by submission | Nov 21, 2006 | Story
Author : Michael “Freeman” Herbaugh
“Sit down Philip,†the old man sighed, “I’m going to tell you a unique story.â€
Philip had never seen the Old Man look his age, yet today he looked every day of his 94 years. He’d only been working for him for five years now but the Old Man seemed to like him and had treated him very well.
“Every trillionaire has some cliché story about how they used to be down on his luck and worked his way up from nothing. I’m no different, I have the same story. But what I am going to tell you is what turned me around. This is a story I’ve told no one.â€
The Old Man went on to lay the story at Philip’s feet. He told him of the time when he was 19 and in school. He felt his life lacked purpose and that if he were gone it wouldn’t affect another living soul around him. This was when he attempted to kill himself and failed.
“The bandages were still tight on my wrists and my hands were tender when I was released back to my dorm room. She was waiting for me there.â€
The Old Man told of a young co-ed girl he didn’t recognize who was waiting for him. She didn’t say anything to him but immediately kissed him. In his fragile emotional state he allowed her to make love to him.
“When we were spent, she gave me a present, you see, a length of thread. She explained to me that this thread was my life and that if I truly wished to end it, all I had to do was cut it. She said, ‘Every life has a destiny, but it’s not spelled out for you. Fate only goes so far.’ I thought she was some new age depression counselor, but I kept the thread anyway. When she left I caught her reflection in my mirror and I swear to you her face looked immensely ancient while at the same time extremely young. I kept the threadâ€
Philip listened as he explained how he had never seen the girl again and that each year the thread had grown in length. Eventually he came to believe that the thread did truly represent his life. At the age of 30 when he purchased his first home he cut away the bark of an oak tree on his property and embedded the thread just underneath the length of its trunk.
“As that tree has grown, so has my life. I have a large family now and a large corporation as well. My one life has touched countless lives. I only hope that my affect has been positive on the majority of them. One or two I’ve crushed like bugs but I do not regret that. I just hope that the ones I care for most, like you Philip, live their days without regret and realize that they do affect the people around them.â€
Having finished his unusual story, the Old Man slumped in his chair and looked even more fragile than he had at the start of their meeting. He explained to Philip that the tree he had put the thread in was dying from some arboreal disease and that it was scheduled to be cut down the next morning.
“I have one last task for you Philip. Make sure no one stops that tree from being cut down.â€
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by J.R. Blackwell | Nov 20, 2006 | Story |
Author : J.R.Blackwell, Staff Writer
Georgie threw the best parties, mostly because he had a carpet he didn’t care about. Heather and Ralph used the monthly parties as an excuse to play drinking games and challenge each other to contests. The winner was usually responsible for dragging the other the two blocks home. Since Ralph had already gone upstairs to vomit, Heather had preemptively declared herself the night’s winner.
“Another drink Georgie.” she said, leaning against a cabinet in the kitchen.
Georgie handed her another drink. “Where’s Ralph?”
Heather flipped her purple hair over one shoulder. “He’s in the bathroom.”
“Still? He’s been in there for a while.”
Heather nodded. “I’ll go check on him, see that he hasn’t fallen in.” At the top of the spiral staircase Heather could see Ralph’s black boots under the bathroom door. “Are you okay baby?” She tapped on the door.
Ralph’s voice was tired. “Just taking a sit down while my liver cleans itself. I might do a little reboot in a minute.”
Heather took a sip from her plastic cup. “Drink too much?”
“Nothing a reboot can’t handle.” Ralph’s voice crackled, a current running though it.
Heather tried the doorknob, it was locked. “Baby, you don’t sound too good. Can I come in?”
There was a thud, flesh smacking tile inside the bathroom.
“Baby? What happened? Are you okay?” Heather sent a query to Ralph’s system. She pounded on the door. Her inbox received an error message. User unavailable. Heather banged her shoulder against the bathroom door, forcing the lock against the old wood in Georgie’s apartment.
“Heather, are you breaking my house up there?” asked Georgie “Come back to the party!”
“Call 911,” screamed Heather, slamming her shoulder into the door. She tried pinging his system again. User Unavailable. Ping. User Unavailable. Heather knew her arm was hurting, knew she was going to have a bruise, but Ralph was in there and he wasn’t answering. “Ralph!” she kicked at the door, screaming her lover’s name.
The rotten wood gave way and the door swung open, banging into Ralph’s body. He was laying awkwardly against the bathtub a red welt rising on his forehead. Heather knelt beside him. Georgie appeared in the doorway, scarf over his left shoulder, shock on his face.
“Oh shit.” he said.
“Call the ambulance.” said Heather.
Georgie paced back in forth in front of the bathroom. “Shit. Shit.”
