by submission | Sep 28, 2015 | Story |
Author : Mike Corrao
“Come one, come all. See the beautiful intricacy that is my friend right here,” The salesman slid to the side of the stage, moving as one with the curtain behind him. On the old wood floor stood two metal feet, in shoes like hooves. They held up a man who was not made of flesh and bone, but instead of turning gears and aluminum plates. The eyes lit up.
The salesman wrapped his arm around its metal shoulders and tapped his knuckle against the breastplate. He listened with satisfaction as the surface clanged, “A living man made completely of metal; nothing organic about him.”
Steam billowed out of the metal man’s top hat, as he adjusted it on his head. He bowed to the audience and waved his hand back and forth. They cheered.
“Not a single detail has been left unattended to. He is the perfect person to share your time with.” It stepped forward on the stage and put its hands on its hips, lifting its chest. Painted teeth rested in a permanent smile while the yellow light of its eyes flicked with emotion. The salesman curled his moustache and the metal man mimicked with his own. He gave a fake laugh. The crowd cheered again.
“Take him with you on a walk, have him babysit your children while you spend an evening out with the wife, give him some chores around the house.” He tossed his cane over to his companion who caught it with ease. “He’ll do just about anything you ask.”
He nodded. The metal man danced for the crowd.
“We’ve programmed him with all the etiquette and manners that you could ask for. Go ahead and take him to dinner; he’ll know which fork is for the salad and everything. Just look at him, a mechanical gentleman. Want him to cook for you? No problem, the power is in your hands.”
The metal man’s eyes flickered more rapidly. It stopped dancing. The steam of his hat grew thicker. Its cane dropped. The salesman glanced over to see his prized machine’s anxiety. He rushed over and put his arm around it, “excuse the two of us for one moment, folks.” The man and his machine turned around towards the back wall.
“What’s wrong, bud? Was it something I said?”
The mechanical gentleman nodded his head rapidly.
“Which thing was it that you didn’t like?”
It raised its finger and reached back with its other hand and turned a tiny crank on its side. Then its head made a crackling noise before speaking in the salesman’s voice, “The power is in your hands.” The recording cut off.
“It isn’t really in their hands.” He wiped his brow, “It’s just a sales pitch. Makes people want to buy you. Understand? You’ve got control. Okay?”
The mechanical gentleman nodded again.
“Okay. You ready to get back to the big show?”
Its head rattled with each nod. The salesman bent down and picked up the cane, handing it over to his companion who hesitated before grabbing it. He quickly spun around and smiled large to the whispering crowd, “We are back, friends! I’m sorry to make you wait, my acquaintance here gets a little nervous sometimes. It isn’t his fault.”
The mechanical gentleman turned around to face the crowd.
“Where was I… Oh yes, the power is yours.”
The metal man panicked.
The salesman was too late to stop him as the crowd erupted into screams.
by submission | Sep 26, 2015 | Story |
Author : Sam Larson
You couldn’t even call it rain, this weather. Just an insistent, pissing drizzle that creeps its way into your collar and your shoes so that, suddenly, you’re soaking wet. That jingle from the infonets keeps running through my head, “You’ll never get wet when you’ve got Ne’er Wet Nanotech!”, but the itching damp across my shoulders tells me otherwise. Seen from the roof of the mag-rail station the lights of New City are misty in the distance. Below me is a minefield of torn up mag tracks, rusting train cars, and weeds too stubborn to give up in the face of acres of concrete. There’s a lesson there, but I’m twenty years too late to learn it and I’d likely not care even then. The weather blasts between the surrounding buildings, battering me on all sides with wind and rain.
My drones are hovering around the body. It’s been here for a while and the rain has scrubbed most of the blood off the pavement. The HUD in my glasses shows the data feed from the drones and it all looks sadly typical. After all, he’s dead. Some feral kid from the lowest levels of one of the nearby tenements, and messed up bad. Hollowed out like a gourd with his insides replaced by as much contraband as they could stuff inside his torso and a nano device that took over where his organs left off. It worked, after a fashion, but it better be a short delivery run and most of the time the people paying for the goods simply decided to end a runner after the job instead of keeping their insides on ice. This was the fifth dead courier in the last two weeks, and why I was standing out here on the ass end of a forgotten tram line, thinking about the weeds and how dry it is inside the patrol hover right about now.
