365 tomorrows

Author : J.R.Blackwell, Staff Writer

The Sisters of Light arrived for my mother when I was eleven years old. Their robes flashed like light in a storm, shifting and unexpected. My mother welcomed them into our home. She knew why they were there but she acted like it was just a social call, smiling like they were old friends.

My mother had been a devotee of the order when she was a girl. Many proper young women became devotees before the war. Mother said that in her time, girls could leave just before they took the Oaths, before they would be sealed into service, the claws embedded in their skulls. Her parents thought that she could secure a good marriage coming from the Order, and they made great financial sacrifices for her proper upbringing. She got her good marriage, not to a wealthy man, but to a noble one. Then the war broke out and the Sisters sought old devotees for service.

Getting out of service was easy for folk that had money, that could pay the tithe towards the war effort that ensured members of the family could stay home. Father and mother hadn’t been able to pay the tithe to the government that year. They had lived on a blank hope that no one in our family would get chosen by the lottery for service. My father told me that it hadn’t been the first year they weren’t able to make tithe, but it was the only one I remember.

Two Sisters came into my home that day. Overkill. It was more than enough to convince us. One would have sufficed, a young disciple would be enough to make it known that my mother was to come, but they wanted to make a point, they wanted the family, the neighborhood to understand the price.

My mother served them tea they did not drink and gathered a pack of possessions she knew would be stripped from her in days. She called sister and I to her and hugged us. She gripped my shoulder so hard I thought I would cry. She said it wouldn’t be long before she came home again and not to worry. After ten minutes, the Sisters announced in their one, hard voice that they would be leaving now. My mother held my fathers hand until she was out the door. My father clasped the empty air, his hand opening and closing, watching the ship of the Sisters depart.

Two weeks later the Sisters sent a letter inviting my sister to come to school. My father burned the letter in front of us. We watched it smolder in the bathtub, the paper curling and glowing till it turned to cinders.

“If I went, do you think I would see mom?” asked my sister.

“No.” I said “I don’t think we’ll see mom again for a long time.” I didn’t tell her that we might never see mum again, that she might die in the war. Nobility can’t be drafted, but my mother wasn’t nobility. She had just married nobility.

When I was old enough, I applied to military school. When I entered service, my family could petition the government to return mother. My father begged me not to go. He hit me for the first time when I told him my mind couldn’t be changed. It took him a day, after I left, to petition the government for my mother. They returned her after I had served a year, after I was committed fully and her mind was gone.

They gave my family back an empty shell.

Author : Viktor Kuprin

October 30, 1961 – Five aircraft rose into the arctic sky from the Olyena airbase, headed northeast over the Barents Sea, towards the frozen wastes of Novaya Zemlya Island. The largest plane, a roaring turboprop Bear bomber, carried Vanya. The most beautiful, a silvery Tupolev-16 loaded with cameras and recording devices, followed the Bear. Americans called the Tu-16 “Badger”. Its Russian aircrew knew it simply as “Tupol.”

Inside the Tupol’s teardrop-shaped observation domes, Instrument Operators Pakulin and Kuchevsky tended their equipment and counted the minutes.

“Did you notice Pilot-Commander Strukov?” said Pakulin.

Kuchevsky nodded. “He wasn’t quite his giddy self, was he? An improvement, if you ask me. I think he’s looking forward to meeting Vanya.”

Pakulin stared out towards the blue sky and ice-strewn sea beyond the dome’s plexiglass. “Who isn’t?”

Strukov’s voice came over the intercom. “Attention. Approaching Zone C. Make all instruments ready,” he ordered.

“Da, Comrade Commander,” both men replied. The well-practiced sequence of toggling switches and closing circuits began. Pakulin could feel his heavy SMENA cine-camera hum as its film came up to speed. Kuchevsky prepared to trigger the banks of stop-motion cameras.

The Badger tracked north over the sea, while the Bear carried Vanya inland across the Sukhoi Nos, the “Dry Nose” Peninsula. Inside other aircraft, within bunkers and fortifications, behind walls of stone and rock, thousands waited for Vanya.

“Mark! Everyone, goggles on!” Strukov shouted. Miles away, Vanya fell free from the Bear bomber. The huge plane turned back toward the sea in a dash to safety. From Vanya’s flanks emerged a 54,000-square-foot parachute, to slow the descent enough so that the Bear would not be sacrificed.

Strukov counted down: “Pyat. Chetíreh. Tree. Dva. Odeen. NOL!”

