Man of the Clattering Past

by J.R. Blackwell | Apr 24, 2008 | Story

Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer

He’s from the time before the bio-enhancements, before organs could be grown from a single cell. Age hollowed him out, and though his plastic face looks young, he’s just a shell. When I lean on his chest, I can hear what I imagine to be gremlins, moving around on the inside of his chest. Gremlins pumping streams of blood, moving his limbs and squeezing his heart.

His arms are hard and lumpy but he always sleeps with them around me, holding me to him at night. I used to slip out from under his embrace but let him embrace me. Bruises be damned.

He’s looked into bio-growth, but it’s expensive, and his system functions just fine. He’ll last for ages and the surgery, so simple for someone going from birth-wear to bio-wear, would be intense for him. He would have to replace his system, one part at a time, attaching bio-enhancements to clinking mechanical cogs. As soon as he would adjust, it would be time for another surgery, another hospital stay. Anyway, he’s not a man of the present he’s a man of our clattering, noisy past.

“They don’t make parts like they used to.” He tells me. He refuses to buy new parts. He searches instead for old parts and he fixes them up as he’s wearing down, rasping with the use of only one lung or hunched over an antique with a drill in his one working hand.

“What about when you run out of parts, when all the antiques are gone or broken?” I ask him, over and over.

He smiles his half metal smile and puts his one arm around me. “We’ll worry about that when we come to it.”

When his system needs fuel, his forehead glows orange with an unfamiliar mark. It’s the logo of the company that made him, long gone, absorbed, dispersed, back from the days of the big corporations, before the big crash. He’s old. I’ve said that. His fuel is rare and expensive. It is harder to find each time his light goes on.

“What about when all your fuel is gone” I ask him.

He cups my chin in his metal hands and brings his bronze forehead to my flesh one. “Our lights will all go out someday.” He tells me. “But my personal forever will be with you.”

His plastic and metal casing cools my flesh.

Pete, Re-Pete

by Stephen R. Smith | Apr 21, 2008 | Story

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Two hours ago, Pete had been pulled gasping from a tank of jelly. Now he sat in an immaculate office, wearing borrowed clothes with his employer staring him down from the far side of a granite slab desk top.

“Welcome back, Pete.” Terrence Carter, syndicate heavyweight and the man Pete ran data packets for. “I must say, you look better than you did the last time I saw you.”

Pete sat straight in his chair, tentatively rolling and flexing muscle that remembered thirty eight years of abusive mileage, but didn’t feel a days wear and tear. “What happened Terry, what’s going on?”

“You were running a very special package for me Pete, one we couldn’t copy, one we had to risk transporting as original data.” Terry paused, pulling at each of his white shirt cuffs in turn, evening their length against the dark fabric of his suit. “You had an incident Pete, for some reason you seem to have hidden my package from me. I don’t know exactly what went wrong in your head, Pete, but when we finally… recovered you, what remained of you no longer had my package installed. We want it back, Pete, I want it back.”

“What are you talking about? I don’t remember that, I’m not on an assignment yet.” Pete shook his head, his face a puzzled frown. Sometimes he had episodes if he stored data too long, there could be cross talk, and data fragments without context drifting in his head caused all sorts of unpredictable things, some unpleasant, but he couldn’t remember anything about this.

“Of course you don’t remember, you’re not the Pete that carried. We just finished growing you from the backup sample we took before we briefed the original you.” Terry pushed himself back from his desk, steepling his fingers. “We keep insurance in case things like this happen, in case we lose a good carrier, especially one with a package installed.

“So I’m a snapshot of myself, from before I left?”

“You’re a cleaned up version of the old you, rechipped and hot-wired to carry. You were the best we had Pete, so I was a little disappointed when you betrayed me.”

Pete ran a hand across the fresh stubble on his head. “What do you want from me now?”

Terry’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I want you to figure out where you put my package Pete, I want it delivered.”

“Wait a minute, if I’m a snapshot from before the briefing, I don’t have any memory of what happened later. That knowledge died with the original Pete,” he shuddered involuntarily, “I mean the original me.”

“True. You don’t know exactly what you did, but you can figure it out. Situational familiarity, behavioral predispositions, pattern predicability. Faced with the same objective, and in the same circumstances, you’ll know what you would have done, where you would have gone. Quite frankly, you’re the only one who can figure out what the hell you’ve done with my package, and I suggest you put some effort into doing just that if you want to get another day older.”

Pete regarded his employer as he weighed his options. He couldn’t help but wonder what bled out of the package he’d been carrying to make him want to risk crossing the syndicate. He also wondered whether he’d been dead when they’d found him, or if death had come later.

One thing was certain, he was being given a second chance, and a short leash. He’d better be very careful not to slip up again, one way or the other.

Magic Fingers

by submission | Apr 19, 2008 | Story

Author : Matthew Reshonsky

Ariel groaned as John held her tighter on the motel bed. For a moment he was lost in the experience of her perfect-ness. The way that her body always seemed to fit the contours of his own with the perfect blend of softness to touch and hold. Over the last three weeks he had even grown to love the smell of ozone that always clung about her.

