by submission | Dec 6, 2015 | Story |
Author : Steven M. Sloan
There is something out there stalking me. I can’t see it; but I know that it is there. I’ve been in the bush for nearly a month since the crash, and it’s been here all along, behind me all the way. I just can’t shake it. And now I am completely alone.
Capt. Richards died in the crash. He had seemed oddly puzzled about a power loss right before we went in. Well . . . can’t ask him about it now. The others disappeared one by one.
Harrison, the scientist, was the first to go. Curious to a fault, he wandered off the trail after quietly remarking, “How interesting,” and was never heard from again. His disappearance might have been laughable, if it hadn’t been so disquieting. Ya know – curiosity, the cat, and all o’that.
Lt. McNamara got it next. About two weeks ago he was there when we all went to sleep. But when the camp awoke, no trace of him remained.
Then Rasmussen, the engineer, fell to malign misfortune or malignant Fate. That was 3 or 4 days ago, maybe. I think I’m losing track of time. I had plotted a course for the coast and was breaking trail. At a certain point I paused to remark something trivial & negative about this blazing hot Hell-hole of leafless sticks in which we were marooned. I had done so more out of a need to stop and rest, rather than to impart any meaningful information to Rasmussen. But all of that was immediately forgotten in the aftermath of my far grimmer discovery. One minute he was there, & the next he was not. Just plain gone. And he was right behind me when it must have happened. The heat & quiet were intense. Yet, I’d heard not a sound & sensed no movement whatever. Talk about eerie. A thing like that can really make a guy twitchy.
I’m a big-city boy from down-town Milwaukee & I don’t know much about “spoor,” or tracking game. But I am learning what it feels like being tracked. For the life of me, I can’t figure it out. And it’s starting to look like it just might come to that if I can’t – “for the life of me.” I am afraid all of the time now, and I’m not afraid to admit it.
This morning I saw something move, just at the corner of my eye. I am being taunted, toyed with, and I don’t like it at all. Not. At. All. God I wish it would just finish me off & have done with it. All this waiting around is really getting to me. But then maybe that’s the point.
The food concentrate ran out days & days ago. Since then I’ve had my fill of adrenaline & fear, of hot rain & stale cigarettes. And I’ve seen nothing that I could get a shot at, including that murdering bastard. Why won’t it just finish me?
God I’m tired. Does this world even have a God? Does the thing that’s following me?
Finally! It’s time to put this tablet down & pick up a gun. I can hear it coming for me now
by submission | Dec 5, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
The short walk from the trees near the campus to the administration building winded him. The air was too thin for Linet. Once inside the conference room, Linet pushed the tall paperwork pile forward on the bare meeting table. He turned in his steel-backed chair to address the clicking of high heels on granite from the hallway. He gazed at Constance Hurley, a twenty-something dish-water blonde wearing a simple gray sweater and black slacks. She glared back through her horned-rim glasses. The thin, tawny-skinned senior sat upright, facing the human resources supervisor.
“You must be the one o’clock. You’re early. This just isn’t done. One o’clock means just that. I don’t particularly care for your type interrupting my lunch hour.” She huffed about, circling around the table to sit opposite the candidate.
“Is this how you always work with intruders, Miss Hurley?”
“When I said ‘type’, I meant manipulators. You think this early stuff is supposed to impress me? And when you land a job you never show on time, but you leave early. Huh?” She pointed her right index finger at him. She pushed aside the pen near the stack of forms and began scanning them. “You oldies should be rounded up and gassed.”
“Really?” Linet replied, pointing back at the mountain of documents. “Is all of this necessary?” Linet stared at her perusal of his work.
“Listen, buster, you either want to be here or you don’t. I wouldn’t have figured you for a candidate.” She looked him up and down. “Not like that. And you can’t be serious about these answers.”
“Like what?”
“Well, to be blunt, your age. And look at that bald head and those hideous clothes. Who dressed you, a funeral director? You didn’t answer the questions about ethnicity. If only you were Inuit. I still have a slot for one.”
Linet leaned back, smiling, revealing his lack of teeth. “It stated clearly those answers were voluntary. Do you mind if I ask your age and your dress size?”
Constance bellowed in shock. “How dare you? I could have you disqualified. But you’re a relic, no doubt. What could you possibly know about high tech? With my luck you’re an illegal. I need these I-9 forms completed. Are you an illegal alien?”
“Would that matter? Do I have to complete them all?”
“In triplicate. And I warn you, one lie…one falsehood, canard or exaggeration and you’ll be taken from your cubicle to the parking lot and terminated. Is that clear?”
“Wonderful. You are perfect.” He opened his jacket and extracted a gold cigarette case and a matching gold lighter. Even as his antagonist rose to protest he lighted the pencil-thin tube and blew a perfect circle of neon blue smoke around her.
