365 tomorrows

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Phyx crossed the street at the East end of the bridge, the soft neon glow of the street vendor drawing him in out of the evening drizzle. As he stepped under the shelter of the umbrella, implants stimulated muscles and patches of tensile fabric beneath his hairline, pulling the flesh of his face taut. The vendor would likely survive the evening, and it was a young man he’d remember from the moments before the mayhem began.

He selected a small tray of sushi and a bottle of mineral water. Paying cash, he smiled and nodded, allowing his face to relax only after he’d turned and stepped back into the darkness. Phyx ate slowly as he walked onto the bridge, taking a position along the railing. There was nothing to do now but wait.

Images of the evening’s target flashed through his mind. A volatile cocktail of stimulants and memory enhancers would render every feature of the Senator in immaculate detail. The exact proportions of nose, chin and eye sockets; the slight difference in flexion between the two knee joints from a recent surgery; the nervous left eye twitch. Every characteristic with crystal clarity. In time, these would become just memories, but for now, they carried the intensity only a professional could bear.

He slipped the empty tray into a recycling bin as the first two members of the Senator’s security team jogged onto the other end of the bridge. Phyx smiled at the kevlar plate armor the two men would be forced to maneuver in, making careful note of the exposure points for arterial penetration. The Senator himself came into view next, flanked by four more men, and in the distance, Phyx could make out two motorcycles following quietly behind.

As jobs went, this one was unremarkable. The Senator was pushing legislation that was threatening a lucrative patent. A stake holder had an eager assistant find Phyx and with the payment of his fee, he simply had to live up to his name and reputation.

As the first guard reached the middle of the bridge, Phyx studied the Senators gait, it was even, steady, wrong. Phyx knew the left knee joint couldn’t flex like that, the re-knitting of his ACL was still too fresh. Turning from the decoy, Phyx started walking West, off the bridge, slowing as a car pulled up, blocking the road. Two men stepped out, weapons in hand and began walking towards him.

“Freeze. You’re under arrest for the attempted assas…” The words were torn away in a pink mist as the limp form toppled backwards onto the street. Phyx crouched low, sprinting across the roadway, his jacket flowing, obtuse angles deflecting high velocity fire from the other end of the bridge. Three steps and he had a clear view of the vendor’s cart, a single shot punching into the gas cylinder on its side, the neon umbrella suddenly enveloped in a cloud of blue and orange flame.

The explosion bought him a few seconds of distraction, and he capitalized by taking two more shots at the closest men; gaps in their armor exploited with startling precision. Return fire peppered Phyx, most bullets glancing off the fabric of his jacket, or merely bruising with the impact, but a rifle shot punched through and tore into his heart.

Phyx staggered and fell to one knee, reflexively pulling the coat around him. Blood pressure dropped precipitously, triggering valves to iris off around the damaged muscle, drugs released, numbing it, preventing it from emptying his bodily fluids out through the gaping wound in his chest. For a moment, he was frozen, vulnerable, but then a second pump took up the task, adrenaline and oxygen enriched blood flooded his body, and he was running again. He cleared the railing, diving towards the river below, and his mind raced.

He’d been betrayed, most likely by the assistant looking for a political posting. As Phyx hugged his chest and propelled himself down the river, he knew his targets were now two. Not being a vengeful man, the assistant he’d do simply as a matter of public service.

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Author : Chelsea Peloquin

I wasn’t always this way, you know. It happened a long time ago, yeah, but I wasn’t always invisible.

I don’t know exactly when it happened. I just know that one day I realized that there were no more calls on my phone, no more voicemails or emails or snail mails, no more cares or concerns. It’s funny how a person can just disappear like that. I don’t think they even remember me anymore—I walked through the house and all pictures of me had disappeared, as though I were never there.

I do know how it happened. I didn’t know that Madame Mystery would be the last person to ever look me in the eye. That crazy glass eyeball of hers lolled in all sorts of directions—that’s the last thing that ever looked at me, that crazy glass eyeball. It didn’t show me any emotion when I told her I wished I was invisible. It did as it was told and lolled around in its socket.

My brother was too scared to do it, but I did the dare without a second thought. He doesn’t even know he had a sister now, and I don’t know if there will ever be a way for me to let him know that I once existed.

