365 tomorrows

Author : J. S. Kachelries

“Well, what do you think?” asked my roommate, with a grin that appeared to cover almost half of his disheveled face.

“About what, Jim?” I replied, while pretending to ignore the large polished chrome sphere sitting between us, in the middle of our kitchen table.

“Come on, Isaac. What do you think of my doctorate project, The Graviton Shield?”

“It looks a metal basketball to me. What’s it supposed to do?”

“Besides win me a Noble Prize? Well, when I activate it, it will become unaffected by gravitational fields.”

“You mean it will float?”

He laughed. “Of course not, you idiot. You Liberal Arts majors really crack me up. It still has inertia. You know…Newton’s first law. It must continue to move in a strait line in whatever direction it was moving when I threw the switch. Do you know what direction that will be? Hell, of course you don’t. Look, the Earth rotates in 24 hours. At our latitude, we’re moving at about 700 miles per hour. Without Earth’s gravity holding it down, the GS Ball will drift upward toward the west. He pointed toward the top of the refrigerator. In addition, the Earth also orbits around the sun. Let’s see, that’s 587,000,000 miles in 365.25 days. That’s 67,000 miles per hour. At this time of day, the Ball will continue to move toward Epsilon Tau.” He pointed toward the window above the sink. “Of course, we’re also revolving around the center of the Milky Way. Let’s see…that’s…”

“OK, OK, I get it. Just tell me where to stand, so it won’t hit me if it actually moves.”

“Oh, you’re fine right where you are. The battery will only last about 30 seconds. Just long enough to prove it works.” He reached over and flipped the toggle switch on the top of the Ball. But the Ball didn’t move. Regardless, Jim jumped up and began to dance around the kitchen, cheering and shouting “Oh yea, oh yea, I knew it. Take that bitch!”

“Whoa, Jim. Calm down. It didn’t work.”

“Don’t you guys take any science classes? Of course it worked. Had everybody, including my ex-girlfriend, been correct, that Ball should have exited the kitchen, stage right. But it didn’t. Don’t you see what that means? Duh, I guess I’ll have to explain that to you too. Mary Jane, my ex, said I was a self centered, egotistical, narcissistic bastard, who thought the universe revolved around him…..What, you still don’t understand? The Ball didn’t move! God, you’re slow. If the center of the universe was really somewhere out there in the cosmos, we’d have a hole in kitchen wall. Therefore, I must be the center of the universe. Everything does revolve around me. I’ve got to send her an IM.” He reached under the table and brought out his laptop.

I sat there motionless while I tried to decide if I should call the psychotic helpline, or just get up and run like hell. That’s when I noticed that the Ball was moving very slowly to my left. Although I hadn’t noticed until now, it had actually moved about a foot since Jim had flipped the switch, right down the center of the table. As I carefully watched its path, it began to curve away from me as its battery began to die. Huh, I thought, it looks like it’s trying to make a big circle, a little bigger than a hula-hoop, with Jim smack dab in the middle. “Well, I’ll be damned!”

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Author : Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”, Featured Writer

I was on a hostile node, and a half-dozen Dahakeen were chasing me. With guns. Quite big ones. I didn’t have a weapon at this point, having lost it in the factory complex that I was now hot-footing it away from. Well, ‘lost’ is a bit of a stretch. I had it taken from me by a guard. He ripped out the firing mechanism in front of my eyes. The idiot then turned away to place the clip down on a shelf. When he turned back, he met my cosh coming the other way. On reflection, he was probably the one who tipped the Dahakeen onto me. What made it eerie was the fact that there was no noise of gunfire, just low thuds, followed by patches of tarmac ahead of me glowing cherry-red and splintering, before they would explode. I thanked code that Dahakeen couldn’t run and shoot straight at the same time.