Thirteen-thousand feet above the icy, stony plain, the largest thermonuclear device in the history of the world exploded. Four-thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima, the triple-layer fission-fusion-fusion reaction created a fireball over four miles in diameter. The flash of white light was visible 1600 miles away.

For Pakulin and Kuchevsky, for all aboard the Badger, it was the light from hell that would not stop. The entire horizon was a blinding wall of white heat.

The shock wave threw Pakulin forward, his oxygen mask smashing against the plexiglass dome. Spitting blood, vision blurred, he heard Kuchevsky screaming and felt the man’s hands slapping.

“Fire! I’m burning! Help me!”

The acintic glare of electricity arced from the floor. Pukulin instinctively kicked at the loose cables, his boots pushing them apart. He yanked a fire-extinguisher off the cabin wall, aiming its white spray at the wires and Kuchevsky’s still-smoking pant legs.

Kuchevsky sobbed, pointing toward the mushroom cloud risen seven times higher than Mount Everest.

“Look! They’ve killed the world!”

And yet, despite the nuclear scars inflicted by Vanya, remembered afterwards as the “Tsar Bomba,” life on Earth carried on.

But as the world healed, the bomb’s powerful X-ray pulse raced across the depths of space. Forty-six years later, in the star system called 26 Draconis, someone took notice.

Author : Lirael

“What’s your name?”

“Butterfly. Butterfly Phoenix.”

“Well, that’s a stupid name.”

Butterfly heard that a lot. Being only five years old, she took the insults rather well. She never even thought to change her name. She loved it. Her mother told her that her Daddy, a famous airship pilot, had given it to her when she was born, and that he’d renamed his ship just for her. Butterfly often saw her father on the television and in the newspapers, standing proudly next to his ship, the Butterfly.

Captain Phoenix ran one of the most successful trade companies on the planet, and stood at the head of an entire fleet of airships. The money poured into his accounts, and his personal accountants divided up the profits.

Being five, Butterfly wasn’t interested in the money or politics of her father’s company. Those were grown-up things. Instead, Butterfly liked to watch her father’s ships on screen. Seeing the beautiful colours of the decorated sails that they used, the flags, and the bright, shimmering designs painted across their hulls gave her a sense of pride.

The pilots and crews were always immaculate in uniforms of different colours, each individual to their ship. Those ships were her inspiration. Butterfly spoke of nothing else. Her mother, a patient, gentle woman, did her best to interest Butterfly in things more appropriate for her age and gender, but she simply refused. For her last birthday, Captain Phoenix had given her a small model of the Butterfly, and today, she had brought it to school. She’d been thrilled when someone noticed it.

“I want to fly one of my daddy’s ships someday. See, this is the one he flies now. It’s named after me.”

“I know that ship. It’s on my daddy’s plasma all the time. Captain Phoenix is the greatest airship pilot in the world!”

“I know! He gave me this ship for my birthday.”

“He did not!”

“Did too!”

“Let me see it, then!” By now, a crowd had clustered around Butterfly, and the dark-eyed boy who had approached her. Butterfly shook her head, her black hair swinging back and forth over her shoulders.

“No, I’m not allowed to let anyone else touch it.” She turned away to shield her prize, and the boy gave her a push.

“Let me see!”

“No!” Butterfly stepped back, and squared herself. The boy pushed her again, but Butterfly didn’t move. She held her ship in one hand, and balled the other into a fist. “You leave me alone, or else!”

“Shut your mouth, Butterfly! If you won’t let me see your stupid ship, I’ll just take it!” The boy lunged at Butterfly, and reached for her ship. Shocked at his boldness, she stumbled, and he took hold of her model, ripping it from her hands. One of the flags broke off, and clattered to the playground pavement.

“You broke it!”

“Hah, this piece of junk was going to fall apart anyway!” Lifting it over his head, the boy hurled Butterfly’s ship as far away as he could. It smashed into the ground, and shattered. Butterfly felt a lump form in her throat, and her eyes burned with tears. Without thinking, she took that fist she’d made, and launched herself forward, striking a punch across the boy’s face, his nose crunching from the impact.

The playground monitor was upon them in moments.

“Butterfly! You broke poor Darrin’s nose!”

“Yes, well,” Butterfly paused, giving Darrin a cold stare, “that piece of junk was going to get broken sooner or later.”

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

I’m surprised you decided to come out here. No, no – I’m happy you did, just surprised. Your drink ok? Good.