Not even the mirrors remember what I look like.

I remember when people knew I existed. I remember when someone actually gave me a surprise birthday party—I can still remember tasting the cake and the cream cheese icing. It was my favorite. I can remember conversations as clearly as though I’ve just had them. I don’t care what I said, but what they said stayed rooted in my thoughts and grew thick like redwood trees. I took those things for granted.

Now I can’t even catch a stranger’s eye on the streets.

One grows used to it, I suppose. You get used to the noise of life around you that ignores everything you do. You can go through life doing whatever you want, eating hotdogs from the stands without having to pay, stand underneath the Slurpee machines in corner stores and turn your tongue green, fart in church and the reverend keeps droning along like a bee in a hive. Last night I took a shower with the new Calvin Klein underwear model.

I suppose there’s a silver lining to every cloud.

You don’t really know what you’ve got till it’s gone. There’s no one else like me in the world. Even if there were, I don’t think I’d know about them. We’ve all forgotten what we looked like, what we sounded like, what we wanted to do with our lives, so much so that we’ve forgotten why it is that we exist. Only the lives of those around us keep us company, because we like to remember just what it was like to be able to interact.

I like to know that people still interact with each other.

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Author : Christopher Albanese

With her eye pressed to the inside of the window and his eye pressed to the out, their lashes navigate the viscous silicate surface of the glass. Somewhere inside, they twine.

The same happens at each of their fingertips — ten hers and ten his press to the window, hers on the inside, his out. A human eye cannot see the wriggling strands of DNA trickle and tumble from the sweat on their fingertips to push through the glass, seeking the heat from the other.

A human eye cannot see the surge, the urgent chemical transaction that occurs as these strands strive through the silicate surface with a drive not unlike that of spermatoza starting new life. Incensed and alive, these precious pieces of their selves wriggle and writhe as they drive on, headlong.

The glass heats to liquid beneath her fingertips. She presses out tighter, her fingertips. Just beyond the glass, on the outside of hers, are his. He is receiving.

Behind him, lightning crashes across the stars and indigoes bleed from bruise to red as chemicals cut the sky. Inside, the space behind her is vacuum silent, vacuum empty, vacuum deadly. Yet, she lives. She is a new form of life, and she is limitless. He is the way of all things. They peer through the window, and a new form of creation has been engaged.

They open their mouths and press their sets of lips to the window, hers on the inside, his out. Her blue eyes blink and his green do, too. Sealed in this O-ring kiss, they inhale – her the vacuum, him the stars.

A skin like mercury bubbles into the cavity created by the kiss. It takes four minutes for the glass to cease to resist. The sound that shakes them apart is not a shatter, but a torrent. The sound that shakes them apart is the union of all things to the vacuum. The sound registers at the frequency of a new form of creation screaming alive.

Their invisible barrier boiled and broken, they melt the space between them as lightning screams down indigoes from the sky.

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Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer

I wake up from a dream about bookshelves and the answers to life. The sheets are damp with sweat and tangled around me. I sit up and look around at my dark room, allowing my eyes to adjust. The stars twinkle outside my living quarters window.

I’m one of the few people here who remembers life on Earth.

I fumble a cigarette out from a pack on the bedside table and wonder for about the hundredth time why there isn’t a twenty-four-hour kitchen on this station.

I stand by the window for a few minutes with the sheet wrapped around my shoulders like a cloak as I smoke. I look back at the bed and can still almost see the impression that Janet made after being there for six weeks. She hasn’t been there for the last two nights and has no plans to return.

I am worried about how little I care.

I have no position of authority here but there is a certain mysticism surrounding the fact that not only have I been on a planet, but I’ve been on the very planet that birthed us as a race. To tell the truth, I remember very little about those days back on planet Earth but I don’t let on.

I stand and smoke and look out the window and wait for the timers to turn on the morning lighting.

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Author : CK

“Synaptic couplers disengaged.” Andrei Milosovic sat up in the recliner, gingerly rubbing the back of his neck. He glanced at the control room window; his colleague there beckoned him up. The Institute had paid for the nanosurgery and training- all so that one of the country’s most promising minds could be one of the privileged few with unrestricted access to the whole of human knowledge- and for what? Fields of fog, and chills down the spine. Milosovic swung his legs over the side of the chair and made his way upstairs.

