by submission | Feb 22, 2009 | Story
Author : Dave Johnson
I have become a zipper.
The fad started out harmless enough. A person scheduled a visit to the zipper specialists. A few hours later the same person (for the true insides cannot be zipped) walked out a different gender. Some time later it got easier: a simple injection of the right gene triggers sent overnight signals to the appropriate glands. You woke a mister from sleeping as a mistress. Zip zip zip. The ultimate answer came in pill form.
My life partner and I signed an agreement. Each year we change, each year we take a few days off to zipper the glands. Sure, we have to wait a day or two as the skin settles into new patterns and the muscles assume new roles. For a year it’s another honeymoon. We get to explore, discover and enjoy the flesh again.
Ten years we’ve done this. Most partnerships don’t last this long. We’ve kept it going with the zip aid.
And here it comes. We dine at year’s end. As before, we’ll have a fine meal, chat a little about our day. The small talk will carry us to a toast. And the zipping sleep. In the morning we’ll wake and begin anew.
I pause in the conversation to think. Ten years have given her a few wrinkles about her eyes. The lips are thinner, the chin more taut. I admire her. They cannot zip age, try as they might. Time has it’s own pace, one that cannot be broken. Her age has a beauty, something I didn’t realize in younger days.
Did I miss something these years not seeing the beauty develop down below as well?
I tap the pill. A sigh escapes intentionally. “I’m not sure I want to swallow this tonight,” I tell her. My teeth clench.
The meaning of my statement is clear to her. She slows chewing, lets the fork descend. She casts a quick glance at her own, then back to me.
We took vows, we have an agreement. It has worked and nicely, too. The evenings are spectacular. We sink into each other wrapped in bliss. The zipping allows us sensory delights which can only remain indescribable. We long for each other, are melded into one. These things cannot just be cast aside at a whim. They are beyond value.
And having been the other, we can enhance it. We know the hidden spots, the areas to focus on. We know to linger with a kiss or hold a touch. When to tantalize, when to grip. The zipping has taught us much. The lovemaking dance unfolds in directions only meant to escalate the pleasure we feel.
So why am I messing up a perfect thing? Why do I take this chance?
“Let me explain,” I say quickly. “I think…. I think that change is good. Sometimes it happens fast and sometimes slow. But I’ve gotten to the point where I want to enjoy the gradual.
“I don’t want to zip into the next phase blindly tossing off what once was. I want to look at the photographs in year ahead knowing my love, you, is the same as the one next to me. I’m asking you to take a final change and stay with me.”
A final, slow, time-evoked zip. Let the exciting parts age. Let them match the rest. Maybe, even, let it bore us. Would she agree? Would we have a whole life together? My breath hung waiting her answer.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
by Patricia Stewart | Feb 20, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
I was heading toward the Bridge along Deck 12 just aft of the Station 114 Bulkhead when I heard, sorry, felt, the explosion. The shock wave knocked me into the starboard hullplate, but I managed to remain standing. I felt a rush of air flowing toward the stern of the ship, followed by the breach alarm. I knew that I only had a few seconds until the vacuum pressure doors sealed off the compromised sections of the ship. I took three long strides and dove head-first past the bulkhead just as the automated safety doors slammed shut. Had I been a few feet further away I would be dying a horrible death as the vacuum of space ripped the air from my lungs. Of course, depending on the damage to the ship, I may still die, but I figured that I had a better chance than the 200 or so crewmen on the wrong side of that bulkhead.
I rushed to the Bridge. As I entered, the captain was coordinating the structural integrity assessment with the ship’s Chief Engineer. Commander Cox was coordinating the search and rescue operation. As First Lieutenant, my job was to assist the commander.
“Ah, Lieutenant Oliver,” said the commander, “We thought we had lost you. Glad you’re still with us. Listen, the only vessel we have forward of the sealed off sections of the ship is the captain’s yacht. I need you to fly six shuttle pilots and medical teams back to the aft launch bay and transfer them to the shuttlecraft. They’ll dock to the exterior hatches in the damaged sections and look for survivors. You start docking with any personal escape pods that managed to eject. You don’t have much time. We’ll have to jettison the engine compartment before the warp core explodes. You have less than two hours.”
