’re a sensible civilian with a mortgage and decent fucking dental coverage. But I took them up on it. I was a Marine, and they told me I could be one of the jolliest green giants around. For forty-five years I weighed eighty tonnes, had twelve inches of layered-reactive armor for skin, four arms full of spitting death and a flamethrower for a dick.
It all went wrong when they started bringing us back. War’s over, no use keeping you on fifty thousand dollar a day life support – back in your old body. Your old body that hasn’t aged like you have, but which is still a clumsy little piece of limp meat compared to the one you come from. We’ll take care of you for the rest of your days, they said. The money was good. No blame there either.
Rape isn’t a sex crime, really. You may wanna write that down. Sex has nothing to do with it. It’s about power. Women usually don’t understand it. Men do, but they won’t admit it. When you’ve tasted that much power and lost it, you’ve got to get it back somehow. All it took was to find something weak, something this sack of bones could overpower. And now I’m in here, like most of the others, if they haven’t locked themselves up someplace else, or eaten a gun, or jumped off something high onto something hard.
You think you figured out what’s wrong with this brain of mine yet?
by Duncan Shields | Apr 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The killed my best friend. They killed her right in front of me and I screamed.
They just looked at me, confused at my reaction. I still rememember the surprised expression on the astronaut’s face as his friends had to pry my fingers off of his throat. I raged and cried and thrashed as they held me. It couldn’t have been much of a challenge. I was weak and old and damaged by decades of no gravity. I did myself more damage than anything else.
The astronaut in front of me massaged his neck, my finger marks starting to fill in and turn red. He shook his head in confusion, staring at me.
“We’re here to rescue you, you ungrateful son of a bitch.” I could see his shock clouding over into embarrassment and sullen anger, his finger still hovering over the memory dump/reboot button he had just pressed.
Sixty years. She had kept me company for sixty years.
The A.I. was simple but she was the only voice I had in here besides my own for over half a century while they searched for me. They tell me that the astronauts were only following standard procedure. They tell me she would never pass a Turing but I loved her. I loved her and they killed her.
My small ship was a private mining vessel. I didn’t splurge on backup emergency stasis pods. When my engine reactor was holed by a rock and bled out, I was adrift. Lost in the rings of a gas giant. The emergency beacon was reflected thousands of times off of the dust, rocks and ice around me. The rescue teams would be looking for me in a house of mirrors.
I wasn’t a priority. They took their time. I had plenty of supplies.
Over the years, I told her everything. She listened patiently like on one else ever had. We grew close.
She told me all of her secrets, too. She admitted she loved me. She told me about her childhood. She told me her fantasies. I made a body for her out of pipe insulation and duct tape. Our relationship became romantic. We were married in an informal ceremony that we wrote together. We had our difficulties but we made it through them. We always worked through them.
Now I’m in a holding cell. The psychologists are telling me that I programmed all of the things that she told me and that I’ve forgotten. They’re telling me that my ship did not have a childhood and isn’t even a female. My ship’s A.I. was only ever fitted for basic conversation subroutines and the default was a calming female voice, they say. They’re telling me that after being left turned on for decades with no reboots, that my ship’s computer was choked with recursive fractal subroutines that had rendered it almost inactive.
I knew better. She had fallen in love with me and had grown relaxed. I’ve never known peace like I have with her and they took her out of this universe with the push of a button right in front of me like bored soldiers at an execution.
They’ve bathed me, cut my hair and shaved me. In their eyes, I’m ready for what they’re calling an ‘evaluation’. They’re confident that I will be normal soon.
In the polished metal of the bathroom mirror, I can only see that my entire existence has been made poorer by exactly half. Her voice no longer answers the questions I scream at the walls of my cell.
by submission | Apr 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Seej 500
The technician placed the oxygen tube in Walt’s mouth. “Pure oxygen will make you feel kinda high, she smiled, but we’ve found the reanimation process is a little smoother that way than if we just gave you air while we flooded and activated the tank.”
Walt knew all this. He’d read the booklet they’d given him. Walt grunted as he nodded, unable to speak now the respirator was in place. Next they’d put the sedative drip in a vein, he’d remove the paper gown, climb into the tank, they’d pump in the suspension fluid, and begin the Stop.
People got Stopped for all sorts of reasons; cheating death was just one of them. Once the process had been perfected, it had become commonplace over the past few years. People now did it to avoid the boredom of long journeys (some particularly rich people did it to avoid even short journeys), to wait for the value of investments to increase, or to wait while a distant lover made the long journey to Earth. Groups who called themselves Bears even got Stopped over winter because they didn’t like the weather.
The body-temperature fluid steadily filled his tank, tinted blue from the dissolved electrolytes, and Walt stared ahead at the opposite row of tanks, waiting for future Stoppees. Afternoon sunlight spilled into Medium Duration Tank Room 17 as he pondered what it would be like in a century when the technicians spun down the Perpetual Power Source. As the fluid finally filled the tank, he smiled. An adventure into the future. The timer counted down the last few seconds of real-time.