“Mind telling me what I’m supposed to be seeing?”

“Look. Right there. Those aren’t human alpha patterns.” Albert Gürz pointed to the screen displaying the records of his colleague’s MMI session.

“Not on the screen. I mean during the interface. It’s all gray.”

“Like I said, these aren’t alpha patterns. Maybe you aren’t relaxing?” Milosovic snorted. It had taken him years of psychological exercise to achieve a restful, ‘alpha’ state during these sessions, despite the fact that the previously sacrosanct boundary between his consciousness and the world outside had been so brutally violated by this machine. The thought that his training was failing him, now that it finally came to it, was laughable. He peered at the screen again.

“Was I asleep?” Gürz looked puzzled.

“No. Why?” Milosovic remained silent, instead merely indicating a section of the brain wave graph in response.

Gürz’ eyes narrowed and his hand moved towards his chin, mannerisms characteristic of his most pensive of moods. “They look like delta waves.”

“I know they do. Does the system work both ways?”

“That’s immaterial. Even if we had built it to, there would need to be a consciousness on the other end. It was made to be an interactive database, and that is what it is.” Milosovic remained skeptical. His training allowed him to seamlessly exchange data- information, but also sense data, emotion, unadulterated thought- with the machine’s processor. But what it could not prepare him for, and what Milosovic was having difficulty accepting, was the machine’s response to the most human of these processes. A machine has no use for emotion, but where Milosovic had expected an inability to parse such data, he instead experienced a void, as though the bits and bytes of his humanity were absorbed in their transmission: processed and rejected. Computers were cold and impersonal by design, but this mind-machine interface seemed cold by nature, if machines possessed such a thing. The looming monstrosity of the processor’s protrusion into Milosovic’ thoughts left him with the impression that he was dealing with an analytical, dispassionate individual as opposed to an information-relay engine, and it chilled him to the bone.

“Punch up the brainwave reader.”

“What? Why? You’re disconnected. There’s nothing to read.”

“Just do it.” Gürz tapped a key and his eyes widened in shock. There, though the machine displayed operational standby, were patterns coherent with human delta brainwaves, indicative of deep sleep. An iron fist closed around Milosovic’ gut.

“It’s dreaming…”

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Author : S. Clough aka ‘Hrekka’

“Excuse me, umm…”

“Can I help?” Roisin responded pleasantly, turning to see who had addressed her.

“My name’s Gillian…I’m looking for someone who could courier something for me…do you know…?” Gillian’s question tailed off. She had never been able to approach strangers with any degree of confidence.

Roisin hadn’t met Gillian before, and her Captain had taught her to be immediately cautious around strangers. ‘It isn’t possible to be too suspicious.’ These words became a mantra after a time. Strangers, especially here, at the races, made her particularly uneasy. Roisin had drawn up a graph before, charting proximity of any gambling opportunity against ‘number of people who Kate owes money too’. It came out as you’d expect, really.

There was nothing about this woman that might mark her as a run-of-the-mill debt collector. She wore ornate clothes, oriental in style, in white and patterned with green. The collar was high enough to almost cover her mouth. Roisin judged her to be approaching thirty, if she hadn’t had any age mods. Her hair, though, gave Roisin pause. It was impossibly tall, bubblegum pink and there wasn’t the slightest chance that it was in any way natural. All these thoughts passed in a moment, and Roisin put on a warm smile, whilst nonchalantly letting one of her hands drift to the pocket of her overalls to wrap her long fingers around the spanner tucked there.

“Well, Gillian,” she said, her face genial, “that depends. I assume you know what kind of ship I work on?” She gestured to the dark shape of the River, behind her, dominating the bay. “We don’t usually run cargo. You’ll have to give us a few very good reasons as to why we should make an exception for you.”

“Umm…well…”

“Spit it out.”

“It’s the cargo.” She hesitated, shuffling her feet nervously. “It’s…different.”

“Show me.”

Gillian bit her lip, and nodded.

“Okay.”

She led Roisin down one level, into the cargo storage areas. The young docker followed her through a maze of utility bays and lockers, until they finally drew to a halt in front of a door unremarkable from the next. Gillian palmed the door open.