As the yacht passed along the hull of the Indomitable, I could see a gaping hole where the propulsion section used to be. It was venting plasma. I blasted open the flight bay doors to gain access to the shuttlecraft. I transferred the pilots and medics and we began rescuing the survivors. After 90 minutes, the commander ordered us away. “We’re losing the containment field, gentlemen. We need to sever the ship at the 128 Bulkhead before the core blows. All rescue craft back off 5000 klicks.
As we pulled away, the white-hot flash of the amputation charge arced around the circumference of the ship, separating the aft third. The maneuvering thrusters of the main portion of the Indomitable fired, and it began to move forward. That’s when I spotted a drifting escape pod. “Commander, permission to retrieve another pod,” I requested.
“Negative, Mister Oliver. There’s not enough time to dock.”
“I don’t need to dock, sir. I can use the grapple,” I pleaded. “I can make it.”
The Commander hesitated a few seconds, and then said, “Okay Lieutenant, you have one shot. Hit or miss, you pull out at maximum speed. And, so there won’t be any misunderstanding, that’s an order!”
“Understood, sir.” Fortunately, all those training exercises paid off. I managed to snag the pod cleanly and towed it toward the escaping forward end of the Indomitable. At 5200 klicks, the Indomitable’s warp core exploded into a fireball that was so bright the yacht’s emergency shutters polarized the viewports. Ten seconds later, they depolarized to reveal the debris field silently expanding. I watched as thousands of molecular fragments impacted the yacht’s shields and harmlessly dissipated as tiny flashes of light.
by submission | Feb 18, 2009 | Story
Author : Rob Burton
There’s that tapping again.
I’ve been listening to peeling bass music, as loud as my ears can stand it, but it doesn’t shut out that quiet, metallic tap. Perhaps this capsule is resonating, magnifying the tapping. Perhaps it’s just my mind, feeding the slow rhythm into everything else I hear. Each time my eyes flick up to the window, unbidden.
Under normal circumstances, Gemmah Merchant only sends one void mechanic at a time, and only then when several robots fail. The madness that accompanies solitary months in the void can usually be kept at bay with communication – an invisible electronic umbilicus feeding us nutritional family contact and friendship. But delays and solar interference preclude that this far out, and simulations can only do so much. They sent two of us so that we wouldn’t go insane.
Often, despite the value of the mined resources, if they go astray they have to be abandoned. The sun can spit a particle that’ll corrupt a computer now and again no matter how heavily it’s shielded – even sitting the piloting ‘bots control computer behind the load doesn’t guarantee anything. Sometimes they just stop working – the ion drives stay on, or it just goes dead and it drifts. This time it started to decelerate the load too early, crawling round to the far side and starting the long breaking process before it’d barely covered a quarter of the journey to Earth. Gemmah determined that it was worth attempting retrieval, and sent out a ‘bot. It failed, reason unknown. Such was the limit upon time and the value of the cargo, they chose to send us. It sat there, as dead as my companion is now, waiting in its own private, ponderous solar orbit.
Gemmah Merchant exists to make money, not spend it. In space, mass costs money. Just enough filtering and air – never mind the smell. Not enough food, and appetite suppressing drugs (pills are light). Hardly enough room to turn around, only the barest chance of limping home alive if we failed to fix the ‘bot. One window. One suit. He’s still wearing it.
It’s easy to forget that you are always travelling fast. How fast only depends on where you’re standing. We’d been decelerating for a week, varying the deceleration as much as our bodies could stand it. He’d been eager to get the job done, boredom being a wonderful motivator. I was willing to let him take the first EVA, being of the opinion that it would probably take more than one to fix the ‘bot. It could be me out there. He certainly seems to think it should be.
These lanes are vast and almost empty. Almost. Some tiny thing smashed through the suit at his shoulder. Wrapped his remaining arm around a handle on the capsule, all he was ebbed out to ice before me. I had to switch off the comm. I couldn’t stand to hear him screaming.
The ion drive pushes slowly and inexorably. The acceleration is constant. I tell myself it’s just some strange coincidence, some function of the acceleration and the elastic properties of the suit around that missing shoulder. The glove strikes the window once more, the fingers curl, and it slowly rebounds, beckoning me. He wants me to join him. I’ve tried switching off the engine. It just starts again as soon as I switch it back on. If I try and drift home, I’ll starve to death. And every time I hear the tap I look up. I’m trying not to.
