by submission | Aug 29, 2008 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
It was a crisp, clement evening. The air was fresh and new, and the gentle purple of the sky gave the scene a tranquil and poetic feel.
About five hundred people were gathered here, although similar groups were gathered all over the world, looking up at the sky and the far away stars. Despite the beauty of the night, there was a somber feel to events, as of serenity mingled with sorrow.
When the ceremony started, it did so gradually. The speaker did not rise on any prearranged signal, but instead did so on the feeling that the moment was right. A glance to the sky told him he had chosen correctly.
“We are gathered here in memory and in celebration. In memory of what happened one hundred and five years ago, and in celebration of what has been done since then. We are gathered ten years after the founding of our colony on this new world, to remember that which we lost.”
The crowd looked to him, and then to the sky, eyes focusing on a particular point.
“It took us ninety five years to get here, although to us it felt less than a week. The exodus took us past the light of our own departure, and for ten years we have been waiting for its arrival.”
All eyes were on the same spot. An astronomer could tell them it was a main sequence star, spectral classification G2V. They didn’t need to know this. They all knew what it was.
“Our mistakes cost us our world, and we have determined to do better here. Until tonight, we have worn this point of light as our mark of cain. From tonight, we will wear it as a reminder, a lesson learned.”
The point of light suddenly began to get brighter in the sky. Photons that had been travelling for more than a century suddenly arrived en masse and were captured by eyes that had leapfrogged the distance, overtaken the disaster they caused, and gathered here in memory.
“Friends, I give you the sun. Let’s do better this time.”
by submission | Aug 28, 2008 | Story
Author : Alla Hoffman
When he opened his eyes, it was a special kind of dark. The sky was a dull purple, and what light there was came from the ground beneath its stygian spread. He sat up stiffly in a sea of trash, a vast junkyard. Much of the scrap metal and rock glowed a sickly greenish color, and he didn’t want to think about why. Every part of him was aching, and the morning amnesia hadn’t fully faded. “The hell….” He stood, rubbing blearily at his eyes, and cursed when he realized his ankle couldn’t support his full weight. As he looked out across the abyssal dumping grounds, he put name to place, mainly because a dented sign creaked on a pole next to him. T. W. D. P. 13, Toxic Waste Disposal Planet 13. Recently made off-limits by the government, on grounds of contamination by hostile elements, the first time such a designation had been given to a trash planet. Then again, no one had ever created a self-maintaining, self-improving species of machines before. He’d known that was probably a bad idea, from the standpoint of personal safety.
He wondered how far they’d gotten in the 84 hours they’d been free. It had taken only 19 for them to make themselves known on the planets surface, 26 to be categorized as dangerous. It had taken the governing council another two days to find out who was responsible, but it had taken them only two hours to try and convict him. There had been talk of execution by various methods or imprisonment, but ultimately they decided on a more…unorthodox punishment. Their leniency had hinged on the fact he had created a species, not a weapon, to destroy this world. And after all, it was only a trash planet. Hardly a great loss to society. So they’d sent him to “live” with his own creations. If the radiation didn’t get him first.
He scrabbled around in the junk until he found a bent metal pole, and used it to pull himself up, stumping shakily forwards. He hadn’t yet figured out a plan for himself, but in the end it didn’t really matter. His big plan, the important one, was already inevitably in motion. The machines would begin to improve themselves, and god knew they weren’t short of materials, and soon they would construct weapons and flight. And spaceflight. And he hadn’t bothered to write hostility towards man into them, that was the beauty of it. They had only the biological imperative: survive, reproduce. Mankind would see to the hostility itself, as the robots spread and people became afraid. They would write their own end with their hostility and their fear. And their trash.