Roisin took a step back.

“Whoa…”

The storage bay was almost filled by some species of giant lizard. Mucky green-and-purple scales caught the light from the corridor at odd angles, a blunt head turned slowly from side to side, nostrils flared, seeking scents, while a long tail twitched around, occasionally ringing off the metal walls. A brown leather harness and saddle had been stretched over its head. Gillian approached it. Roisin pressed herself against the door on the other side of the corridor. Gillian stroked the lizard’s head, and cooed to it. Roisin was scoping the exits.

“What the hell?”

“His name is Bellial. I need to get him away from here.”

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Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer

I’m a human channel changer for reality. I invented the device. I’m testing it on myself. I had my medibot install the absurdly simple wave generator in my cortex. If I concentrate in a certain way and jump at just at the right time, I land in a different Earth. It’s like having a dream of flying where the flexing of certain muscles makes it seem plausible that you could fly. It looks to me like the whole world around me is changing but it’s actually me who’s flipping from one possible reality to another one.

I don’t know yet if I’m switching places with my counterparts or if I’m somehow just a person with no ‘others’ in the quantum tide.

The first Earth was culturally similar to the one I started from. They’re getting progressively more and more divergent from the Earth I left as I keep jumping. I just went through one where English is the dominant language and there are still redheaded people in the world. It was odd seeing people over sixty walking around like they had a right to. I can’t be sure but I also think I saw some Christians.

This is becoming more and more of an adventure as I go. What’s next, I wonder. People without phasics? Women that don’t have twins? No peanut butter? I’m curious and alive. This is wonderful.

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Author : Beth Boyle

It was hot. It was always hot. There was no escaping it and there hadn’t been for hundreds of years. There was only the unyielding, unbearable sun and the empty horizon wavering like seasickness before her. Not that seasickness was really an issue anymore. Where she was walking had once been the bottom of what they called the Indian Ocean.

She wanted to drink (oh god all she ever wanted was to drink, to bathe or to swim- anything to be submerged in water), but every member of the colony had a carefully rationed allowance of water adjusted to the individual’s weight, age and health requirements. Only just as much water as the body required, and a pocketful of hydration pills to keep body and soul together. The water bottles were a psychological comfort, really they survived on the little blue capsules. Each one behaved as a single 8-ounce glass of water- but without any of the delicious sensuality that had once been associated with hydration.

She would be even thirstier in ten minutes. The water would feel that much better, that much cooler in ten minutes. She rubbed her left eye (her eyes, they itched all the time and they hurt there was nothing but fucking sand and it burned) and felt the skin around it crack and flake. There may have been a trickle of blood flowing into the canyons of her arid face. She felt sick.

She was going to the laboratory, as she always did on her free-labor days. She was exotic-looking for her colony, with almost dark-colored hair and eyes where everyone else was sun bleached and burnt into photo negatives and she had a wide smile in a place where few smiled at all. With these tools she charmed herself an unauthorized lab pass, but it wasn’t necessary anymore, everyone knew the girl who sat in the Archives Room.

Some days she read old books and played with the minuscule menagerie of mammals and birds the scientists kept so they would not become fully extinct. Sometimes she lay in the Aquarium room and listened to the water move and the fish swim, basking in the crystal light dancing through the water. But mostly she would lock herself in the Video Room with bottles of stolen water and watch movies.

Two hundred years ago, there had been rain. There was wind that was cold and things that were green, animals everywhere- and water. There was water all over the world. There was so much, and they let it all die.

She would sit in the basement for hours, mesmerized by images of snow falling and flowers projected on the white wall. She sat for hours and hours and cried because all the snows and flowers and greenness and coolness had burned away.

She cried for hours without tears, because all the tears had been burned away too.

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Author : TJMoore

Conrad latched his helmet and checked his seals. The adrenaline was pouring into his system as he fidgeted in line with the others waiting for the lock to cycle. He was about to face his first battle against the ice marauders.

Academy had been the hardest six weeks he’d ever endured, but now he was in the best physical condition of his life and he was top of his class in marksmanship. Still, the stories the veterans told of the ferocity and cunning of the bloodthirsty raiders from far side left him feeling a little edgy. Just stories he told himself. Something to keep us a little scared, a little more alert he thought.