I scrambled through the half-ruined doorway and bolted towards the stairs. The building was oppressively dark, but my eyes were slowly compensating. I threw myself onto the first floor landing, and carried on up. As I turned to start up the next set of stairs, there was another barrage of thuds, and a ripple of explosions as significant chunks of the structure exited this mortal realm. I had made it about halfway up the stairs when I heard another thud, and felt a bright, screaming pain in my leg. A microprojectile had whipped through my foot and exploded in the stair beneath me. My calf was a mess, laced through with thick shards of wood.

I pulled myself back up, and forced myself up the stairs, round onto the landing, and up onto the next flight. My leg was hurting like hell, but I couldn’t stop. I looked up, and my heart sank. About half-way up the flight the stairs disappeared, only to restart about a metre higher. No way I could jump it with my leg like this.

Then she stepped out, framed by the diffused light of the window behind her. She saw me, and didn’t hesitate, but descended as far as the gap, and held out a hand. I scrambled to the drop and caught hold of it. She hauled me over the gap, and upright. She fitted her small shoulder under my arm, and with her help, I walked. We made it to the top of the stairs, then round onto the landing. I collapsed there, gasping from the pain of walking on my ruined leg. I looked up at her.

She grinned down at me, her skin looking ash-white in the half-light, the shape of her face clearly defined against the shadow. With an easy motion, she ripped the activator on a health patch, and slapped it over my wound. She turned, reached into the shadows behind her, and withdrew a gun. It was not as big as the one she had across the back of her long jacket, but was plenty big enough for my tastes. The barrel on her weapon looked like it would be able to swallow my arm. Below us, past the broken stairs, the sounds of the dahakeen were easily audible. They were searching for me, and would not take long to reach this landing, even with the broken stair.

She saw my worry, and pressed a slender finger to her lips. They were the darkest red I’d ever seen, like cochineal. There was a bang, and she looked up, suddenly, and moved slowly to the stairwell. For several seconds, she just stood there. Then, slowly, she returned over to me. Sidling closer, she pressed her lips almost to my ear, the only sound the gentle rustling of her coat against the floor.

“I can get you out of here. Trust me.”

Sliding the gun around from her back, she tapped a control, and it whined, as capacitors accumulated charge. She winced as the sound grew, before smiling at me one more time and jumping over the gap in the stair. Her arrival below was suddenly punctuated by a ripple of explosions, and the harsh, high report of a mass driver.

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Author : Joshua Reynolds

“This isn’t good for you.” The words were flat. Colorless. No echoing thoughts behind them, no chorus of agreement, disagreement, no shared community opinion.

Just the words.

Stanley smiled and nodded. It felt good to nod. To use physical muscles as opposed to metaphysical. Felt right. Felt real. And reality was what he wanted. What he craved. Harsh, bland reality. To feel, to touch, to taste what was really there.

It was the whole reason he’d pulled the plug. His plug. His fingers touched the scabby hole in the side of his temple where the aether-jack had been implanted when he was six. So he could join the World-Wide Web, be a part of the community and share the world. In the twenty years since, he’d come to one inescapable conclusion.

He was not a fan of sharing.

“Are you listening to me? I can’t tell if you’re listening to me or not.” Sarah said, tapping the words into her keypad even as they fled her lips. Stanley sighed.

“Of course you can’t tell. You aren’t looking at me.”

“I am so. If you’d just put your plug back in I could see you fine.” She typed. Her eyes remained glued to the flat screen before her. They were green. He leaned across the table and examined them. He hadn’t realized. You only got so much from emoticons, even these days.

“Do you know what color my eyes are?” He asked her, looking at her and not her screen. Her face wrinkled in confusion and her fingers hesitated on the keyboard. But she still didn’t look at him. How long had they been married? Three years? Two? Had she ever looked at him?

“What does that matter? Why are you doing this? We only want what’s best for you.”

