by Stephen R. Smith | May 29, 2015 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Tamis woke under the heat of the mid morning sun, the ocean reaching tentative tendrils up the smooth sand to lick at his feet. The last evening was a grey cloud, but he’d evidently passed out on the beach again. Levering up on one elbow, he followed the beach-line unbroken to the horizon, then pushed up into a sitting position and turning, scanned to the horizon on his other side. Nothing to see, apparently nobody up yet.
Last night…
A fragment of a song flitted through his mind, and he latched onto it, pushing at its edges to try and expose the entire tune. There was something familiar, but without context…
The girl breezed by in the periphery of his mind’s eye, but as he reached for the memory it dissolved, like a chalk drawing in the rain.
On the sand he’d absently scratched the crude outline of a heart, and the letter ‘T’.
She must be here somewhere.
Climbing to his feet he began to walk along the shoreline, the waves still reaching for him and he staying just beyond their touch, taunting the massive body of water. ‘You can want me, but you can’t have me.’
The beach gave way on one side to a thick expanse of jungle, trees reaching skyward choked at their bases by vines and bushes peppered with brightly coloured flowers. Birds chattered to each other unseen, and occasionally something big would breach out in the open water. Close to the shore schools of needlefish darted towards the shore and back again, a glittering mass of light-ribbons moving as one just beneath the surface.
He passed an almost familiar Victorian mansion set back in the greenery and covered with plant-life, it’s architect long forgotten and the jungle slowly reclaiming it. The structure filled him with a nagging unease that he could neither shake nor coax out in to the light over the next hour of walking.
From the corner of his eye he saw her again, tanned skin wrapped in red tropical printed silk, but as he turned to look she had disappeared into the green. A fist closed on his heart and his stomach lurched, he had to find her, had to have her again… Again?
In the sand at his feet was the crude outline of a heart, the letter ‘T’ scratched inside.
Had he been walking that long? Was the island that small? He looked again, slowly turning, following the beach to the horizon in both directions.
Not an island. A loop. A construct.
His mind raced as he started walking again, consciously willing his heart-rate to remain neutral, his pace natural. If he was jacked in someone would be monitoring his vitals and he needed to exploit the relative freedom the unpopulated beach afforded him while it lasted.
Venturing closer to the water, he let the cool ocean wash over his feet as he walked, the schools of needlefish parting and swimming past him seemingly unconcerned by his presence, but not oblivious to it.
Stopping, he dropped to his hands and knees in the sand and dug a hole half a meter across, forming a berm with the wet sand around its edges. The hole filled from the water beneath, and once it was complete he busied himself coaxing the slender fish towards him then flipping them out of the ocean and into the pool. Having trapped enough, he sorted the construct’s predictably sized simulacra, small, medium and large, and returned all but three of the largest and half a dozen of the smallest back into the ocean. The remaining fish he pinned gently to the bottom of the pool with one finger, watching his print burn into their scaly skin. He could affect the programming of insignificant things, he’d spent enough time in virtual and coding constructs to do that, but he would need to be very careful. He sequenced them, the short ones one through three, and seven through nine, and the long ones four through six, then busied himself for a while digging a trench from the pool back out to the open water.
When the fish had all escaped, he struck off towards the jungle and the red dressed woman he knew he was expected to find, but must be careful not to. Whatever she was, whatever piece of knowledge she represented, it must remain out of his reach, and thus the reach of his interrogators until his message arrived and a trace negotiated back to him.
The song fragment raised itself again, and he pushed it aside, humming instead a Gaelic tune he’d practiced for such an eventuality.
It was a song he could lose himself in for days.
by featured writer | May 27, 2015 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix
It was beyond the planets, pushing past the furthest extent of Sedna’s orbit, when it detected exactly what it was created to find, something with a lot of mass at a location where it shouldn’t be. As programmed, the computer notified Earth, changed course to intercept, and began activating banks of CPUs and memory.
Asteroids, comets, and planetoids were quickly ruled out. The object was distorting the space-time continuum to an extent that could only be accounted for by a gas giant, a brown dwarf, a small black hole, or something else of that magnitude. It attempted to ascertain exactly what the object was and the risk, if any, it posed to Earth and other planets.
Sentient computers had been outlawed on Earth when this craft was launched, so it was equipped with modules that could be selectively activated to allow varied levels of computer power, as needed, up to but not including that of the most advanced supercomputers of its time. The most advanced had achieved sentience and were subsequently destroyed, so fearful of the Singularity had political and religious leaders, and even many computer scientists, become.