She breathed in deeply and he relaxed his hold. “So John, how was work today.”

“Eh, nothing much happened. All I could really think about was getting back here to you.”

“You’re the sweet but I know something had to have happened you’re so tense.”

This gave John pause, when he was with Ariel he always forgot about the world. Except today he had reason to be troubled. She must have sensed it, that was one of the things he loved about her the way she was always able to understand him.

“I caught the news feed; some Jack off politician is going to ban full force field holography making your job illegal.”

“They’re always trying to do that, don’t let it bother you.”

“Well the pundits say it’s going to pass this time, a broad ban on everything except medical use.”

“So we don’t have much time left, do we?”

“A week maybe two.”

She pushed her face into his chest a squeezed him so tightly that he was having trouble drawing breath and then she released.

He gently nudged her head back so he could look into her green eyes.

“I have something I want to tell you. I went and-“, he was abruptly cut off when she vanished. The all too familiar feeling of emptiness returned to the center of his chest that he was only able to push away when she was in his arms.

“Shit.” He reached over to the bed stand and counted the dollar coins left in the roll, only ten left.

He quickly slid them into their slot on the headboard when she reappeared.

“Anyway, as I was saying I went and saw an agent about putting a lien on one of my kidneys to see if was enough to buy a home unit and your program from the motel before the ban goes into effect. In order to get enough I’ll have to hawk my heart and one of my lungs too.”

“You can’t do that. What if you can’t pay them back on time?”

“I should be able to do it, I won’t be spending money here so that alone should be enough to make it on time, worst case scenario I’ll live on ramen for awhile.”

“Then you do love me.”

“What can I say, I have a thing for chicks with pink hair.”

“How much do you have left for tonight?”

“20 minutes.”

“So just enough for a happy ending.”

“As happy as it gets anyway.”

Capital Punishment on Beta Hydri

by Patricia Stewart | Apr 18, 2008 | Story

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

Using his pincers, Brachyura meticulously trimmed the crust off the edges of his sandwich. Satisfied that it was all removed, he rapidly consumed the meal in a nibbling motion that was too fast for his human visitor to follow. Brachyura arched his two protruding eyestalks backward over his brow plate and cooed. “Wow,” he exclaimed, “that’s the best thing I ever tasted. What’s it called again?”

“Peanut butter and jelly on sourdough,” answered Mike Kramble.

“And this exquisite white liquid?”

“It’s called milk. Listen, Brachyura, let me talk to our Governor. Perhaps I can convince him that this incident was just an unfortunate misunderstanding. Maybe I can persuade him that you didn’t mean to kill the maintenance workers.”

“Oh dear, Mike, you keep using that nasty word ‘kill.’ I didn’t kill them. I simply ate them.”

“It’s the same thing, Brachyura.”

“Of course it isn’t. It’s just eating. I was hungry; they were food. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s what we do on Beta Hydri. Doesn’t your species eat meat?”

“We don’t eat sentient beings, Brachyura. Listen, you’re wasting valuable time. In a few minutes the guards are going to come in here and escort you to the beach. They plan to execute you in front of your friends and family. They want to make an example out of you, to discourage any future attacks. Please, Brachyura, I can beg for clemency if you show any sign of being remorseful.”

“Mike, I’m not remorseful. I’m just full. Besides, it’s not a problem. I love our beach. It’s next to the ocean. I can finally go home.”

“Brachyura, you don’t understand. You’re not going home. There’s a twenty-foot high electric fence around this island. We had to build it because you guys think that it is okay to eat us. We only want to live here in harmony with your species.” Mike could hear the escort detail coming down the main isle. A minute later they unlocked the large cage door and slid it to the side. The guards used their cattle prods to motion Brachyura out of his cage. Electricity was the only effective weapon against the four-foot tall by ten-foot wide crustaceans. Bullets only ricocheted off their super-hard exoskeletons. As Brachyura walked down the corridor, his eight legs skidded erratically on the hard concrete floor. When he stepped out of the makeshift warehouse prison onto the soft sand, he paused. He spread his foreclaws apart and raised them toward the noonday sun. Momentarily startled, the guards jumped backwards and extended their prods.

“What a beea-uuuuu-ti-ful day,” proclaimed Brachyura. Then he lowered his claws and turned toward Kramble. “I will miss you, my friend. I will also miss peanut butter and jelly on sourdough. Perhaps in a few years, the relationship between our two species will improve, and you can make me another sand-d-wich.” With that, he bowed his head in a respectful gesture. An instant later, the back of his shell split apart to allow four large wings to unfold. In a maelstrom of blowing sand and debris, his massive body lifted off the beach. He hovered for a second, then majestically turned and flew over the fence. He splashed into the ocean approximately 100 yards offshore.

“Well, I’ll be damned” remarked Kramble with a smile. “They can fly.” Then he suddenly realized the colony had a serious problem. “Whoa, I guess that kind of makes our electric fence worthless.”