by Julian Miles | Jun 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
We were getting pasted in a dogfight off Agnos IV when Team Havoc dropped out of subspace and chewed up the Havna interceptors that had been giving us grief. The thirty-two of us left were damn happy to see the cavalry.
“Marduk Leader to Havoc Leader. Cheers for the assist.”
“No problemo, Marduk. Happy to help.”
At that moment, the jaws of the Havna trap closed and seventy-two Crusis Class interceptors appeared in four ‘eighteen wheels’ formations.
“Marduk Leader to all Marduk units. Looks like we get to celebrate on the run. Havoc, you got flank?”
“Hell no. I got the latest version of Combat Assessor online. Predicts over eighty percent losses. Havoc Flight, reset to start of zone in three,-”
“Reset what?”
“Oh man, you’re realtime? That sucks. Havoc out in two, one… Seeya.”
Team Havoc vanished into subspace and the dying began.
The merging of flight simulators, multiplayer combat games and drone technology started back in the mid twenty-first century. When man went into space via the discovery that subspace could carry more than communications, ‘simdrones’ became the new frontier. Billions of young gamers could reconnoitre actual new planets, all from the comfort of their recliners and gameshelms.
When negotiations broke down with the Havna, we nearly won. A million simdrones piloted by teenagers from across the world had the Havna outnumbered and out-insanitied – there are no limits to what you’ll attempt when you can’t die.
Havna technology advanced and subspace feedback missiles gave the simdrone community their first casualties: 196,547 in two days, to be precise. Cocky became cowardly. So much so that ‘training missions’, supposedly in virtual environments on Earth, were actually live missions, pulled off without the knowledge of the all-too-aware-of-their-mortality little darlings safe at home.
Occasionally, clusterfucks like the one that killed all bar three of Team Marduk happened. Apparently, Team Havoc received a ‘stern’ reprimand.
We hear the chime within the house. It’s a fine day and people are sunning themselves by their pools. Stacey and I, we look summer-ish. Get too close and you’ll see angular outlines under our jellabiya.
The door opens and a woman who could be anything between fifty and ninety smiles at us, revealing teeth to match her million-credit bodywork.
“Can I help you?” Her tone indicates mild curiosity.
“We’re from SD Monitoring, Madam. Can we speak to the resident SD Warrior?”
She sighs: “Warrior? Pain the neck is what he is. CECIL! People from the base to see you!” With that, she leaves us standing there and saunters off, calling for the maid.
A few moments later, a well-built teenager in a silk dishdasha ambles out: “You two my new handlers?” He focuses on Stacey: “Oh man, they sent a babe.”
I rest the foot-long suppressor that fronts my Morgan .60 cal on the tip of his nose: “Marduk Leader to Havoc Leader. Karma time.”
The kick shocks my wrist, elbow and shoulder. Cecil’s head sprays across four metres of parquet and stucco. I look at Marduk Seven – Stacey. She nods.
“Next?”
She checks the datapad on her wrist: “Two houses down on the other side.”
“Law enforcement window?”
“Nine minutes.”
Three minute walk, one minute knock and wait, one minute kill.
“Send subspace co-ordinates for the road outside the next house to Marduk Twenty-Three. Evac in seven.”
Jimi’s that good. Put him in a captured Crusis Class and we become oni: unstoppable demons of vengeance. By the time questions are asked about surveillance suppression and the like, we’ll be back in our quarters on ISS Twelve having left no traces of our little field trip.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Shadow coloured stones crush and scatter under boot heels. Their passage unheard, two figures have slipped silently across the rooftop expanse to its eastern face. Lumbering mechanicals presenting themselves at intervals, drinking heat from the spaces below to exhale in great humid sighs. These are the only sounds to disturb the pre morning air. There are no bird songs, no passing vehicles, no murmuring undercurrent of peripheral lives. It will be hours before the first ships climb to the stars.
This is the silence before the break of day.
Two figures sit, silent, legs dangling into space from the parapet, the last of the previous night’s beer in hand, each absently slaking the thirst neither of them feels anymore.
It’s not the night’s antics that make this moment memorable, indeed those memories are lost now. Not even the rise of the sun itself, though I’m sure as always it was worth the wait. The rising of this particular sun on this particular day was merely an ending, it had no significance beyond that.