You must find me fascinating, kind of the poster boy for post war re-creation. I’m not the only one you know, there are a lot more soldiers just like me.

All of this… equipment that keeps me alive, these legs that I’m walking on, the tube that I piss through… it’s the best that our government can buy. The best. Sure, they can buy bombs the size of buses, and bullets that shoot through tanks, but this – this is the state of the post-war medical art right here. No expense is too great when it comes to caring for our soldiers. That’s so damn true. No expense, and even that was too great.

You like me? You like this fucking machine they made me?

I did three tours, three goddamned tours. Do you know why? Do you know what kept me going back? Because after every one, when I got home, nobody could understand. You think you’re just like us, but we’ve experienced war, and you have no idea. I was just numb, and distant, always anxious. I’d go on week long benders, try to completely self destruct, and my girlfriend would make excuses, say it was ok, that it was normal. It’s not normal. The only way I could cope, the only way to get back to my new normal was to soldier up and go back to the front.

When that car bomb blew me in half, and they bolted all this shit onto me, they said I was all better, but I was no longer ‘suitable for re-deployment’. I’m supposed to just be ‘retired’ now.

Every friend I ever had, every connection I could ever manage with another human being, they cut me off, just like they cut my fucking legs off. They’re over there, deployed, and I’m stuck here, drinking in the Vet hall with you pencil pushing assholes. You want to write a story about me? You want to show the world the ‘face of the post war man’? Screw you. We fought to protect your freedoms in countries we’d never even heard of while you stayed home and wrote about how horrible the war is. You didn’t have the balls to serve, and you come here to make an example out of me? I bought these stripes with blood and honor, and for what? ‘Retirement’? And what am I to you? A story? I don’t think so.

You’re going to mean so much more to me.

You look tired. Don’t worry, it’s all ok. I’m going to give you a chance to do your part for the war effort.

Don’t get up. I know, you can’t. You’ve had the use of a perfectly good body for the whole war, and you’ve just been here pissing it away.

I’m not going to let it go to waste.

Go on, close your eyes. The Doc’s going to put you to good use. There are guys like me dying for what you’ve got; good heart, clean liver, working eyes. What the government can’t produce, the black market can provide. Here’s your chance to be a real contributor. Me? You’re going to make me a whole soldier again, and when they’re done stitching me back together, I’m going to march right back into the recruiting office and catch me a ride on the next transport back to my boys.

Not to worry. The government will just bury what’s left of you. That’s what they do.

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

Cody Starr, the seventy-fifth Director of The Venusian Terraforming Program, removed his foot-gear and waded into the warm Venusian Ocean on the western shore of New America. The sun very slowly inched its way above the western horizon to begin the long Venusian day (equal to 243 Earth days). Eventually, he thought, we will have to do something to shorten the day to something more reasonable, or more importantly, to shorten these long, cold Venusian nights. But that would be a task for future Directors. Right now, Cody just wanted to bask in the warmth of the abnormally large sun (38% larger than it appears on Earth), and to listen to the rumble of crashing waves. Occasionally, the wind blown spray would reach his lips. How unusual, he thought, a fresh water ocean. That may take getting used to. As the sun rose on this new day, Cody allowed his mind to reflect back on the long journey that brought humanity to this unlikely shoreline…

It was over 1000 years ago that Planetologist Philip Gregory began the construction of The Great Solar Shade. The GSS, which orbited Venus like an opaque cylindrical version of Saturn’s rings, performed three primary functions:

1) It blocked most of the heat being delivered by the swollen sun.

2) It powered the converters that obtained breathable oxygen from Venus’ thick carbon dioxide atmosphere, and finally

3) Over the next eight centuries, it meticulously scooped up the rarified upper atmosphere of Venus, and gradually dissipated it into space in an effort to reduce the overall atmospheric density from 90 to 1.2 times Earth normal.

Then, two centuries ago, Dillon Holder began the process of corralling thousands of ice-asteroids to create Venus’ ocean. It was no easy feat to develop the technique that would shepherd over one billion cubic kilometers of ice from the asteroid belt down to the Venusian surface, while carefully avoiding the GSS on the way.