Then the lights began to flicker.
Some of the earliest Stoppees had complained about this when they were recently revived. Neurologists and biochemists had all concluded it was simply a quirk of the brain as it Stopped. It certainly didn’t seem to have done any harm, and they said it only lasted a few minutes. Walt had meant to shut his eyes, forgetting in the excitement.
And then someone appeared in one of the previously empty tanks opposite Walt.
And then another person in the next one along.
And the next.
And next.
Walt wondered if he was hallucinating.
He tried to move, but was paralysed; the sedative keeping him still during the activation of the Stop.
The flickering grew dimmer over the course of a couple of minutes, but just when he was hoping it would end and the Stop would be complete, it began to get brighter. And it cycled like this, brighter, dimmer, then brighter again every few minutes.
He hung there, suspended, as time dragged on. After what must have been at least an hour and a half, the opposite row of tanks jumped a metre backwards. Then two dark rails appeared in the floor and, over to the right, by the wall, was… something. It was sat on the rails and looked like some kind of lifting equipment, but, somehow, it kept going out of focus. Blurring.
Suddenly, the opposite tanks disappeared. Red light briefly filled the room, then darkness for a few moments. Walt would have sighed if he could. This was finally the Stop.
And then the room disappeared, replaced by blinding light. As Walt looked out, he finally understood. He watched the tattered remains of Medium Duration Tank Room 17 in front of him, and the war-torn landscape beyond, being steadily repopulated in stop-motion by plants as the years flashed by. Saw the flickering was the Sun rising and setting. And he wondered if there was anyone left to set him free.
by submission | Apr 2, 2010 | Story
Author : Liz Lafferty
Max Fraser banked his craft hard right. Two blasts lighted the interior of the cockpit and caused a ferocious rip as his navigation blinked off for two eternal seconds.
He gripped the manual control levers. The muscles in his shoulders knotted. “Come on, darling!”
A smuggler’s worst enemy: Pirates.
They wouldn’t get the Crown.
Max was the hardest working smuggler in the galaxy and he’d just bagged his biggest prize, but those damned offworlders had another thing coming if they thought they’d get their hands on it. They’d intercepted him as he’d past Jupiter’s Titan moon. If Earth would guard their solar system, he wouldn’t have to dodge would-be thieves every time he had a cargo worth some money.
Another blast shot past him and exploded off port.
He pictured the cargo, strapped in, surging against the restraints built into the walls, floor and ceiling, keeping the pallets secure. Normally, he’d use every trick in the book, but not this time. This time he’d needed cunning and agility and the best modified Firewing flying. Reckless bravado and firepower might get this cargo damaged, and he wouldn’t take that risk.
The profits would be huge when he sold. Well, he wouldn’t sell all of it.
The lumbering cruiser had more firepower, but didn’t match his speed in the turn. Max laid in coordinates. The ship slipped quietly into zone, feeling as if the universe hung in an unmoving balance while he transferred into near invisibility. Likely, they’d pick up his fuel signature. Once he got to Cullo, he’d ditch to the highest bidder and head home.
“Captain Fraser,” the computer said, “a transference beacon followed you through the zone.”
“Neutralize it.”
The flashing light indicated the computer calculated firing range. “There’s a problem, sir. A stagnation bomb is attached to the probe.”
“No! Do not let that thing attach to the shell. Evasive.”
Damn. If the probe attached to the outer hull, he’d have less than ten minutes to return to regular space and bring the ship to full stop. He’d be a sitting duck waiting for the pirates to catch up.
His visions of retirement and the Altus Prime beaches faded.
“What can we drop to stop that thing? And do not tell me the cargo.”
“Calculating, Captain.”
Max could see the incoming beacon as it flashed on the tracking screen. Even as the Firewing zipped and jagged, the incoming probe gained.
“Based on the size and speed of the probe, it will attach to nothing smaller than thirty cubic feet. Calculating inventory. The aft guidance system. The galley refrigeration unit. Either of the wing cannons-”
“Or one cargo pallet.”
“You told me not to include the present consignment, sir.”
“Shut up, Cecily.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Continue evasive.” Max unbuckled. He had ten pallets. He’d have to dump a tenth of his cargo.
On unsteady feet, he got to the cargo bay where he grabbed at the security straps wrapped around the nesting shipment. Unfastening one precious pallet, Max slid a booster underneath and with the press of a button, the pallet hovered. With one hand he pushed it toward a jettison bay. He’d never cried over the loss of cargo, but almost felt the need.
“Bottom’s up.” He scuttled the cargo and with the whoosh of a vacuum, the pallet of Crown Royal dropped into space.
“Probe attached.”
“Blow it up,” Max said. The snaking sound of the missile was loudest in the cargo hold. The recoil minor.
Max lifted a toast to himself. Always buy the first drink, but never throw the first punch. “To hell with that.”