The memory, rather, is of two accidental friends sharing the last moment they’d know together, in silence, waiting for the sun to rise and give them permission to leave one another, to leave home.
It is these few moments, this shared time of solitude so exquisitely inscribed upon which I now reflect. A time remarkable in its clarity, plucked from a sea of murky memories, of happenings that have long since faded from view. Brought forth by the thought of a sunrise I can’t remember watching, and will never see again.
by submission | May 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : JD Kennedy
It is interesting how seemingly unrelated technologies become connected together to create new and unexpected capabilities.
First, there was the successful development of cryogenic ‘sleep’ systems. The goal was to freeze someone who had a terminal illness until a way of treating that illness was discovered. Unfortunately, the researchers found that you could keep a body frozen for only six months or so before irreparable tissue damage occurred (effectively, freezer burn).
While this was a failure for terminal patients, it turned out to be a boon for deep space travelers. A frozen person does not need the life support that an awake person does. You can transport dozens of frozen people on a much smaller spaceship than would be needed for an awake crew. You can also get them there faster since rapid acceleration and braking is not a problem. This allowed the creation of large research stations on Mars and even a small outpost on Titan.
Later, a practical matter teleporter was developed that could de-materialize an object on one end and re-construct it on the other. There were several significant limitations with it, though. It only worked with inanimate objects – living creatures always died in the transmission. The teleport range was also very short and limited to wired connections as it was very sensitive to errors induced by noise. It also required a fixed receiving station – you couldn’t just teleport anywhere like they did in SF stories. As such, it hasn’t seen wide-spread use.
The first breakthrough came when someone realized that you can store the ‘image’ of an object being teleported and later re-create a perfect copy of it from the stored image. This allowed more equipment to be sent to the Mars stations than ever before. It was teleported a short distance on Earth, where its pattern was stored. The object was then recreated on Mars from storage devices that were shipped with the frozen crew, further reducing the cost of deep space exploration.
The next came when someone realized that a frozen body was an inanimate object while it was frozen. Tests proved that you could freeze an animal, teleport it, and then revive it with no damage to the animal. Soon trials were successfully made on human volunteers (usually terminally ill patients). It didn’t take long before a researcher realized that you could store the pattern of a frozen person and make as many copies of it that you liked! It was much easier than cloning – you didn’t have to grow and train anything! This discovery resulted in some very sticky legal and ethical considerations. Thus, it was quickly and universally outlawed.
But like any law, there developed one very unusual exception.
A visionary realized that we could now ‘package’ an entire off-world colony, including hundreds of colonists, in a very small volume. Travel time to a planet in another solar system was no longer a limitation. A special team of ‘colonists’ was extensively trained on how to survive in any habitable condition. Specialized equipment was developed for the new colonies that not only would help with the initial deployment of the colony, but could be replicated as needed once the colony was established. When everything was ready, the ‘colonists’ were frozen, teleported, recorded, and revived. All of the equipment was also teleported and recorded.
Then one great day, hundreds of identical copies of the colony were launched to every habitable exoplanet then known. The seeds of humanity will finally reach beyond confines of its home system, even if the ‘original’ colonists never leave the planet.
by Stephen R. Smith | May 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Sergeant Gains got the call at four am; lone white male out on the Golden Gate Bridge about mid-span. He spent the twenty minutes on the Harley with the throttle pinned, the lights up and the siren silent wondering what he’d find when he got there and hoping he wouldn’t be too late.
The man was still pacing when Gains rolled up, but as Gains powered down the bike, killed the lights and slung his helmet on the handlebars, the man climbed out onto the cord. They regarded each other with mutual apparent uncertainty as the officer closed the gap between them on foot.
Gains stopped a few metres away and hitched his thumbs into his belt.
“Be careful, it gets slick out there this time of night.”
The man, still wearing the previous day’s office attire, collar undone, tie pulled aside, squatted and looked around before speaking.
“Doesn’t matter. Don’t waste your time. I’ll be gone in a minute.”
The Sergeant scrambled to remember his training, to remember the dozen or more men and women he’d been called down here before to talk out of ending their life. He always felt unprepared, like each was the first time.
“If you wanted to jump, you would be gone already, I think you really just want someone to listen to what you’re feeling.” Gains moved slowly to the edge and looked over the side into the darkness below. “What’s your name son?”