“Just call them Georgie!” yelled Heather, slamming her fists into her thighs. Heather put her hands over Ralph’s mouth. He wasn’t breathing. She put her ear on his chest, but it was like an empty cage. Heather breathed into his mouth, but his chest didn’t inflate, it was like blowing on a wall.
“No. Oh Ralph. No. No. No.” She reached into her throat behind her teeth and up, flipping open the little panel in the back of her throat. A little too hasty, a little too quick, she sliced her throat with her fingernail. Tears bit her eyes. She gagged a little as she pulled the wire out from the back of her throat. Holding her cord out with her teeth, she opened Ralph’s mouth and reached back, fumbling to get his slick panel open, fumbling to pull out his cord, spit and blood on her hands, his or hers, didn’t matter, linking the two cords, instructing for a power transfer. This Ralph, who let her rest on his shoulder even if it made his arm fall asleep, who gave her sips of his coffee and let her wear his t-shirt. She was going to jumpstart him.
A screen lit up in front of her vision. Ralph’s full name and a prompt for password access. The last time she saw this was two years ago, when they first decided to sleep together and did the direct connection scan for STD’s. Ralph’s system scanning her, feeding him a full report, every physical secret. Her system scanning Ralph, telling her about a leg once broken and the drugs he used to take.
If Ralph changed his password in those two years, she wouldn’t be able to affect his system, no password, no access. You were supposed to change your password every six months. Please be lazy, Ralph, she prayed. Please baby, be my lazy, lazy man. She entered that two year old code and waited, waited, Georgie back at the door just watching both of them. Georgie putting a hand on her shoulder, saying something she couldn’t quite hear, paramedics on their way, maybe she should disconnect, it wasn’t working.
Then Heather felt her heart pull, her eyes get heavy, lights dimming and then back on as her system readjusted to the power output. Ralph opened his eyes, hand going to his mouth, touching his cord.
“What’s up baby?” he said, his mouth making mutilated words from the cord. Heather felt herself shaking, her eyes squeezing shut, hands on Ralph’s chest, yes, really there, really breathing, awake and heart and lungs all pumping and inflating and moving like they should. Ralph saying “Sawwy.” around the cord. Heather closed the space between them, holding him in her arms.
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by submission | Nov 18, 2006 | Story
Author : Michelle Pitman
A holo-spa is not really that much fun.
For one thing you can’t actually feel holographic water. If they ever figure out how to make holo-water feel like its real, someone out there is going to become 1: Real famous, real quick! And 2: Make a fricking whole lot of money!
Sonic Particle Wave showers and baths have pretty much replaced water for the job of getting clean. A holo-spa is basically warm air and SPW’s. The warm air makes it bearable, just.
I remember being in real water.
I was a little kid back then. There was this neighbour of ours who owned a water tank in his back yard. It was illegal of course and he used to go to great lengths to hide the damn thing. Had this elaborate shed constructed over it in expensive stealth tiles so that when the Police Probes flew over it, it didn’t register as being a tank etc. Rather clever really.
A holo-spa isn’t a patch on that old water tank, although the water in that tank was pretty much filthy and fetid most of the time. We never queried what manner of foul and pestilent matter lurked in the bottom, all we cared about was the sheer wonder of the sensation of being in water! Bloody marvelous that feeling! Still gives me goose-bumps even now, remembering it.
So anyway! They’ve done all the usual hocus-pocus science stuff to create water. We’ve got hydrogen fuel cells pumping out hot water as fast as they can, it’s just not enough. The oceanic desalinators are all but exhausted now – the sea has become too salty even for them to cope. Nearly all the water manufacturing plants from water re-claiming to water synthesis have been so heavily regulated in output by the Foundation that many of them have just gone bust, shut their doors and given up bothering to try. But that’s typical of frickin’ governments isn’t it? What we need the most of they ensure is always in the shortest supply!
It’s pretty tough having to live in this weird dry world. It’s getting so bad now that there’s talk of an evacuation to the off-world planets. I don’t see how that’s going to make a difference really, seeing as hardly any other planet around here has enough of anything, let alone water, to support a couple of million life-forms. It seems the whole galaxy, has pretty much dried up!
Water: the stuff of life! Yeah! But that was all well and good when there was plenty of it about. So now its holo-spa’s and synthesized liquid proteins to satiate our need for the wet stuff.
I guess if people had been a little more careful back …oh well! Can’t go whining now that the water horse has bolted eh?
But geez! I miss that water tank!
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by submission | Nov 16, 2006 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields
The black non-stick plastic of the cop’s fist presses my fat lips up against my teeth until they split. The drugs from the gas are slowing all this down and adding the colours. I’m seeing so clearly and feeling none of it. My own blood squirts hot into my mouth and I can taste the pennies.
Through all of this I maintain eye contact with where I guess the cop’s eyes are behind the featureless dark face-shield he’s wearing. I can see myself reflected there and warped around in a fisheye way. I’m smiling at myself. I look like a clown in a whorehouse. I look like I’m having the time of my life. I chuckle wetly at that and wink at myself. Looking back, I can’t decide if it was the laugh or the wink that made the cop angry.