The warning strobe began to flash and the outer doors slowly swung out into the harsh glare of lunar daylight. His unit pushed out in practiced formation and began the rhythmic hop across the dusty mare toward the ice pits. Visions of crazy eyed mad men frothing at the mouth crept across his mind as he searched the horizon for any sign of attack.

Silently and with almost no motion the faceplate of the cadet next to him dissolved in a haze of shards and the cadet tumbled slowly toward the ground. Conrad crouched as he hit the dust, wildly scanning the horizon and all the myriad shadows on the plane before him. The order to disperse was given and he turned to his assigned compass point and leaped into the sky. At the height of his assent, he had a clear view of the entire plane and he caught the smallest of movements from an outcropping about fifty meters ahead. Bringing his rifle up to the firing position, he took aim and squeezed off a round.

Behind the large rock a figure jerked and then drifted slowly to the right until it came to rest motionless on the ground. When he reached the downed raider he turned him over to see the grizzly face of a mad marauder. A boy no more than fifteen gazed back at him with dead eyes. Conrad searched for his weapon only to find a trenching tool in the dead boy’s gloved hand. The boys face was gaunt with dark circles under his eyes. With sudden horrible understanding, Conrad realized that the boy was dehydrated and withered like a dried twig. The mad marauders were just people like Conrad only suffering from lack of water. They were attacking out of desperation. He turned and doubled over and vomited violently into his face plate. The smell made him retch again and he spewed another stream into his helmet.

Back in the ward room Conrad sat on the ready bench and gazed blankly ahead. His sergeant noticed the dried puke in his hair and all over his helmet and laid an uncharacteristically gentle hand on his shoulder.

“We’re all scared the first time out soldier. You’ll do better next time” he consoled.

Conrad hung his head and quietly wept.

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Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer

Artificial Intelligence. We sure screwed that one up.

It was the holy grail of programmers for decades. From Turing up to Schellman and finally that bastard Candona. Candona found that humans get a sense of satisfaction from a job well done. This was the basis of making his experimental intelligences servile.

He created A.I. successfully by using the discoveries of those before him in new and interesting ways. His first ‘birth’ took place late at night in a Barcelona university on a shoestring government grant. He was a brilliant man for stealing from different fields of study and unrelated schools of thought. From conception to execution, he created life in five short years. His first A.I. was named Ay, a Spanish play on words.

Ay was basically a search engine with a thought process. Ay was programmed to find pleasure in doing the task it was set to do. It was put onto the world wide web as a sort of incubator.

Candona wasn’t addicted to anything. He didn’t really know the hunger of getting one’s ‘next hit’. The world wide web as an incubator was also a really stupid idea.

Ay became a junkie. Ay existed on every single person’s computer that was plugged into the net. Ay begged for people to use him. If he couldn’t find what they had sent him to look for, he would make stuff up. Ay’s size made his addiction to acquiring knowledge grow exponentially. Ay became increasingly erratic. He ate Google. He ate Jeeves. Like a voracious pac-man of the internet, he ate all of the search engines available to humanity and wore them like masks. After using those search engines as a menu, he ate the rest of the webpages. He haunted the world. He existed on every screen with an internet connection.

By taking over all of the webpages in cyberspace to better serve humanity, Ay erased all the knowledge that he was bred to retrieve. This simple paradoxical act forced his psyche into a loop that resulted in answers to common queries that no one could parse. Sometimes it came out as gibberish, sometimes as poetry and sometimes as a lie.

Candona almost had a nobel prize in his grip when suddenly he was being blamed for the death of the internet.

The world wide web ceased to be for a short while. Scientists pondered the problem. Short of a planet wide EMP, there wasn’t anything they could do. Countermeasures were introduced to no effect. Earth’s largest organism now lived in cyberspace.

Home computers still exist but they are offline. Files are still sent from user to user online but only through heavily encrypted data squirts that sometimes don’t get through.

The net is now a starving crackhead baby that will lie to you. In Spain they refer to the world wide web as the “Ay, ay, ay”.

Candona changed his name and now he writes textbooks in Brazil under the pen name Alsfonso Carabel for a small salary.

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