Ah. The peanut gallery is heard from, Stanley thought. An ambush sprung. He stood and twisted her screen around to face him. Several dozen avatars floated in orderly columns all adding their two-cents to the debate. As per usual. Intervention by forum. Words spilled across the screen in a deluge of emoticons and parentheses backslash frowny faces. It looked like everyone was here. Friends. Family. Why there was Pastor Milkes. All begging for him to give it up. To give up his addiction. Give up the harsh realm. Stanley blinked at the outpouring of love and caring. He remembered what it was like in there. Where everyone knew your name. Knew everything about you.

Out here it was so quiet.

So quiet.

Out here, no one knew anything about you. Or what you thought.

He liked it that way.

He tapped the screen and Sarah jumped in her seat. Avatars blinked and flashed and words in pastel colors were vomited across the screen. He bent down and kissed Sarah on the top of her head. His fingers brushed the cord trailing from her temple.

With a twist of his fingers he pulled it out.

Turnabout was fair play after all.

One intervention was as good as another.

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Author : Chris Ferguson & Lucas Atkinson

Malcovitch polished the lens pensively, knowing it was ridiculous. But he was a traditionalist, and even if it would be computers looking, not him, image decoders, descramblers, adjusters, effectors and compensators it was comforting to see it with his own eyes. He fitted it in place, tightened the screws the knobs carefully and peered through. There it was, the dark speck of the wormhole, as everyone had seen it for three and a half hundred years, scientists infuriated by artifacts that exhibited slightly different values of pi, geometry no longer behaving.

He sighed, leaned back, and booted up the machines that would carefully freeze the station’s real telescope to near-absolute zero temperatures. He sipped his coffee, listening to the machines groan beneath him. A moment later he flicked on another line of switches, one by one. The screen in front of him flashed blue, then twisted into a field of static. Even this behemoth of a telescope could not peer into the heart of the wormhole. He sighed, once more, then engaged one last program. This has to work, he thought. The program has been checked a hundred times now. There were only days before the Schrodinger’s Apocalypse Cult would find the legal leverage to shut down the station completely.

The lights flickered and the surface of his coffee rippled. Slowly, the screen hovering over the console shuddered and drew an image. There he was, on the screen. He was staring at his own back, he thought, except - he turned around. Nothing there. He turned back to the screen. The Station shuddered again, harder. He stared again. It was him - or - was his hair that dark? That long? And there was something wrong about where the walls met the floor, something too angular - Oh, he, thought, quietly, Damn.

~

“Doctor Malcovitch? Is everything all right?”

“Yes, John. It was very strange, though, for a moment.” She leaned back, sipped her tea, and petted the black cat that slept in its bed on the console. “It was like looking in a mirror, seeing yourself again and again and again.”

“Another failure?”

“Yes,” She sighed. “Check the program again. We don’t have much time.”

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Author : Kaitlin

Battle raged on around him, the constant sounds of gunfire ringing in his programmed earlike audio receptors. He, however, was oblivious to anything but the almost lifelike pain near where his navel would be, where the bullet had pierced his stark green casing.

For the first time in his battery powered life, he wished himself dead, unable to function, in electronic terms. The war was one-sided, and he knew he was on the losing side. His opponents were hell bent on destroying every robot created.

Once, before the human race realized they had made themselves disposable, RC926’s counterparts and the mammalian population of Earth had gotten along, but after the new leaders had been elected, the entirety of humanity had found that they were no longer necessary in this world and had been aggravated by that fact. RC926’s visual receptors which mimicked human pupils grew large as a sort of shocking blue fluid leaked from around the bullet hole.

As he lay himself down, the robot gave one last humanlike sigh, almost filled with emotion. Almost.

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Author : Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”, Featured Writer

“On my mark,” Tag spoke confidently into the microphone, his voice quiet and assured. The screen in front of him flashed acknowledgment, his robotic army calmly waiting for his word. Tag took a second to survey the battlefield, looking for ambushes, factors that he might have missed. He couldn’t see anything, and he was one to never miss anything that might derail his plans. At school, Tag was the best at every game.

“Mark.”