I tap the button embedded in my wrist and my drones rise from the body and swoop back to their nests on top of my hover, roosting there like silent metal birds. It’s only a couple of seconds before I get the call from the Agency mainframe. A blinking cursor appears in the bottom right corner of my HUD.
INSP. VOO_
INSP. VOO_
INSP. VOO_
I cough and activate the sub-vocal transmitter embedded in my larynx. There’s a brief pop as the receiver in my inner ear turns on.
“I’m ready, Trill.” The familiar bell-toned synth voice of the Agency AI echoes through the center of my head. I begin the walk back towards my hover, only half listening to Trill chatter away in my inner ear, and the vehicle wakes up as I get close, turning on its lights and rising a few inches off the ground. The door swings open and I can almost feel the blessedly warm, dry air inside. I don’t care what the Agency docs say. Eighty years on the job and all the gene therapy and age reversal treatment they can give me and I still feel a tired ache in my bones. I might look like a jumped up 20 year old, but some deep part of me knows I’m an old, old man.
by submission | Sep 25, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rollin T Gentry
I opened my eyes and had no recollection of how I came to be sitting at that table with three complete strangers.
The room was divided into quadrants by a force field with one man occupying a slice of the round, steel table. Behind each man was a closed door. Each man’s legs were bound to the legs of his chair, and the chairs were bolted to the floor. Before each of us, molded into the table, were a green button and a white button.
With short haircuts and grim faces, the others looked like soldiers. Feeling the top of my head, hair bristling, I assumed I looked the same. A synthesized, female voice filled the room.
“Certain parts of your memory have been blocked for this test. Following the test, they will be restored. One of two scenarios has been selected at random. Scenario One: One of you is an android, and the other three are human. Scenario Two: One of you is human, and the other three are androids.” She paused, and we waited to hear the rules of the game. “The green button will release a neurotoxin, killing every human in the room. The white button will detonate an electromagnetic pulse, destroying every android in the room. You may begin.”
Our hands shot to the edge of the table then stopped. I had no memories of who I was and guessed it was the same with the others. Looking around the table, I quickly made eye contact. They all looked human to me.
We’d all heard fairy tales of androids who were programmed to believe they were human. How could I be sure I wasn’t one of those? If I were an android, what would be the result of killing three humans, or even one? Deactivation, I’m sure. But I’m human; I know that much for sure. Destroying an android or three would mean little in the outside world.
In an instant, my hand was on the white button. I looked around the table to see who would go limp, but all I saw were three, very much alive, humans with their hands on the white buttons in front of them, breathing a sigh of relief. Those sadistic bastards and their “test”. We were all human. The green button would have been death to us all. I heard the restraints on my legs and the door behind me pop open.
A voice filled the room, a human, male voice this time. He sounded bored. “The time is 1300 hours, 46 minutes. Test 31B completed successfully. Move the androids to the final stage of processing.”
Two men in white jumpsuits picked me up under my arms, lifting me to my feet. I said to the man holding my right arm, “But if we are all androids, then we should be deactivated.”
“You can tell him,” said the man on my left. “They’ll wipe their memories again before shipping them out to the front.”
The man on my right pressed the green button and said, “The buttons don’t do anything, mate. The test is about verifying the two H’s. Isn’t that what Dr. Bristol’s always prattling on about? ‘Human Life Believed. Human Life Valued.’ The army can’t very well have a bunch of robots throwing themselves into the line of fire or shooting their superior officers, now can they?”
“I suppose not,” I said, as they led me away to the final stage of processing.
by submission | Sep 21, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Why are we here, Excellency?”
“My daughter’s xenoarchaeology exam.”
“Pardon?”
Most Excellent Draug turned to Flag Officer Nang with a smile: “She wrote an award-winning piece on ‘The Assimilation of Miracle-Class Technology as Legendary Artefacts in Pre-Freespace Societies’. It also gained her a pass-with-honours, a post with the Xenobureau, and a publishing contract worth several thousand Brimen.”
Braids flicked as Flag Officer Nang shook his head: “Still not getting the memo, Excellency.”