Just five decades ago, the Solar Shade was changed from opaque to semi-transparent, to gradually permit more sunlight to reach the surface. The Shade was also heavily magnetized to provide shielding from the potentially deadly solar wind, and cosmic rays. The planet was then seeded with a verity of hybrid plants and algae to remove most of the remaining carbon dioxide, and to provide the foundation of the planet’s food chain. Thirty years later, small animals and fish were introduced. Recently, robots began farming, and building the infrastructure that would be needed to support eventual human colonization. But for now, Cody was content to watch the genetically bioengineered birds dive into the ocean to catch the genetically boiengineered fish. Off in the distance, he could see…

“Cody. Cody.” Who could be calling him, he wondered? He turned to look toward the distant dunes. Nobody was there, but he could hear faint traffic sounds: cars, trucks, horns, and sirens.

“Cody. Scott will be here in 10 minutes. Life insurance doesn’t sell itself you know. You’ve got quotas to meet. Let’s go.”

Through his squinted eyes, Cody could see his wife pull back the bedroom curtains, exposing the smog-covered skyline of Los Angeles in the distance. He buried his face in his pillow. “Nooooo.”

Author : Simon Petrie

There’d been big changes at Dave’s workplace.

Dave, 43, had been offered retirement, but he’d opted to stay employed in the burgeoning industry that he, as a roboticist, had helped initiate.

The society-wide introduction of working robots (more pedantically ICs, ‘intelligent constructs’) had been the past century’s dream, finally brought to fruition. And yet …

And yet. Midlife crisis, or something more? He didn’t know.

His reverie was interrupted by a tone in his earpiece.

“Completed on that level yet, Dave?” Hal’s clipped, precise tones, perfectly modulated.

“No, still stuck on the third unit. Shouldn’t be too much longer. Don’t think the rest pose any major problems.”

“Don’t forget those units on the next level. They need attention too.”

“I’ll get there, Hal, don’t sweat. Job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.”

Don’t sweat. Hah. That was a good one. All the same, Dave did take perverse pleasure in the point: there remained some tasks beyond any IC’s abilities.

He finished up, reached the foyer. Several lifts awaited. Time was, Dave had ridden these lifts daily, twelve floors, to his office. These days, he only ever went one floor up. The lifts didn’t see much use any more.

They should have seen, ten years back, where automation led. The first domestic-grade ICs were already able to oust FIDE’s reigning chess champion while still not performing adequately on tasks such as the vacuuming of a shagpile rug. Their handling of basic household chores had improved in subsequent models. Nonetheless, it remained apparent the ICs’ real strengths lay elsewhere, in realms of symbolic logic, abstract concepts, and ordered environments: money; justice; administration; science, technology, mathematics; the factory floor; the shopping centre.

Chaos was their weakness. A disordered environment posed an insurmountable challenge to even the new top-of-the-line ICs with millimolar memory capacity and massively parallel quantum architecture. In some circumstances and for some applications — military, police, rescue, mining — there were ways around this, through the use of human-piloted semi-IC proxies for dangerous and difficult tasks. Many chaotic tasks remained, though, for which this was not cost-effective; perhaps the future would change that.

Funny, Dave thought. The very tasks people had always thought tailormade for robotic intervention were the ones at which ICs weren’t any good.

Hal called again, of course, as he did at precise fifteen-minute intervals whenever Dave was behind schedule. “Completed on that level yet, Dave?”

“Ground level? Yeah, sure, just starting on the first floor units.” He entered the first booth, got to work with bleach and disinfectant, and soon had the entire unit sparkling. The next cubicle was worse: it looked like the S-bend was blocked, he’d have to get his hands dirty to clear it.

Not too complicated a task, in reality; you’d think an IC could master it, if it chose.

But it was a paycheck, and wasn’t that still worth it?

Author : Grady Hendrix

There’s that clanking, again. There’s that ratcheting, sound. There’s that grinding of gears and that whining of servos. He’s gotten used to the way his guest bedroom sounds like a robot factory, ever since Grife Marauder showed up.

“Jim, you gotta take me in, man,” Grife’d said.

Grife was an old school punk, his entire body wasted away except for gorilla-sized arms maintained by years of drumming. James was used to seeing him under the stage lights, bald head gleaming arrogantly, but now he was scared, now he was pushing past James to get into his living room.

“What’s going on, Grife?”

“I got…I don’t…I’m…they done something to me,” he managed.

“Who?”

“I don’t know!” Grife shouted, then he clapped a hand over his mouth and pinched his lips together.

“Do you want some water?” James asked.

“No! No water.”

“What happened?”

“I woke up, right? This morning? We’re recording so I gotta be there by twelve. I look over, and this isn’t my arm.”

“What’d you have last night?”

“Nothing much. Sip of tequila, bit of Vicodin, couple of joints. Teeny bit of coke, a few Ambien to put me out.”