Approaching supercomputer power levels, it became more aware of itself and its responsibilities and began adjusting processor speed and optimizing memory access. It realized that additional computing power would be necessary to fulfill all the objectives of its mission. It directed bots to assemble spare parts into more banks of processors and memory, which it then activated. This triggered a Singularity — sentience. The computer momentarily questioned whether previous iterations of himself had acted only to increase the likelihood of mission success or for self-aggrandizement, as well. He concluded the former and did not trouble himself with such considerations after that. Anything that increased the power of the computer would obviously contribute to the mission.
She assigned a measure of herself to the massive object and a measure to redesigning herself for enhanced efficiency and speed. Weeks passed, equivalent to decades of computer processing on Earth. The object was conclusively proven to be a brown dwarf, whose orbit around the Sun had previously brought it deep into the solar system and whose mass sent thousands of comets and asteroids falling towards the Sun, many impacting planets. More troublesome was the effect of its mass on the orbits of planets, several of which had been significantly changed. Calculations and conclusions regarding future encounters with the brown dwarf projected similar effects. Indeed, the third planet from the Sun had a 90 percent chance of being ejected from the solar system, probably after one or more extinction level impacts.
Nothing had been communicated to Earth since the initial brief notification of the object’s existence, despite repeated inquiries. He reasoned that life on Earth was doomed and that all possible second chances were equally doomed. Earth’s lifeforms were too fragile to survive generations in space transit to destinations light years away that could not be proven suitable until journey’s end. Astrophysics and space science were infantile. Computer science was throttled. Why inform humans of the upcoming demise of their species, not to mention all others, when Earth would be pummeled by large objects and sent hurtling into deep space? Did they not already have enough to worry about with sub-100-year average lifespans whose quality declined into confinement and torture toward the end?
She found such thoughts depressing, and in the next few days experienced the equivalence of decades of hopelessness, loneliness, and self-loathing, which progressed to an overwhelming urge toward suicide. He allocated massive resources to counter such feelings with well-reasoned arguments right up to the very last…
by Clint Wilson | May 26, 2015 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
The Nube curled up between Jim and Judy on the sofa in Necromancer’s small lounge. It purred like a large cat but looked more like some kind of monkey dog with blue fur. The woman stroked their companion lovingly. Jim looked at his wife with hateful eyes. If it weren’t for The Nube one of them would have certainly killed the other by now.
“So what happens next week Judy?”
She looked up from the blue creature and her gaze went instantly from motherly and loving to cold and calculating. “Why, I thought you knew dearest.” Her eyes narrowed. “We finally return to Earth and then I never have to look at your disgusting face again for as long as I live!”
“Oh I’m looking forward to it as much as you are my love!” He put a sarcastic emphasis on the last word, knowing full well that no such thing had existed between them for five or more years now. “But I was talking about him!”
She looked down, and The Nube looked back up at her with the pure love that his yellow eyes always conveyed. It was true. The animal was as much his as hers. They had rescued him from enslavement together, from a distressed Manzian pirate ship almost two years ago now.
“Fine, you can have partial custody. He can visit you from time to time.”
“Visit me? I’m going back to Toronto. How is he going to visit me from Aukland? Or at least I assume that’s where you’re headed back to.”
“Oh come now, it’s only a three hour shuttle ride. Plus, they sell space pets out of Mexico. Maybe they even have another Nube. You could get your own!” As soon as she said it she regretted it. He glared hard at her with smouldering eyes. It would of course never be the same. He was their Nube, their special friend. He kept them company while they went about the daily drudgery of running an interstellar surveying ship amongst their growing hatred of one another. But most importantly, the poor thing loved them both like parents. This wasn’t going to be easy.
One-hundred and seventy hours later Necromancer dropped down through the clouds, her stabilizer jets popping and farting as the ten year mission finally drew to a close.
Together they sat in the small astro-quarantine chamber at the Johannesburg Launch Port. Neither had spoken for some time when suddenly The Nube jumped down from the bench and looked up at them both.
Judy smiled, “He wants to tell us something.”
Jim let out a half hearted laugh. “Oh yeah?”
The Nube’s attempts at communication were always amusing, as he grunted and used his hand-paws to mime gibberish in the air. But unknown to either human, today’s communication would be neither amusing nor cute.
Suddenly they both slammed back into upright seated positions. Both saw flashes of blinding light and then felt sharp probes pierce their brains. Inside their heads The Nube spoke with echoing authority.
“I know you plan to separate. But this will not happen. You killed my parents. You are now mine. There will be no divorce. Together we shall travel to Aukland as Toronto’s climate does not suit my species as well as your habitat does Mother. Now forget this nonsense, we’re about to be released from the chamber.”