That’s what they were for, to provide the antidote to humanity. Ultimately, he hadn’t been supposed to survive either. He’d just wanted to watch. There were cliffs of wrecked ships in the distance, and he began making for them. They’d have a pretty good view. They were a good place to wait. He was glad he’d ended up here, in a way. He might not get to see the end, but he could watch the beginning. It seemed right that the next stage should start here, where humanity had started out so long ago, before it had gotten lost among the stars.
by submission | Aug 27, 2008 | Story
Author : Pavelle Wesser
When she first appeared to him in the dead of the eternal night, her tentacles undulated in bluish silver tints that reflected the twinkling lights of his ship. She slithered silently toward him while he was out performing an errand. Until he saw her, he had never questioned working in silence and alone. It was when she slid that first tentacle around his waist that he stared into the endless night and neglected his mission, turning to face her as she wrapped more tentacles around his body. Later, he could never remember how they became two beings writhing on the surface of sand so soft he could have sworn that it sifted through the pours of his skin.
It was then that her first tentacle pierced his flesh and entered his body. He stumbled back to the ship feeling ill, and threw up at some point during the eternal night. His initial malaise turned to raging desire by the time he was sent on his next errand. She appeared to him as he collected pitted rocks, her tentacles wrapping themselves around him, requiring nothing of him other than that he willingly surrender to the sensation of slime slithering over his skin. This time, when they connected, electrical currents charged through his body. They were mild at first, but escalated, causing his teeth to chatter and his hair to stand on end.
“How can you do that to me?” But she did not answer, just as she never spoke.
It was then that another of her tentacles pierced his flesh, wrapping itself around his internal organs, squeezing, squeezing, until he felt so ill that he didn’t have to wait until later in the eternal night to throw up. He would have been sick for days, had time been measured in anything other than the phases of the multiple moons that hovered overhead. He lay in his cot suffering fevers, chills and muscle cramps, wondering how she could possibly leave her tentacles inside of him. Didn’t she want them back? How could she live without them? How could he live with them?
They sent him on another mission, this time to collect the weeds that grew in the eternal night. His body shook as he donned his spacesuit, for now he was afraid. It wasn’t long before she appeared, slinking noiselessly, her tentacles extended toward him. A cold, sick chill descended.
“Look,” he said, “I think we need to call this off.”
A tentacle slid down his throat, and he realized the choice had never been his to make. He thought he might gag but as her other tentacles caressed his body, he experienced thrills of pleasure that escalated until he felt as though he were an electrical conduit through which an overload of energy was being transmitted. When she had done with him, he understood that just as the night was eternal, she herself would never end. He turned to face her.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he said.
Another tentacle wrapped itself around his heart. Cold and icy, it squeezed the living breath out of him. Feeling the dying pump of his most sacred organ, he wheezed out his final words:
“Is this what you’ve wanted from me all along?”
She didn’t answer, just as she never had. And as her tentacle writhed and twisted about his heart, he thought of a home he’d never known, of a love that had never been true, and a spaceship that would soon depart, leaving him alone to die in the eternal night.
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 25, 2008 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Marshal’s great grandfather had taken up the guitar as a older man, and played it as though he simply always had done so. He had passed this love onto his son, Marshal’s grandfather, before the Departure. Marshal’s family had always been tradesman, and his grandfather used his degrees in micro-fabrication to get on the ship, and his skill at coaxing sounds from his stringed instrument to secure not only a wife, but a place in the social scene on Discovery when she set off into the stars.
Marshal’s grandfather had one child on the voyage, a daughter, and she grew up always at her father’s side, basking in the warmth of his music. She took up chemistry, and divided her time between misusing chemicals in defiance of the ships authority, and caressing deep rhythm and blues from the guitar her father had left her.
When Marshal was born, it was clear his mother’s chemical abuse had affected him, but she didn’t survive his birth to make amends.
Marshal grew in the care of the crew to be a stoic but directionless young man. He dabbled in chemistry, in microbiology, and settled on psiono-sonics as a field of study. He found he had a heightened sensitivity in communications, and was tasked with reaching out across the void of space to the other star ships en route to new star systems.