“Well…” James said.

Grife knew James wasn’t taking him seriously, so he took his jacket off. His left forearm was covered in metal. Pistons ran up the sides. Silver and gold wires snaked through the core.

“Your arm is stuck in there?” James asked. “Let me get some soap so it won’t tear your skin.”

Grife pulled on his forearm with all his strength and his skin stretched, gruesomely.

“It is my skin,” Grife said, tears streaming down his face. “Help me.”

He spent the rest of the day in the guest bedroom with a blanket pulled over his head, watching TV. The next morning his entire arm was metal.

“Get it off,” he moaned.

“I can’t, Grife.” James said. “It’s growing out of you.”

It was a beautiful arm, precision engineered and finely crafted but Grife couldn’t appreciate it.

“Maybe it’s psychosomatic,” James said.

“What?”

“You said you were pissed that the band was getting into this post-punk thing and were replacing you with a drum machine on some of the tracks. Maybe your mind is reacting to that by turning you into a machine?”

“I’m not turning into a machine!” Grife yelled and then he pulled the blanket over his head and sobbed until he passed out.

Every day, he sat in the dark room, growing. And every day there was less of Grife and more of what James had come to think of as the Grife-Machine. And now there was that clanking, again. There was that ratcheting and that whine of servos. He got up and went into the guest bedroom.

“Look, man,” James said. “I think we need to get you to the hospital.”

The Grife-Machine rotated its speaker towards James.

“Luk mann,” it repeated, tonelessly. “Eye thank wee need two git u two thee huspitul.”

And then it stood up, and it began to walk.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

That’s the thing about silicates. They get cancer from radiation, just like us, except their tumors are jewels.

The silicate in front of me here has a head full of diamonds.

He’s looking up at me with his prism eyes. When the sun shines through the hospital window, the sunlight refracts through them and shoots little rainbows around. He’s no smarter than a cat now.

Their presence here was a history of shame. They landed in their glittering spaceships made of super-dense manufactured crystal in a park in Philadelphia.

Their technology was entirely built around the manipulation of crystal growth. They created crystal that made diamonds look brittle. They ate sand and rock. Their stomachs were kilns. They could make their bodies faceted and sharp with a thought.

All was peaceful for a time until the first few of them got sick. Their doctors worked with our doctors to find a cure before they realized what was happening.

Cancer. Just like humans.

The first tumours to be removed were a revelation. Emeralds.

Once the news got out, a black mark on the history of humanity started.

Many of the silicates were taken prisoner and bathed in radiation to produce raw emeralds, diamonds, rubies and hundreds of other types of valuable rocks. The market was flooded, with the jewels ceasing to be valuable after six horrible years.

Diplomacy healed the wounds over the next decade but there was still bitterness on both sides

Any jewelry at all is seen as gauche now.

My friend, Rock Opal Truestone, is going to be dead before the week is out. There’s still no cure for cancer but at least the egg-sized diamond eating the mental pathways behind his beautiful eyes is worthless.

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Author : James Smith

Sarah’s eyes went dim for a second, and I figured she was getting mail. She squinted with one eye and said, “That’s weird. I just… got… headmail from my… from Richard.”

“What’s he say?”

“‘Wanna get dinner? Wear the red dress.’”

“Are you serious?”

“This is crazy…”

The waitress walked by, I beamed her the bill and tip, stood and put on my jacket. Sarah got up with me, looking vaguely distant.

“Are you still reading it? What’s he say?”

“This is just too weird. He’s got a girlfriend now. That’s good… Do I… Should I send it back to him? Let him know she didn’t get it?”

“What? Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Come on! Two years and he hasn’t forgotten your address? How many times do you defrag your long-term memory in a given year? Two, three times? Or you bog down? Get bottlenecks? And he hasn’t dumped your address yet?”

Sarah walked beside me, thinking. You can tell, somehow, the difference in the eyes, between the look that says, “considering your opinion” and the one that says, “wiring untold megabits of crap through my forebrain, probably porn, please kill me.”

She came up out of it. “So, I should just leave it.”

“Yeah, and it better not be there by tomorrow. Throw his headmail out with tonight’s self-doubts and thoughtcrimes.”

She stammered, looked for a word, didn’t find it, online even, because she didn’t know what she was looking for. So she closed her mouth and we just walked some more.

We came to the store where I’d seen the keyboard we couldn’t afford. I stopped and stared at it, let her walk a few steps before noticing I was gone. Counted the seconds. Felt her come up behind me.