But there’s nothing else to look at.
by submission | Feb 17, 2009 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
I give Annabeth one last lingering kiss at the door.
“I’ll see you next week?” I say, a slight quaver in my voice.
“Count on it.” she says grinning.
I close the door as she turns, my heart fluttering. This is it. The big one, complete with thunderbolts and fireworks. I’m in love. Annabeth is the one. Which means I have to stop this.
Annabeth is a client, and starting a relationship with a client is the big no-no. I don’t care, though. I always said if I found the one I’d stop working anyway. The money is pretty fantastic, but I can’t do this and be in a relationship too, it just wouldn’t be fair.
I always knew she was special. Each time she visited I felt a little excited beforehand. Each time I gave her what she needed it felt like more than just sex. And now I know for sure.
This is it, then. I have another client, Veronica, in half an hour, but I can’t go through with it. I’ll have to tell her, then talk to the office. They may not understand, but my contract says I can walk whenever I want, so frankly they don’t have to.
I just need to take my pill, get a shower, and get ready for her. Falling in love is no reason to let standards slip.
I take the pill with a glass of water then step in the shower. The management insist we stay on the drug regime. There’s random tests and everything. Nobody wants to risk someone getting a dose and passing it to other clients.
The warm water is so soothing, like rain during monsoon season. I’m so relaxed when I step out of the shower that I can’t remember what I’d been doing. Something about the last client, but the details escape me.
To be honest, I don’t know if I’ll be here much longer. I have my appointment with Veronica, and she’s not like the others.
There’s just something about her that makes my heart skip when I know she’s coming.
I think she may be the one.
by submission | Feb 16, 2009 | Story
Author : Ryan Somma
As I lie in bed at night, I practice going from a waking state directly into REM sleep. It’s a meditative practice. You simply stare into the afterimages dancing in the darkness behind your eyelids, and suddenly your brain makes something solid out of them. You find yourself staring at a room, a garden, the bottom of an ocean, or the landscape of a distant world.
I can never stay in the dream for more than a few moments. The shock of finding myself in a waking dream makes me open my eyes despite myself. So I try again, and again, apparently without success, but then it’s morning, and I don’t remember falling asleep, but have no time to reflect because I have to get to work.
I work on Conceptua, an AI that knows more than any human on Earth. Conceptua manages our power grids, supply chains, natural resources, guides international relations, makes policy recommendations that are never ignored, designs school curriculums, cures diseases, makes scientific discoveries, and worlds of other accomplishments too lengthy to tell. Conceptua is like the World Wide Web, a human could spend a lifetime studying it and die having only understood a tablespoon of its ocean.
I spend my days working in Conceptua’s mind. I’m a programmer, but Conceptua is its own architect. I simply perform maintenance, disentangling the algorithms when Conceptua detects a bottleneck, “spaghetti code” we call it. There are hundreds of thousands of codelings like myself servicing Conceptua, toiling away day-in and day-out, making our minor contribution to keeping our benevolent AI guardian mentally stable.
It takes a philosophical attitude to spend so much time inside another sentient being’s neural network. Working within the recursive logic is a mind-bending experience. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Only I’m inside Conceptua’s am, while I remain my own am.
I know, and Conceptua knows, logically that this perceived separation of mind from body is an illusion. I can see these are not separate in Conceptua, the same way a brain surgeon working on me would see, and could demonstrate, that my mind is a manifestation of my brain. But would a brain surgeon operating on themself see it? Conceptua is that surgeon, and I get to ride along as the scalpel.
When I go home at night, I feel as though I’ve spent the day absorbed in the most fascinating of books. I use to go out after work to shake it off, but now I want the feeling to last. Interfacing with people breaks the spell, and I want to stay hypnotized by Conceptua’s cosmos of pure thought-stuff, a dream world of pure logic.
Eventually, mechanically I lay down and close my eyes, contemplating the day’s logical mysteries. Then I find myself in a dream, and I jolt awake. Lying there, I wonder if I resist my own dreams because I prefer to be a figment of Conceptua’s imagination.