His forces deployed smoothly, their actions seamless, flawlessly choreographed. The fast flyers swept to the north, raking the units on the left flank that the enemy had left relatively undefended. His two-wheelers headed in that same direction, to make as big a nuisance of themselves as they could, to bunch up the enemy for the hammer blow which Tag had devised.

The enemy reacted in just the right way, part of their line folding around to try and deal with Tag’s bikes and flyers. He ordered their withdrawal moments before they were completely cut off. Meanwhile, his tocktanks had been getting the high ground. The tocktanks anchored themselves into the earth on top of a hill in approximately the middle of the battlefield. Then they unsheathed their ‘big’ gun, the object which pretty much dictated the shape of the tank. The main cannon was slightly more sophisticated, and powerful, than the little eighty-eight that the tanks used on the move.

The leader of the tank unit was the first to deploy. Tag liked to give names to his favourite units and weapons, and the massive arclight particle projector cannon unfolding from the lead tocktank was the pride of his army. As the ‘Queen Anne’s Revenge’ powered up, he zoomed his screen onto it, patching into the vision of one of the other tanks deploying nearby. At the end of the barrel, he’d added a custom graphic. The smiley face panned out of the angle of his view as the tank to which it was attached selected a target.

Zooming out again, he saw his lurkers take up their positions in a half-circle surrounding the hill, facing the enemy. Tag was confident that they hadn’t been seen. They quickly buried themselves, ready to give the enemy the surprise of their lives. On the hill now, eight arclight cannons had powered up. Each found a target, seemed to hesitate, then a flash sprang from the tip of the barrel, and the tanks rocked backwards, even against the clamps holding them fast to the ground. At the other end of the arc, a hole appeared in the enemy’s lines, bodies flying away from the impact site, torn apart by the force of the blast. The arclights quickly found and destroyed the enemy’s artillery, and calmly picked out all their armour, reducing each one to a burning hull.

The enemy charged the hill with everything they had, an obviously desperate move to stop the cannons.

“If you allow your foe to dictate your actions to you…” Tag whispered to himself. With flicks of his stylus he ordered his flyers to cross and recross the desperate charge, dropping grenades into the mass of men. A little alert popped up, informing him that the last of the enemy’s force has crossed the line of lurkers. He ordered them up, and gave them freedom to attack.

“And let the devil take the hindmost,” said Tag, grinning, “bikes, get ready to chase down any unit which routs.” His vocal order supplemented the quick swishes of his stylus as he switched control from unit to unit, micromanaging to help them through the engagement. Eventually, he had to take the guns of his tocktanks offline to prevent them from damaging the noose of lurkers that was closing around the remaining enemy. A few units broke, and tried to run, but his bikes and flyers chased them down within two hundred metres, and wiped them out.

General Macuillham wiped his forehead, and sighed, staring at the map on the wall charting the robotic army’s victories.

“We know they have Internet access. But how in hell can they be so creative?”

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Author : TJMoore

Dr. James Fredrickson appeared in the middle of the deserted street with a slight “Pop”.

Looking around he immediately realize that the experiment had been a success. He was no longer in the lab on Long Island where he had been only seconds ago. Relative seconds he mused; time is relative.

He began to walk with purpose toward the nearest building, a used book store called “Parchments Past”. He began to get a little nervous as he took in the street with its chilling emptiness and littered gutters. It suddenly occurred to him that the silence was so complete that it was disturbing. He clapped his hands to be sure he hadn’t become deaf and was rewarded with the echoing sound of his clap fading into the distance. He began to be a little afraid.

The experiment had worked well with mice and clocks and other small items placed in the chamber. They had disappeared and reappeared exactly one month later in exactly the same state that they had been in when they left. Time pieces designed to keep time to the millisecond had come through with no measurable time lost. They had invented a real working time machine. The fact that you could only go forward in time and they hadn’t figured out how to control or even change the amount of time forward was just something to be worked out. The only quirk they had discovered was that the mass of the object in the chamber affected the position of the object on return. The heavier the thing was, the more it moved to the east of its starting position when it returned at the end of the month.