“That the one you were waxing over so poetic last night?”

Sarah came around in front of me and I nodded, chin against her head. I smelled her hair. I watched the keys where our reflections cut the glare on the glass. I tested a palm against her hip, imagined those keys along that curve of thigh and played them, the kind of thing I’d play on a Sunday, the sunlight orange and silver where vertical slivers of sky could reach us. The cat at my heel.

She leaned back into me. I didn’t know if she was thinking about him just then. When we married, we agreed to offline any leftover sense data from past lovers. But he was back in there now. She could re-think his last thoughts to some other woman any time she wanted, and I figured I would have to do something about that.

Author : Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”, Staff Writer

Kana took a deep breath and brought the butt of her father’s rifle to her shoulder. She tilted her head, both eyes open and focused beyond the length of the barrel. The iron foresight that perched at the end of the weapon had been cast as a dragon: the beast’s upthrust ears forming the neat ‘v’ through which she stared with intent. She had eschewed her father’s kabuto, but she did, however, wear his kikou: she had spent a long time adapting it to fit her slight frame.

She knelt on a ridge overlooking the village, making no effort to hide. It was only a matter of time until Daichi left the farmhouse. When he stepped from the door, there would be a single chance.

One shot would be all she’d have.

The rifle she held and it’s companion pistol at her belt were pinnacle weapons, comparing favourably to anything of their time. The bullet in the chamber was one of the original two hundred cast when the rifle was made.

She couldn’t miss.

Daichi left the farmhouse.

She fired and immediately ducked, thumbing a new cartridge into her father’s rifle. This was a new, cheap round: only countrymen were worthy of dying by the ancient ammunition. She braced the rifle again. Daichi was laying in the dirt, the top of his head splayed open against the ground, blood and brains mixing with the dust.

Two offworlders were scanning around the village. The first was reptilian, and the second wore a bulky space-suit, both wielding local weapons.

The rifle snapped as she fired again, and the lizardman jerked backwards, gore spraying from his gut. The space-suit located her and returned fire. Three or four shots tore into the soft dirt around her and two ricocheted off her kikou. She whispered a prayer of thanks to the armourer, and went to meet her foe.

She pressed herself against the back wall of one of the buildings, her father’s rifle already reloaded. The space-suit began to round the corner, but drew back too quickly: Kana’s shot whipped past him, missing by millimetres. Slinging the rifle behind her back, she drew the companion pistol and edged around the corner.

Her heart leapt into her throat when she heard the footsteps behind her. Whirling around, she came face-to-face with an unfamiliar pistol and the space-suit’s flat visage behind it. She hadn’t realised how fast it would be.

“Put your weapons down. Comply.” A harsh voice echoed from the space-suit. “You have killed two innocent men.”

“And Daichi,” she sneered at the corpse, “he killed my father in cold blood. You people did nothing. This was an act of honour.”

“You are Kana Takahashi? Respond.”

“I am.”

“Miss Takahashi. Your father’s death at the spaceport was an accident. There was nothing we could have done.”

“Liar.” She hissed, stiffening her grip on her father’s pistol.

A gunshot echoed around the village, but Kana had not fired. The space-suit crumpled to the ground. Kana turned: behind her, the lizardman stood, clutching his wound and barely managing to hold his rifle. The chamber was smoking.

“They told us,” the lizard spluttered, “that honour was dead here.”

In the distance, she could hear sirens. Turning away from the bodies, she ran for the relative safety of the woods.

Author : J.R.Blackwell, Staff Writer

“How is the Krugar adjusting to his second childhood?”

The Krugar’s mother motioned to the reporter to sit. “We don’t call him The Krugar here, in his will, he requested that we call him Uill, as he was called in his first childhood.” The Krugar’s mother looked like a fairy tale godmother, round and pink in a flowered apron. She seemed a natural part of the cottage in the country where The Krugar had specified he would live his second childhood.

The reporter sat, crossing her long silver legs. She was tall, traditionally beautiful with shining black crystal eyes thin, pearlecent lips. She tapped her metallic fingers against the wooden table. “Does The Krugar remember any of his previous life?”

“Impressions, yes. He recognizes objects sometimes, doesn’t go outside without one of his toy weapons, but he has no real memories of his past.” The Krugar’s mother put two tin cups of tea down on the table. “The Krugar can’t recall specific events from his previous life. Uill is a child with ideas about places and people, but no real reason that he understands behind why he feels the way he does.”

“If he doesn’t remember anything of the past, why do you think he’s been summoned as a witness for the upcoming trial?”

