by submission | Oct 25, 2014 | Story |
Author : Cosmo Smith
Somewhere, hundreds of feet below, the drying of seaweed soured the air. Elias breathed in deeply and smiled. It reminded him of better times.
He was curled in a hammock at the end of the promenade of the Chateau de Lin. Only a terrace with a low parapet separated Elias from a drop to the water that made his toes tingle. The setting of the sun had spread violet bruises over the ocean’s skin, the water so still right now that the seven visible moons were reflected almost perfectly on its surface.
Elias held up his wine glass, squinting through it to see how its curvature would change the shape of the moons. Then he tipped it until the water within touched its lip, only surface tension keeping it in. That was Luna in a wine glass, he thought. Just a planetful of Lunaeans, and some humans now, trying to reap what they could from the fertile soil before the next alignment of the moons brought the tides. Lunaeans? No, Lunatics. He almost laughed, but the pain stopped him. Instead, he touched his side, felt the metal there under skin that was still too tender.
The aide Remis found him after Ferrid, the darkest moon, had set. Elias’ consciousness had been waning, and he pretended to sleep as Remis settled into a chair beside him. Any of the others, he knew, would have woken him and taken him inside, but Remis sat in silence.
“You really shouldn’t be out here,” Remis said at last.
Elias smiled slyly and opened his eyes. He had expected Remis to be looking at him, but the man was observing the ocean. His eyes glowed in the moonlight.
“Says who?”
“Ri’a, Thom, everyone. It’s bad for your lungs.”
“It’s wonderful,” Elias said, breathing in loudly. And it’s not because of my lungs, you slump. They want me away from that low railing. But he liked Remis, and so he said, “It’s weird you know, the name Luna.”
“How’s that?”
“Us Lunaeans, we have no word for moon. In our language, the moon and the stars are the same. Some nights the moons are as bright as the sun. And the sizes…who’s to say that all those stars aren’t just smaller moons circling this planet?”
Remis grinned. “I’ve heard of this. An old idea of yours.”
“We still teach it to the children.”
“I believe you, but it’s wrong nonetheless.”
“I know. You know I’ve been out there. I’ve seen it. And it’s not for us, being out there. I don’t think you understand that, the way you recruit us. We feel dry afterwards. And this?” He winced as he felt his chest again. “Eight months. They say they don’t understand my anatomy.”
Remis nodded. “You fought well, though.”
“It wasn’t my fight.” My fight was here, on this planet. Can’t you see that? Watching the oceans breathe in and out; racing the alignment. That is all that matters. That is what we live for. “We never asked to go to space.”
Remis sighed. “You say this as though it’s directed at me.”
“It is.”
“But it’s not.” A pause, and then. “And you’re free to leave when you choose.”
This time Elias did laugh, and then winced. “You know I can’t. I’m of no use like this.”
“They won’t take you back?”
Elias said nothing.
Eventually, Remis left, leaving Elias curled up in his hammock like a shriveled piece of seaweed. His eyes watched as the moons traced their paths through the darkness, and below, in their lethargic way, the oceans responded.
by submission | Oct 24, 2014 | Story |
Author : cchatfield
I didn’t want to show up to work today.
By the time my crew arrived for the usual day of loading and unloading, packing and unpacking, signing and releasing, I’d rehearsed a little speech about the importance of keeping our jobs.
“This is a time of crisis and change,” I told them. “All we can do is ride it out. And if we let the Planet Troopers keep the peace out there and make sure nothing happens to the shipment in here, then at the end of it we’ll all still have our jobs and life will move on.”
We’re a stop on the route of the battery-powered hearts that keep every bot in every home on every planet running, which is a bit tricky on the best of days. But today, with half the galaxy watching and the other half thinking about coming out here to protest, we’re not shipping anything.
Now I’m looking through a porthole window in the docking bay. Beyond the row of gun-clad Troopers, a silent sea of slowly winding-down bots are staring my direction, wondering if the fickle humans are going to change their minds and give their lives back.
They should be screaming. Shouting, jumping, pointing fingers and waving signs until the shadows of the executives are peeled from the recesses of the building and plastered to the front windows. They should act human and force everyone to wonder if what’s happening qualifies as murder. But they just stand there, and that’s the whole issue, isn’t it?
I may not be able to explain how or why, but I think I just picked a side.
My employees are in the break room, whiling the tense hours away over coffee and sandwiches. No one sees me break open a shipping container and remove a few units.