“David,” their eyes met for a minute before the young man looked away, “David Parker.”
“Well David, what brings you down here tonight?”
David sat for a minute before looking up, catching and holding Gains’ gaze.
“You have no idea what it’s like to never fit in. To be smart, but treated like a freak, to be funny but treated like a joke. To only be able to make friends with the other freakish jokes that are just like you, and to know everyone is talking about you behind your back all the time.” He spoke in a steady tone, barely pausing for breath. “I meet girls who like me until someone tells them about me, and then they stop returning my calls. Do you know what it’s like to know you’re always going to be alone? Truly, completely alone? Even in a world packed so tight with people that you can’t even breathe, to know you’ll always be alone?”
Gains started to move forward but paused as David tensed up.
“I know what it’s like being on the outside looking in. You don’t do what I do as long as I’ve done it without becoming a little detached from everyone around you,” he read David’s expression and changed his tone, “but no, I don’t know what you’re feeling exactly. But there are people that are going to miss you if you go.”
David looked at the dim steel of the chord for a while before answering.
“No. Nobody will. Sorry you wasted a trip.”
With that he leaned sideways and was gone.
The second David did, he knew he’d made a mistake. He thought of Becky Six in statistics, of her sad eyes each time he declined her invitation to join their group for lunch. He thought of the last glimpse of resigned horror on the policeman’s face, a horror he knew would wake the man up for countless nights in a cold sweat.
By the time his back and shoulders impacted the water a few seconds later, his body was travelling at nearly one hundred kilometers an hour. The water brought him to a very sudden, very painful stop, shattering his spine and ribs, puncturing organs and caving in the back of his skull. His arms and legs cut a graceful arc away from his body, snapping as they too impacted the water’s surface.
He realized he could no longer blink or close his eyes.
Secondary systems powered up to try and maintain his consciousness and preserve his memory for a rescue he knew would never come. Pain recepters amped up and closed down spasmodically, sending shockwaves of pain through him. Sea water slowly seeped into his control systems, shorting out and shutting down his fine motor controls so even the feeble twitching of his shattered limbs stopped. He slipped beneath the surface and the lighting bolts of pain dulled into a steady ache.
He watched the moon until the depth took even that ray of hope away.
It would be hours before his batteries would flood out completely and grant him final peace, his pain transferred to those who loved him.
by submission | May 26, 2014 | Story |
Author : Cosmo Smith
I am knee-deep in snow, holding tight to a dying man. His name is Arkan and he is one of our best fighters. He has stayed alive for an unbelievable two hundred and forty days. Besides that, I know nothing about him.
“Hold tight, we’re close,” a voice whispers into my ear, and looking up I can make out the dim sweep of searchlights through the curtain of snow. Several dirigibles are landing on the cloudfield.
Arkan shivers in my arms. “I – I can’t -” he begins.
I put my fingers to his chest and send a flash of warmth through the restoration glyphs tattooed there. He breathes a sigh of relief and relaxes.
It is only temporary, though. By the time the crunch of boots announce three soldiers with a gurney, Arkan is already dead. His body hangs limply across my knees.
“Dammit,” one of them mutters, but I hardly hear him. I am already leaving. As much as I would like to stay for the ride out, to see again the hovering cumulonimbuses of Cloud Nine from the safety of the dirigibles, snow leaking from their statically-charged underbellies, I have work to do. Events can play out without a cleric for a while. Arkan will regen somewhere with maybe a few weeks or even months of his progress lost. Sucks for him, but not too important in the long run.
I am back at home: a nice four-terabyte house with a view of Saturn’s rings. Over the next hour I will concurrently be checking back on progress in Cloud Nine, coding up a dragonwolf for a client of mine, chatting with the avatars of several friends in my living room, and watching a videofeed of the news back on Earth. I’m not as good at multitasking as some people, but I think it’s pretty decent.
“Why are you still watching Earth?” one of my friends asks.
“Just for fun,” the version of me in the living room responds.
But the part watching the show is completely engrossed. How can people still live such single-threaded lives?
I guess it will always be that way. Even during the 21st century, people were still fighting physical wars as it became more and more apparent that true power lay on the digital frontier. Google, Amazon, Rift: these are the superpowers today. Who even cares what America is anymore?