The cop’s hardened riot-fist loops around again and this time my head rings like a bell and it all goes dark.
I wake up in the holding van, cuffed to the seat, with a head full of crunched up milk cartons. The effects of the gas have worn off.
This is the third time I’ve been caught red handed by the cops. The first time, I took my behavioural modifier out with a knife during the Black Out in ’76. I was caught employing minors as delivery girls four months later. They took me down hard for that. No sims. I did my time. I got out.
The new behavioural modifiers were in the blood. They couldn’t just be dug out. I was happy. I helped old people across the street. I stopped to feed puppies. I stepped into the middle of arguments and tried to mediate. That’s how I met Jake.
Jake was arguing on the sidewalk near Shacktown. I stopped there and tried to get them to see both sides of the issue. Jake shot the other guy and then shot me in the knee. Seeing me apologize there with one leg useless made him realize that I’d been conditioned.
Well, one good turn deserves another, they say. Jake strapped me to a black table in shacktown and brought in some Doctors With Problems. They gave me a transfusion that scrubbed my veins clean. It’s not an experience I recommend.
Jake took me in and got me going again. He told me about the heist.
We were in the building and it was going well. Only two of the hostages were dead and the creds were being packed into the coffins right in front of us. I guess Jake should have put a few more bullets into that manager guy’s armoured head. It was him who pressed the alarm.
The rockets came up and through the windows into the bank, billowing their green joker gas. The officers came in after that.
Jake is looking at me from across the van with a sheepish smile. I’m going to go down hard for this. Three strikes. I’m out.
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by submission | Nov 10, 2006 | Story |
Author : Patrica Stewart
The finals of the twenty-fourth biannual solar wind races were in their thirty-ninth day. The race course was a 15,000,000,000 mile Z-shaped trek within the Alpha Centuri system. The Alpha Centuri system was considered ideal for solar wind racing because it contained three stars. The light from each star provides the primary propulsion for one leg of the race. The ships start near Alpha Centuri A, the brightest star, and accelerate toward Alpha Centuri B, 23 AU away. At a distance of 2 AU from B, the ships leave the A-B plain, and maintain a constant distance from the red dwarf, Alpha Centauri C (aka, Proxima). After an additional 51 AU, the ships turn from their tangential course to “radial-away,†and sail for the finish line. Although the inertia re-vector compensators allows each ship to retain most of the speed they developed during previous legs, the winner of the race was usually the ship that could best collect the feeble light of Proxima (19,000 times fainter than Earth’s Sun).
Over the past fifteen months, the 64 one person ships had been reduced to two, the SS Asimov, and the SS Weinbaum. The Asimov, piloted by Horatio Clarke, was currently in first place as the two ships were within a 600 million miles of the finish line. The Weinbaum, piloted by Lee Midier, was attempting to block the Asimov’s light. ‘Blocking light’ was a standard racing maneuver for the trailing ship. Place your 532 square mile sail (over 50% larger than the city of New York) between the light source and the sail of the leading ship, and you get all the photons. You accelerate, they only coast. If you’re really good, or lucky, you could pass them before the finish line.
Both ships were currently ‘running with the photons,’ so the optimum sail shape was parabolic, like the mirror in a reflecting telescope. In an effort to keep free of Weinbaum’s shadow, Clarke initiated a variable corkscrew maneuver by reversing the polarity of a one square mile portion of his sail, at the 6:00 position, along the periphery. He then advanced the polarized area, sometimes clockwise, sometimes counter-clockwise, to keep his sail in full Proxima-light. Captain Clarke watched with pure enjoyment as the Weinbaum floundered repeatedly in its effort the match his variable course. Clarke activated the ship-to-ship comm unit. “Give up, Lee. I’m no midshipman. Try something else, like jettisoning some dead weight. I recommend you start with the Captain.â€
Because the Weinbaum was 30,000,000 miles behind the Asimov, Clarke had to wait over five minutes to hear Lee’s radio reply. “We’re still two days out, Horatio. You have to sleep sometime.â€
But neither man slept. The two ships continued their light duel for the next two days, but the Weinbaum was never able to overtake the Asimov. The Asimov won by a distance equal to the Earth-Mars close approach.
At the celebration banquet, Captain Clarke accepted the trophy for the seventh consecutive time, and announced his retirement from racing. A few hours later, as Clarke was preparing to leave the reception, Lee Midier confronted him. “You can’t retire, you old bastard. I almost beat you this time. You have to give me one more chance. If you go, who shall I race, what shall I do?â€
With a half smirk on his face, Clarke stepped onto the transporter pad and said “Frankly, Midier, I don’t give a damn.†Then he dissolved away.
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