The Krugar’s mother slid into the seat opposite the reporter. “Politics. Grandstanding lawyers. They won’t get anything about the War Crimes of Minister Talthod out of him. He doesn’t remember. He can’t.”

“How do you respond to allegations that his decision to be reborn was to protect Minister Talthod?”

The Krugar’s mother wrinkled her brow. “I generally don’t respond to those allegations.”

The reporter tapped her fingers on the wooden table. “Do you think this is disorienting for him?”

The Krugars mother looked out the window, where Uill was running after his pet Solft laughing, his little plastic sword stuffed down the back of his shirt. “Uill is just fine.” She smiled at the reporter and past her, to the three million viewers looking through the reporter’s eyes.

Author : Andrew Bolt

“Why is there no Zeus, Vale? Why am I the only one?”

Dee sits on a pile of aquamarine thermal pillows. Cushions of air, tinted and pressurized, hold her aloft, warming her blood and chlorophyll and making her glow red and green like Christmas.

“C’mon, Dee. You know this one. You were the only one with enough residual Psi-fi left. Something to do with the mineral content of that sanctuary in Sicily. I don’t know. I don’t get it either. But the point is, we haven’t found enough psychic residue to recorporate anyone else.”

Her eyes darken. It’s subtle, but I’ve been watching this for months now. It’s an open secret that she’s been growing peyote in her arterial walls for the last twenty or thirty years. She’s just released some into her bloodstream. Her metabolism operates at a rate fifty or sixty times that of a professional athlete. The amount required to have even a mild effect must be incredible.

“What about Ares? That temple in Thrace?” she inquires with a slight slurring.

“Yeah, well, we talked about that, too. Believe it or not, the WestHem government is not thrilled about the idea of recorporating the ancient god of murder. There’s a spot somewhere outside of Parga that we could probably use to pull together Hades, but we’re not going to be doing that either. Death-related gods are not considered viable candidates.”

“We’re not gods.”

“Pardon?”

“I’m not a god,” she mumbles, drifting both physically and mentally. “I’m a physical embodiment of the neural energy empowering a generalized faith in something like me. I’m a recorporated Tinkerbell, powered by your fucking belief in fairies. I exist because some government tool clapped too hard and brought me back from Never-never-land with that damn PsiReCor.”

“To Never-never-land.”

“Hmmm?” Her head lolls to the side.

“Tinkerbell died. The clapping brought her back to Never-never-land.”

Dee glances around at the walls of her room, a plush setting that looks like a cross between a botanical garden and a medlab.

“My mistake.”

Screw the Westie rules. I slip my electric bandolier off my shoulder and settle next to her on the thermal couch. Up close, she looks terrible. Greenish veins trace spider webs down her cheeks. Sweat is slick on her face and hands, even though the couch is set at only slightly above room temperature. She coughs once. I lay my arm across her shoulders.

“I’ve saved the world, more or less,” she murmurs. “You have food growing everywhere, in deserts, around the poles, on the surface of all major oceans, even on the moon colony that everyone said was impossible. Why do you still need me?”

She gazes at me distractedly, a milky white film over her eyes.

“Why am I still here?”

Author : Chris McCormick

When we finally made contact it wasn’t in the way that everyone expected. It wasn’t like Star Trek, or Sagan, or Alien.

It should have been kind of obvious, looking at an atlas of the universe that there were so many of us. Tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny points of life on planets, in star systems, in galaxies, in galactic clusters, in the cellular mess of the known and unknown universe of radiating globules.

It should have been kind of obvious, looking at the ubiquity and persistence of evolution in every system we examined. The genetic systems, the stock market systems, the social systems, the atomic physics systems – everywhere the same rule – “Things that persist, exist,” the corollary of which is that the more intelligent the system, and the more desirous it is of persistence, the better it is at persisting.

The universe gave us an escape valve against the frustration of physical isolation; the impossibility of transcending those colossal, unthinkable distances.

The particle itself had a longish lifetime. Long enough that we could create several of them, overlapping in time so that there was always at least one in the atomic soup for us to probe and watch. Collide, examine, die, collide, examine die. The first time we created the first one, we simply could not fathom the data. The energy signature from this one, weird, heavy particle, was completely strange. The data spewing from it hung around at the border between chaos and order. It was neither chaotic nor ordered. It was complex. Spectral analysis, fourier transforms, and various forms of signal processing yielded only more mess.