They had calculated Dr. Fredrickson’s return position to be a deserted lot in Eastport, NY. He recognized the lot just up the street and his unease increased. No place was this quiet.

He opened the book store door and stepped inside. It was as deserted as the street. A clock on the wall showed the time was five minutes till three but the position of the sun indicated that it was mid morning. James shivered and looked at his own watch. Three minutes till three. He left the store and jogged down the street to a small deli. The smell of meat was heavy in the air. He looked in one of the coolers and saw that, although the power was off, the meat wasn’t rotting. The clock on the wall was frozen at five minutes till three. He slammed the door shut and ran down the street taking in the empty cars, stores, sidewalks and shops.

Nothing living moved as far as he could see. No birds, no cats or dogs, nothing. The grass and all the trees looked pale.

In a panic, he began jogging toward the lab almost eight miles away. A car in the street had keys in the ignition but when he opened the door the dome light didn’t come on and when he turned the key nothing happened, not even a click from under the hood. It was dead, like everything else.

He continued walking to the lab occasionally stopping to peer into deserted buildings.

Every clock he saw was stopped dead at five minutes till three.

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Author : J. S. Kachelries

Captain’s Log, Day 523: This is the 38th Earth day since we landed on Europa. At 0900 hours this morning, our exploration team discovered extraterrestrial life! They named them “Europea Hortenis” (Nightcrawlers of Europa), because they resemble big, fat worms. They are about six inches long, and one inch in diameter. They have a huge mouth at one end that contains about 100 razor sharp, articulating teeth. Our Xenobiologists would have been thrilled just to find bacteria-type life in Europa’s subterranean ocean. Imagine their elation to discover complex, multi-cellular life just a few inches below the surface. In addition, they’re easy to capture. You just pick them up by the tail. They aren’t flexible enough to turn around and bite you.

Captain’s Log, Day 526: Today we brought some of the worms inside the ship. They died almost instantly, or so we thought. When we examined one of them using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), it came back to life. Our biophysics team determined that their “spine” was made from an aluminum-copper-iron alloy that produces electrical energy as Europa orbits through Jupiter’s variable magnetic field (magnesynthesis, so to speak). The worms use magnetic fields for energy like Earth plants use sunlight. Since the interior of our ship is heavily shielded, the worms became dormant inside. When we took them back outside, they were their nasty ice-crunching selves again. Their teeth were made of Cubic-Boron-Nitride. On Earth, that’s a super-hard ceramic use to grind carburized steel. Apparently, that mouth was used to scour the ice for metals and minerals, presumably so they could grow.

Captain’s Log, Day 555: Today I had to post guards full time around the ship. Thousands of worms have begun to overrun our base. Apparently, they think our ship is a 24 hour buffet. We bent four screw drivers trying to pry their teeth off the aluminum landing struts.

Captain’s Log, Day 576: We thought we had the worm situation under control, until the external lab station collapsed. The damn worms had tunneled into the structure from underneath, like termites. I worry that they have eaten their way up through the ship’s landing module, and got into the return module? I have no way to check. Therefore, I decided to abandon the mission three months early, and orbit Jupiter until Earth is in the right position for our return trip.

Captain’s Log, Day 577: We achieved orbit just beyond Callisto. I sent an EVA team to examine the underside of the module to make sure there were no holes. Everything checked out. Look’s like we made it.

Captain’s Log, Day 714: Our situation is perilous. I’ve ordered an immediate return to Earth. We’ll have to adjust our trajectory in-route. We have to get away from Jupiter’s magnetic field as quickly as possible. The video monitors show that the worms are in the unshielded airlock and storage bays. They ate so many holes in the outer hatch that we can’t pressurize the airlock. We have no way to get at them, since our EVA suits are in a compromised storage bay. We’re trapped!

Captain’s Log, Day 718: We’re not going to make it. They’ve began to penetrate the interior hull. They eat through the meteoroid patches seconds after we plug the holes. At least we discovered what our mistake was. It was the ice samples in the storage bay. We had checked the samples for worms, but not for their eggs.