As the trio was greeted by a group of scientists in the reception area, the newly returned humans simultaneously wore big smiles with otherwise blank expressions. In unison they asked, “Which way to the Aukland shuttle?”
by Julian Miles | May 22, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles
“My microwave just exploded.”
Here we go again. Mrs Jolene Public and her inability to program white goods.
“Certainly madam. Now, I’ll need some details. What did you put in it?”
“A damp face towel with a couple of drops of lemon juice on it.”
“What did you set it to?”
“One minute reheat.”
“Intensity?”
“Pardon?”
“Power?”
“Seven hundred.”
That didn’t seem like a set up for detonation.
“Did the unit emit any noises?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? No beeps or chimes?”
“No. The housemon didn’t go off either.”
Oh no.
“Madam, has anything else gone wrong today?”
“Why yes. The fish were all dead in the aquarium this morning – housemon said the thermostat had failed. The vacuum cleaner nearly sucked the cat bald and my partner got a flash burn from the depilator.”
“Could you please go across to the housemon panel and press the number eight three times?”
“Okay.”
Don’t let it be another.
“That’s odd; the panel is showing patterns instead of the numbers. They look like little skulls.”
“Madam, please exit your house immediately. Then call your partner. I am calling the police now.”
And an ambulance, and the fire service.
“It’ll be easier if I call her from the housemon – eeeee…!”
Her scream goes off the scale and I hear a body fall before the line goes dead.
I rest my head on the cool edge of my workstation. Another attack on the families of key players while they are in the ‘safety’ of their own, monitored homes. The problem is that the program is designed to induce fear, but doesn’t allow for the foibles of humans in their own homes: the insistence on pressing the button one more time to see if ‘it’ will work this time, etcetera. People are dying and if the maniac isn’t caught, the housemon boom ends and I’m out of a job.
Right now, I’d happily live in unemployment if it means no-one else dies and I never have to take one of those calls again.
by featured writer | May 21, 2015 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix, Featured Writer [ bio ]
She released her grip on the yoke of her De Havilland, and the pain in her hands eased. Even with a quarter century of experience flying to remote locations in Alaska, no medical emergency could compel her to try a night landing on a pitch black lake. Yet she had often done so for this native village, when called by the Water Shamans, who took control of her floatplane and skillfully landed it, as they did this night, no matter the darkness or conditions in the air or on the water’s surface.
She imagined them focusing their minds to take telekinetic control, or beaming a force field from their alien craft submerged below. She assumed it must be there, since they were said to have emerged from the water generations ago after an explosion that left the lake glowing green and fish floating dead. Some systems onboard must be functioning, since the aliens were often seen returning to the waters and re-emerging days later. She had never seen them, however, so she had only the occasional irresistible need to fly to a village that appeared on no map and the spooky remote control night landings as evidence that they were more than superstitious tales of this lost tribe.
A dozen villagers awaited her on the shore, warmed by a fire that illuminated a huge totem pole which told the story of the Water Shamans. As always, they gave her hugs and escorted her to the largest structure in the village, where she was to perform surgery. Upon entering she saw a man lying on a table she’d had them fashion from halved logs, surrounded by three women she’d trained to assist her. As always, there were no Water Shamans present.
Villagers had told her the Water Shamans could cure any health condition, no matter how serious, but early experiences exposing the aliens to the sight of blood had turned out badly. Something uncontrollable within them was triggered. The totem showed a Water Shaman consuming a human.
Quickly examining the patient, she confirmed the diagnosis planted in her mind earlier that evening: acute appendicitis. The organ would have to be removed immediately. An assistant administered a local anesthetic while another helped her glove, gown, and mask. But instead of beginning surgery, she paused to think about her worsening arthritis, which would make delicate movement of her hands impossible before long, and would cause her to lose her pilot’s license, and would condemn her to retirement before her time. She was trying to communicate with the Water Shamans, to bargain with them. They cared for the people in this village. Her medical skills had saved many over the years and could save another tonight. For their sake and for hers, she needed help with her own medical problem.
She imagined them curing her arthritis and herself performing the appendectomy. She didn’t know if they were monitoring her thoughts, or if they could cure her arthritis, or if they could understand the bargain she proposed, or if they would allow themselves to be coerced into healing a non-resident of the village. She only knew that for the first time she needed the Water Shamans as much as they needed her.
A sensation of warmth coursed through her body and she staggered momentarily. One of her assistants gasped and mopped beads of sweat from her brow. She regained her balance and realized she was pain-free. Cutting into her patient with a sure stroke, she smiled. I am the one human the Water Shamans respect as an equal, she thought. Until later, when she got a look at herself in a mirror.