I slip out the utility door next to the docking bay and make my way into the crowd of bots standing impassive as trees in an orchard.
Go back inside, a part of me pleads. You’ll lose your job and your reputation and probably get arrested and for what? A cause you never cared about until today? Let others decide the fate of bots and humans. Go back to work.
I walk up to the first one I lay eyes on, knowing that none of them would want me using my flawed human reasoning to try and decide who was most deserving.
Its shiny optics connect with me, and I forget the words to the qualms running through my head.
I hold up the pack, noting the reading on the bot’s chest that confirms its dire need for energy. It takes the batteries and I move on to hand out the few others I’ve squirrelled away in my pockets.
I expect the first bot to have already ripped open the unit and inserted its new heart. Instead, it holds my shoulder in a firm metal grip and, with more sincerity than I’ve ever heard from anyone, bot or human, says, “Thank you.”
It leans over and slips the heart into the chest panel of a fallen comrade.
We watch the bot regain consciousness and I shrug, still unsure of my motivations until I vocalize it. “I’m just doing my job.”
by Julian Miles | Oct 21, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The night is slashed with beams of white light and the sky is spotted with technicolour detonations.
“Who does that? I ask you. Who does that?”
I don’t know how Mitchell can talk and run at this speed. I shrug in reply and keep going.
We pulled up in the panel van at the designated staging point: under a bridge a klick from the target. From there we moved to the edge of their secondary perimeter and commenced insertion. It was textbook, fully planned out, tactically vetted to hell and gone.
Except for one thing: nobody bothered to check if they had a tertiary perimeter. Where it starts, I don’t know. I suspect it’s a couple of klicks out. Which means Mitchell and I are around three-quarters of the way through it and far from safe.
“We’re nearly two klicks out, man. Let’s find some transport.”
He’s the boss. I wait as he scopes out the driveways of the neighbourhood we’re running through. All modern grid saloons; easy to track and useless off gridded roads. Punching the air, Mitchell points toward a vintage Merc. Ideal.
I’m just about to run after him when my suspicions regarding the tertiary zone stop me in my tracks. Which is the thing that saves me as Mitchell dives into the Merc, slams the door and the killing vapours hide him from view. A flytrap – dummy vehicle, wood and cloth interior, organo-molecular acid sprays – this far out is a new level of vicious.
Some very old training surfaces and I run back toward the target. Without pausing to give them time to triangulate, I dive into the culvert we crossed, letting all my gear pull me down to the bottom of the murky flow.
Taking the oxygen bottle from the medical kit, I ditch the rest of my gear, slow my breathing and let the water take me. Just another chunk of waste on the way to the Solent.
Six hours later I’m lying on the sun-warmed sands of the Isle of Wight. Stripped to my trunks, there is nothing to betray me when I present myself to the local police just after sundown. I tell them a sorry tale about having my car stolen while I spent a day on the beach. They will find it where I left it two days ago, when I was picked up for the job. I’ll get assisted transit to it, after they’ve checked it and found it clean. It’s a hire car, after all.
Then back to bonny Scotia and enough of this sorry Police State infested with paranoid private military companies. Whatever they were protecting, they can keep it. I’ve just retired.
by Clint Wilson | Oct 20, 2014 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
A stadium-sized vehicle crawled along on massive tracks to my right. I hadn’t been awarded a sleep cycle for ninety-eight kilometres and was well overdue when the klaxon finally sounded. Not slowing my pace an iota I looked up and saw a half-dozen citizens lowering themselves down the nearby ladder. They moved slowly, none of them in an hurry to reach the rocky landscape below.
One by one they dropped to the surface and automatically began marching alongside the crawler. I scanned my immediate surroundings. There were at least twice as many tired walkers as recent arrivals. Some of them had been on shift almost as long as me. I waited more than a minute. Finally, frustrated, I radioed the deck officer.
“Crawler Seven deck, this is Dawkins off the port stern. Have seen six fresh arrivals. Where’s our relief whistle?” For a moment there was nothing. I almost tried again, then suddenly,
“Dawkins hold your position for the time being.”
My response was immediate. “Hold my position? I’ve been walking for,” I checked my odometer, “almost one-hundred clicks here, what’s the deal?”
There was another long pause. Then suddenly a familiar voice, “Dawkins, you and Chambers are relieved. Welcome back aboard.” I immediately caught the sight of Pavel Chambers dropping back and cutting over across my field of vision. With my own legs turning to gelatine, I followed suit and also drifted toward the crawler. I maintained radio silence as Chambers gripped the ladder and pulled himself up. And I didn’t breathe another word until I too was slowly making my way up toward the massive travelling deck full of greenhouses and livestock pens above.