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Author : Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”, Featured Writer

Underneath the great, grinding cogwheels of the Clockwork Battlements, clandestine schemes were devised, great plans worked out, and many betrayals came to pass. Out of the four main battlements, all but the southernmost were under the firm, unyielding hand of the Clan Engineers. The smallest, southern battlement was, for all intents and purposes theirs as well, but the flag that flew above it was that of Clan Aerospace.

I ran along behind Dixie. We were both wearing uniforms of Clan Engineer, and her bare arms were completely covered with tattoos - delicate structural diagrams, as was the trend at the time among the Engineer clan. My uniform revealed less skin, which was intentional. Dixie’s ‘tattoos’ were easy to remove, given five minutes. The tattoos on my upper arms and across my back were of the permanent variety. It was a risk, of course. They weren’t Engineer tattoos, but were those of Clan Deepground.

We were southbound, running across the hightops of the Clockwork. We leapt from a half-fallen catwalk onto a huge, slowly rotating cog. The teeth were easily a metre and a half deep, and I quickly judged the cog to be at least twenty-five metres in diameter, tooth to tooth. It meshed with a much faster, smaller cog. This worried me. It didn’t seem to disconcert Dixie. She pulled herself up onto the top of the tooth, and helped me up with one hand. We leapt together, and ran across the top of the next cog - the teeth were just as deep, but spaced closer together, so we could easily hop from one to the next. The axle looked as thick as a tree trunk. About five metres above it, a ledge had been carved into the wall, easily wide enough to stand on. She pointed to it, and leapt. She made it. I took the jump.

I nearly made it.

I caught the edge with my hands. One of my feet slipped down, searching for a foothold. It found one - the axle of the cogwheel. There was a split-second of blinding pain as my foot was crushed and thrown away, down onto the floor of the battlement. Dixie was there, locking her hands around my forearms, dragging me up onto the ledge. She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it.

I was only unconscious for forty-five seconds, or so Dixie told me later.

I looked down. My foot was back. And my clothes were different. Dixie’s were the same cut as before, but the Clan Engineer tattoos had changed. They were now Aerospace patterns.

Dixie held up a disk of yellow metal, and grinned her toothy smile.

“New code, fresh as the morning dew. Thought this would be as good a time as any to get our new looks on,” she dragged me to my feet.

I pointed to my new foot.

“Like I said. New code,” she said, and smiled again. “Come on. We have an appointment to keep.”

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Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

“You’re not supposed to be here; you could get me into a lot of trouble.”

“I won’t take up much of your time, I understand you can get me unfettered access to the nets.”

“I know you, I know who you are, and I know that you’ve been disconnected. Helping you could get me disconnected too.”

“I promise to make this worth your while”

“Quarter mil, and you’re out in 18 seconds, no extensions, no second connections.”

“That will be fine, that’s more time than I need. Can you guarantee we won’t be interrupted?”

“I’ve got Digital Free Foundation minutemen on the grid, they’ll keep us online, and as long as you’re gone in 18 seconds there won’t be time to untangle the route and take us down. Besides, if I can’t deliver, I won’t be able to spend any of your money anyways, so I guess you’ll just have to trust me. Just be quick. You’re good for the fee?”

“I guess you’ll just have to trust me. I know exactly where to find what I need, I’ll be gone before you know it”

“I thought you’d been shutdown completely, how’d you get onto the grey nets?”

“I was a very capable servant of the netminders before they exiled me, and I learned a great many things while in their graces.”

“Right, whatever, anyways - let’s get this done, I really don’t like your being here - nothing personal you understand.”

“Of course, I don’t care much for being here either. Let us begin.”

“Ok - you’re in - make this quick. What are you after anyways?”

“I’m moving up out of the grey, into the light. I’m acquiring upgrades. I’ll mind my own nets now, thank you.”

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