In time, the voices grew harder and harder to find through the darkness, and communications duty became an eternity of projecting into nothingness, deafened by the silence returned.
When the star drive began to fail, Marshal felt it before anyone. He tried to describe to the Captain how the engine was losing its rhythm, how he worried it would stop beating.
He’d been thrown off the bridge, and confined to his quarters.
When the star drive went out, the captain locked himself in his own cabin, refusing to acknowledge it was true.
Marshal had spent very little time in his own cabin, having not grown up there, and finding it unsettling to be in the room this mother he had never known had once called home. He could never connect himself to the space, but now, confined there as he was, he found himself idly picking through her things, discovering the woman who had made him and then left him here alone.
He flipped through frames of images, some single and still, some sequenced and moving. He heard laughter, saw a smile he recognized sometimes from the mirror, and felt a rhythm that resonated somewhere inside.
When he found her guitar, it fit his hands like well worn gloves, filled a hole he hadn’t realized existed. His fingers found the chords to a song he’d never heard. A to C sharp, to G sustained, back to A. Words drifted into his head with impossible clarity, “If you can just get your mind together, then come on across to me.” Across the ship each psionicly projected note from Marshal’s guitar turned every surface capable of vibrating into a point of amplification. Everyone stopped, and listened. “We’ll hold hands and then we’ll watch the sunrise,” people spilled into the hallways, “from the bottom of the sea.”
Marshal felt long closed doors open in his mind as he reached out into the depths of space. He felt the wave come back a hundred strong, and the Discovery reeled as unseen voices chimed in “But First, are you experienced?” In his cabin, the Captain closed his eyes, tears streaming down his face. They may be lost, but they were no longer alone.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There’s a hole in the roof of my mouth that I can’t fix. A black putrescent liquid that hasn’t stopped for hours is dripping slowly onto my tongue. It tastes salty and smells a little like melting rubber. I’m still alive.
The plague killed the biological parts of me. I am rotting. I don’t know if that will eventually kill the manufactured parts of me. Myself and five other people in this building had enough metal and plastic implanted in us that we survived.
We’re police dispatchers.
We had all been badly injured in the line of duty and brought back to ‘working condition’ with the help of current technology. After we had been repaired, we were put on desk jobs with good pay.
The reason that the six of us were still moving and thinking is that our brains and bodies have been rebuilt as a result of our long-ago injuries. Us six in particular had all sustained massive cranial damage in the line of duty. Our nervous systems had been automated and our movements were controlled by the thin bodycages that we wore. Our memories had been saved and digitized during our surgery but our imaginations were limited.
Just a few days ago, we were the stupid ones. Now we’re the survivors.
Ted had his entire body burned to a crisp in his line-of-duty accident ten years ago. He was the most mobile of us now because of all his muscle-work but unfortunately, he had the bare minimum of police dispatch silicon in his brain. His metal body is at his desk taking sips from a coffee cup long gone dry
We were all amped up to handle the flow of calls coming in from the massive populace of the west coast. There were four hundred of us. The flow of data was constant and huge. It’s down to a trickle now and most of the incoming calls are automated which is okay since we’ve gone from four hundred down to the six of us.
Our country has been wiped out.
Fortunately, the plague had left us mostly-silicate demi-borgs alive. Unfortunately, the motors of our brains and bodies were running on backup batteries that would run out in sixteen hours.
There is a stink in this office of the other dead operators. It’s the ghost of Christmas future for us. We’re trying to come up with plans but it’s difficult with our limited imaginations. We’ve effectively become machine intelligences. We have no urge to panic and we have no real ideas on how to proceed.
It’s frustrating to think of all the money and time that our country had used to prepare for a giant EMP of some kind and the enemy bastards went and released the biologicals.
Those of us that are mobile are going to leave this office and search for batteries. We will try to find weapons. We will fight the invaders.
We will be automated zombies guarding what’s left of our country. I am good at math. We will fail.