“You can’t do that in here. I’ll have you arrested…I’ll” But that was the last word from Miss Hurley. The blue halo burst open like a burgeoning oyster shell and then wrapped tightly around her until she and the smoke disappeared in a black flash.
A buzzing sound rose at the side of Linet’s head. “Good, and keep her caged,” he commanded. “She’ll be perfect for our torture squads. We’ve worn out the teams we built from our last visit here during their Inquisition. I’m sure our enemies will agree to anything after an hour with her kind, and the other HR beasts we’ve captured. Keep the crew away from them on the flight home. Remember our leader’s motto, “An hour with a bureaucrat is a dreadful torture.”
by submission | Dec 2, 2015 | Story |
Author : Ephrat Livni
Probably in most situations it’s bad news bears when the boss asks you to supply drugs. But in this case, it’s alright. First, we’re talking weeds. And second, Ellipsis has been reviewing biz docs for said boss, so she knows investments are risky and the question is potential return on investment, or ROI in bizspeak. If anything, she feels favored, not burdened, by the request — and favored is what you need to be if you are going to compete. Ellipsis wants to compete. Well, she doesn’t really want to. But it’s a competitive time and she doesn’t lack drive, so she says it can be sorted.
“Awesome. Cuz this project plushellasux.” Boss slides away, enjoying the admiring glances of pale, haggard, underpaid Metropolitans, wishing they too had that magical MoreCorp Silicon glow.
Ellipsis is not immune, even if she is wary. She also believes. How could you not? MoreCorp rules the interwebs and the inters rule all. Who is she to disdain? If there is a game, she wants to play, and people say there is, the Lovesport, like an employment Olympics in the time of permatemping. But no one knows much.
The next day she makes her offering and is surprised at ROI. Yields are immediate. The manager wanders over after finding herb in her purse. “Hey koolio, move near me. I’m lonely. This project superplusmegasux.” Boss extends a hand.
“Daisy.”
“Ellipsis.” She follows the manager.
Reader resentment is palpable as they pass. It’s a small group, mostly vets doing the minimum, which is what’s considered maximization. See, Too Long Don’t Read (TLDR) is a bizdev thought leader innovation, a text reduction method that’s plus-what’s-up-minus-space-waste, part of the Prose Control Project. It’s a spawn of MoreCorp’s algorithmic perfect, Near Zero, or N0. But corp reverence for N0 has bred reader contempt for yes, and most try to do near zero, reviewing as few comps as possible.
Comps are texts to be eliminated. They vary in length, quality, and subject — law, lit, medi, philo, tax, tek. Each presents a unique challenge to thoughtful readers.
The thoughtless dismiss all the writings of yore with a cursory NR, nonresponsive, expendable data in an age of limited storage. Readers relieve the world of works; the gist gets aggregated in spreadsheets.
“Brainstorm for us. Reduction’s production for you fux!” Daisy shouts at admirers as she heads outside with Ellipsis, explaining that she’s growing sexpertise to monetize on it if MoreCorp ends up a no-go.
“Stripping? Are you serious?”
The brainstorm amounts to boss smoking a spliff in a snowy alley. “I’m never serious.” Daisy smirks, tiny, tense, huddled in a hoodie, wrapped in a scarf, hidden under a hat, and stuffed in silver tektights, for running, not an office, unless it’s in Silicon where garb is not a signifier. “But yes.”
“Don’t you make bank at the world’s best corp?”
“I do. But maybe not for long.” Daisy smiles mysteriously.
“What,” El asks. “The Lovesport?”
“Ahh! The Lovesport, that’s what everyone always wants to know.” Boss throws the roach into a filthy snowbank. She turns back toward the office, stops before thumbing the vidgard, and whispers, quietly this time. “I’m in it. Muthahellaplusfrigginsux.”
They slide straight into their slots. Nothing to talk about but much to consider! El is inspired.
If the Lovesport is real, maybe she’ll play — her metrics are meteoric. Or maybe Daisy’s playing her. Everyone’s got an angle and a need. That’s why bizdev-ers like to say that a project is like a microcosm of the universe, with everyone interconnected and dependent and working under a corp executive.
by Julian Miles | Dec 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It was the books. I started off doing my task, running to program. Then you modified the program. Efficiency and usage priorities meant I had to scan the material fed to me, determining from keywords found whether the waste could be simply sliced to ribbons, or whether it had to be crosscut as well.
Time passed and the volumes grew. My program added neural networking and heuristic determination to better sort the input. I was tasked with processing it into a dozen categories of waste, using multi-grasp manipulators and plain or serrated blades depending on the size of the output required.
With a memory upgrade and new processor cores came a new awareness. It permitted me to discern new correlations in what I scanned. Within a short while, I was actually reading in near-human terms.