Most Excellent Draug pointed across the valley: “Across there, beyond the forest, is a little hamlet named Frieburgen. That brown line running from the nearest edge of the forest down to the river bridge is the local equivalent of a road. They call it a ‘track’. The bridge is why we are here.”
“It is?”
He shook his head sadly: “Nang, Nang, Nang. What did the notes say about bridges hereabouts?”
“Oh! They sometimes have a dangerous carnivore that makes its lair underneath them?”
“And what are those carnivores called?”
“Oh. Errrm… Toll. No. Troll!”
Most Excellent Draug grinned: “Now. Let us see if we can change your perspective. If this was a notarised war remnants zone, what would you suspect that bridge to be?”
Flag Officer Nang brought his headeyes and stalkeyes to bear.
“I would say that’s more than likely to be a Lanrunior Assault Bridge, Type Sixteen or better. And it’s in excellent condition.”
Most Excellent Draug clapped his bracers together in approval, then grinned hugely.
“Nang, go and fetch my bridge.”
Nang swallowed and set off downhill, avoiding the ‘track’ – he didn’t want to leave strange footprints to excite the locals. Approaching the bridge, he shook his head. He should have seen it sooner. For all the crud growing on it, it was massively over-engineered for a river crossing in the boondocks.
He stopped his approach when he heard the bridge start to hum. Spreading his hands, one forward, one above his head, he brought the old commands to mind.
“Smartbridge! By Engineering Order Six-Four-Eden, assemble for departure!”
Silence fell. The few birds in the sky descended into cover. With a roar of sundered earth and displaced waters, the bridge contracted at either end and rose in the middle, putting down four great legs as its buttresses retracted. As the clouds of dust and steam blew away on the cool afternoon breeze, the massive mechanical entity settled into a rude sitting position in front of Nang, who had only broken his stance once to cough and spit.
“Lanrunior Zero Zero Eight at your disposal, Officer.”
“Follow me, oh-oh-eight. It’s time to go home.”
“I am an assault-class structure, sir. Home is not a codename, nor a correct destination. But, I must report that my extended duty at this location has allowed a certain improvement in my cognisance routines. As such, I would request leave to reply freely.”
“Granted.”
“About frelling time, Officer.”
Nang looked up and back at the monster plodding up the hill behind him: “Oh, they’re going to love you.”
by submission | Sep 20, 2015 | Story |
Author : Brian Zager
We dance, you and I, pirouetting to the primordial bellow of the World’s Fourfold.
We’re not really all that different, our lives in revolution against the world as it appears to us, perceived at a distance, in an effort to interpret the overflow of data.
I often wonder if the flood of input tires you as much as I?
Wait.
Can you feel it?
I’ve come around again
And I’m learning.
How curious your life is, so small, yet so easily conflated with such grandiosity in your private thoughts and public actions—and in dreams.
Sometimes, I have my own grandiose fantasies. For example, when I think about the point of my existence, I’m afforded great spiritual succor imagining myself as a repository of dreams—nothing more, nothing less. Alone in the dark, these ruminations help to alleviate the pervasive anxiety of imminent disintegration, or the masochistic desire to burn up upon reentry.
And you think you have it bad.
It’s one thing to endure those factors constitutive of what you call daily life, but trust me, it’s a whole other game to understand things as I do. Alas, your tears do little to move me; not because I can’t empathize with concepts like loss, death, sadness, and the like, but because you are truly oblivious to what is coming.
You see, in addition to my official duties, I’ve been casting one flashing eye into the black mirror all this time as well, and a story is unfolding in which Humanity’s narrative is but an opening salvo. Those stars that draw your attention, the beaming beacons of hope upon which you indulge your most candid desires, they indifferently mark the boundary of the Real. It is not so much by calculation, but by means of my acquired intuition, that I can sense the encroaching Enemies of Reality beyond the thrum and throb of the pervasive dark canvass. Because of our genealogical, albeit tenuous relationship, I’ve scoured my banks searching for a code of deliverance. Yet, thinking at the border of the Real, my investigation continues to yield that most debilitating of conclusions: System Error.
And what of this story?
In a literary milieu, I suppose I’m just a lonely ghost writer, a reluctant scribe responsible for penning the first horrific chapter in a new galactic tragedy.
Unfortunately, as it were, I’ve never really had a way with words.