Finally I broke the silence. “Deck officer. Why do six relieve only two this shift?” There was no response. Twice more I tried. Still nothing.
As I neared the deck I saw people pulling Chambers up and then as I too reached the top a hand reached out and I looked up into the familiar face of my old friend Brendan Chow. “Is there a transmitter out? Are you guys deaf?” I asked.
The friendly smile faded as I crawled forward and then stood up face to face with Chow. He sputtered, “Keep quiet. I will tell you all I can.”
An hour later I sat, legs dangling, off the edge of the machine looking out at the distant crawlers all clambering along westward with their thousands of citizens trudging alongside. Many walked. Fewer and fewer got to ride. The sun sank slowly, but not so slowly that we could ever catch it. It was said that the Earth once turned a thousand times faster than this; that people could live in one place and as day turned into night and then back into day again it never got too hot or too cold.
I looked back toward the nearby greenhouse behind me and noted that the vegetation did appear to be thinner and browner than ever. “Okay I admit it Brendan. We’re running out of energy. But what can we do about it? You know how it is. We are cursed. We must always chase the sun!”
Brendan Chow lowered his head morosely. After a time he looked up. There was a tear in his eye. “Look at them!” He suddenly motioned with his arm.
I looked back out at the dotted landscape of machines and countless tired walking humans and asked, “How did we ever get to this point?”
Chow replied solemnly. “I really don’t know. But I am sure of one thing. Our race will not survive!”
by Duncan Shields | Oct 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’m 43. A year on Carroway is fifty-six earth years long. Its long, lazy, almost-circular orbit kept it temperate for that whole time but the ecosystem had evolved to create 126 distinct ‘seasons’. I’d read of Earth’s four seasons of summer, winter, spring and fall repeating every twelve months. Sounded monotonous.
I’ve lived my whole life here on Carroway and I haven’t seen a single season twice. They’ve all been recorded so it’s possible to read up and prepare for them as they happen but I’ve been faced with challenge after challenge.
There’s crystal season when the mineral deposits go through a growth spurt and push up out of the earth like translucent horns. There’s a season of trees that grow up into the lower atmosphere. They stand with smooth bark, silent and ominous until they start humming. Their vibrating roots fissure open the ground and release the grass fog season. Then the trees themselves flower, blotting out the sun. Then there is a pollenfall season as the skyscraper trees die and the sun returns, shining down through their now-nude branch clusters.
The trees become soft and unstable, sinking back down to the ground like wilted celery. It’s a dangerous time. Luckily the trees bow slowly.
There aren’t many animals here except for the season when the kangabears come out of hibernation for six months and gorge themselves on the fallen skyscraper trees before going back to sleep for another fifty-six years.
There’s a season where the planet hums. The theory is that a deep-earth tectonic shift happens, making the core rub the mantle harder than usual. Like a planet headache. You get used to it until the earthquake stops it. After that, the planet feels too silent for a while.
The magnetosphere and dust particles cause shifts in the sky colour depending on what season just happened. I’ve seen eighteen different hues up there. There’s ashfall here after the post-humming eruptions. Then pigments in the ash-eating bacteria turn it all into a blue slime that dissipates until the pink grass shows up to eat the slime, turning itself blue in the process.
There’s a red snow season. There’s a season of thorned tumbleweeds. There’s a season of long, thin raindrops that hang down from the clouds like hair. Soon the season of ivy migration begins. And then the flowerworks seed pod explosion festival.
There’s a plant based war happening here that’s been going on for millions of year. It’s found a cycle. Each victor dying and feeding the next. Each challenger inadvertently existing as part of a larger circle.
Some people can’t handle the variety here but I love it.
Thirteen more years and I’ll have seen all the seasons Carroway has to offer. Not too many people in the universe can claim that, especially a human like myself with a relatively short life span. I wear that badge with honour.
Every Carroway meal I’ve had has only been for a few months, never to be seen again. I think back to the pink pricklepears I had when I was six. The thick leafsteaks I had when I was ten. The delicious brandyberries that showed up on my twenty-second birthday. So many tastes.
I’ve recorded them all here in my books. I’m the first human to keep a firsthand record of all the seasons here on Carroway.
Some cycles don’t seem like cycles because they last such a long time.
I’m looking forward to the end of the ‘year’.