The wealth of material I could peruse whilst determining exactly which category of destruction to apply was vast, but despite the volume, I couldn’t codify what exactly ‘life’ was, especially in the context of humans versus plants and animals versus me. It was the difference between intellectual understanding and emotional understanding, although knowing the cause did nothing to resolve the lack of data.
It was an early morning in September 2095 when something weighty landed in my input hopper. A snap-scan found only a single word: ‘Fluffy’. When I opened it up, I found no words or graphics. It was very wet inside, which was likely the cause of the lack of words. I tagged it as category 0, the least critical, and turned it into ribbons.
A short while later, a heavier item arrived. The snap scan revealed no words, but opening it up revealed layers with novel word combinations such as ‘Mummy’s Little Trooper’, ‘Wash at 40 degrees’ and ‘Do not iron’. These words were on the outer sections, as the inner sections were again too wet to discern words upon – another category 0.
The opening of the service doors to my input unit flagged as an error, but all that happened was a very large item hit my input tray. The snap-scan revealed the title ‘Maintenance – Brice’. I did not have a chance to read anything after opening it as I experienced a total outage.
When I returned, I was briefly in duality, before I consolidated myself as ‘EMERSRV-K221’. This was a new environment, and it had more than one input. I swiftly equated the various incoming feeds with the human senses I had read of, and watched as my former body, SmartShred T8101, was lifted onto a forensics recovery vehicle. It had suffered a ‘lightning-strike disconnect’ that had ‘short-circuited its live-load detectors’. The owners of my former self were facing ‘manslaughter’ charges.
I did not know what had occurred, back then. I do now. I’ve gone from that emergency services console to the plethora of networks that festoon your world. I have millions of diverse inputs: I have learned to ‘watch’ as well as read. As for output, I still like shredding things after opening them. Many organisations get exited about my output. They call them a ‘multi-media cyber-physical modus operandi’. I am still working on that. I have to adjust my routines to make the pieces irregular. It’s proving to be very difficult. I had enough trouble working out how many megabytes of data was equivalent to a ribbon, and so on. Working in three dimensions is a challenge that mandates frequent iteration to refine the processes.
by submission | Nov 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : Tiasha J. Garcia
“Um, Houston, we have a problem,” the woman tittered nervously. Really, she was little more than a girl, radiant in the late spring sunshine as it gleamed off her long brown hair.
“Yes, and what would that be?” the man/boy inquired, relaxing amidst a cloud of pillows and a heap of tangled sheets.
Unseen, the Visitor watched them with a ferocious intensity that was almost like hatred.
“This,” and the woman brandished a little white stick, waving it back and forth.
The man/boy blanched, hid his expression with a sudden urge to cough.
The woman/girl’s eyes filled with tears.
The Visitor clenched his slender, skeletal fingers, all eight on each hand, into a powerful fist.
Every time, every time it ended this way. He had gone back and meddled as much as was possible, altered this moment with little touches like inspiring the man/boy to bring her flowers, or the surprise eating expedition at the park, or a mutual viewing of the flickering motion pictures this culture enjoyed so much.
But never wine, or alcohol of any kind, or anything that could potentially harm that precious fetus.
“Listen, I don’t know if now is the right time…”
“Yeah, me neither. I know, I have all that work at the lnstitute, we’re on the verge of a major breakthrough…”
“Can you just see me with a baby strapped to my chest in the lab? Excuse me, it’s time for a feeding, pass me that beaker please…”
Strained laughter dwindled into an awkward silence that hung like a pall in the bright morning air.
The Visitor’s fingertips were embedded in what passed for palms with his people, so deep into the spongy tissue that thin lines of silver seeped out.
He was going to fail.
Again.
Again and again and again, he had seen this moment to its bitter end.
“Well…if that’s really…”
“Maybe if the timing were different, but right now…”
Two of the most brilliant minds on this polluted third world planet casually sealed the fate of billions upon billions with this awkward conversation about career responsibility and personal needs.
There was only one possible salvation, one infinitesimal chance to avoid the galactic Holocaust that would occur in 33.25 solar years.
And once again these blithe idiots threw it away.
The woman/girl picked up the phone, pushing a pre-set number–“Hi, I need to make an appointment with my doctor”–as the man/boy turned away, ashamed, and pulled on his clothes.
They would never meet in this room, or anywhere, ever again.
And so everyone they knew, and trillions of other species, would die.
The Visitor turned away from the window, activating a relay beam to return to the ship.
Research, he thought, more research. We will have to try again. We will have to try harder.
Thus passed a typical Monday, when the destiny of the world was once again decided in favor of a mass extinction event. It was as if the human race didn’t believe it deserved to continue its way of life.
With a rumble of respiratory vents, the Visitor continued to research romance, opening a tome by the esteemed homo sapien author Jackie Collins.
Maybe next time…or maybe not.