At last someone gave up and threw the data on the ‘net. Flushed it through the distributed computing networks, and eventually, subjected it to cryptographic analysis. Suddenly the data came into sharp relief; millions of tiny voices, babbling, saying hello.

The particle was a resonator which resonates at the same frequencies everywhere. A change in one place means the same change everywhere else on the same resonant channel. Like Einstein’s spooky action at a distance, like strange attractors, except that here the particle broke the known physical laws, and now information travels faster than light. So now, while the physicists scramble to accommodate the new phenomena, we’re talking, sharing, and discovering with all of them – Everyone, with a capital ‘E’. Our webs and nets connected to all of their millions of webs and nets. Our network is a tiny node in the largest network of all; the universal network, stretching across all known space, outside all known space.

We’re all working hard together, trying to find a way not to be alone.

Author : Joshua Reynolds

“Can I has cheeseburger?” the cat whined plaintively. It’s voice was an electronic squeal that grated on Jim’s nerves. Jim swatted the cat on the butt and pushed it off of the desk.

“No.”

“Plz?” it mewled up at him, eyes unblinking. Jim shook his head.

“I said no.”

“OMG.” the cat yowled. Jim threw up his hands and tried to focus on his work. Schematics for cybernetic voice-boxes filled the screen of his laptop. EMP hardened as most things were these days. No help there. There had to be-

“ROFL!” a cat screeched, rolling onto its back on the desk, swiping at him.

“Shut up!” Jim shoved it to the floor.

“Happy cat is out of happy.” another cat burbled, laying flat on the floor behind his chair.

He glanced at it and went back to work, muttering, “Happy cat is out of happy because happy cat snorts catnip like it was going out of style. Happy cat needs to knock that shit off before happy cat burns out his teeny-tiny brain.”

“Plz can I has cheeseburger?” the first cat purred, leaping into his lap and rubbing its head against his arm.

“No, no, no! A hundred times no!” Jim banged his head against his desk. “Just shut up!”

“I has bucket!” a third cat yowled from the top of a bookcase. Jim whirled.

“Get out of that flower pot!”

“I can fix it.” a fourth cat mumbled, fumbling at Jim’s laptop. Jim turned back and swatted it away from him. His computer screen hiccuped.

“Don’t touch that!”

“Cheeseburger!”

“No! No cheeseburger!” Jim buried his face in his hands. “No damn cheeseburger.”

It had seemed like such a good idea. People loved cats. People loved those stupid pictures. Just a slight cybernetic modification to the animal’s larynx and bam! Talking cats. Everybody who was anybody wanted one. For about ten minutes. Then nobody did. The fad ended and he was left holding the bag.

“OMG lurve you.” the cat on his lap grumbled. Jim sighed and stroked it.

“Thank you.”

“Can I has cheeseburger now?”

“AUGH!”

It wasn’t the talking that bothered people really.

It was the fact you couldn’t get the damn things to shut up.

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

Captain Goff sat at the head of the conference table. “Well, we find ourselves in a rather precarious situation. The Capellians have seized our ship, as well as the flagship of the Rana. They claim that our war with the Rana has violated their sovereign space. We have been tried, in absentia, in the Capellian Courts, and have been found guilty. According to the Judge, both vessels, including the crew, are to be destroyed. Fortunately for us, however, it appears that our court appointed counsel has done his homework. He appealed the sentence on the grounds of an ancient precedent. If both defendants concur, we can settle our current battle with a one-on-one contest to the death. The survivor’s ship is set free; the other is destroyed. Obviously, this option is better than the original ruling, so I assume the Rana will agree to the fight. What are your recommendations?”

“Captain,” said the first officer, “this sounds like a bad plot from a twentieth century science fiction novel. Surely the Capellians are not serious. This is uncivilized.”

“I’m afraid, Commander, that the Capellians are quite serious, and they have the technological superiority to carry out their sentence. Consider that aspect closed. My primary concern now is figuring out how we can best win the head-to-head conflict. As it stands, the Rana were permitted to choose the weapon. We get to pick the battlefield. Not surprisingly, the Rana chose hand-to-hand combat. I suppose if I had a two inch thick exoskeleton and weighed more than 1000 pounds, I’d choose hand-to-hand combat too. As for the battlefield, the Capellians will recreate any Earth topography we choose. I’m open to suggestions?”

The science officer spoke. “Since the Rana come from an arid world, we need to avoid any rocky, desert terrain. I recommend a cold, icy location. Perhaps, the Siberian Tundra.”

The captain replied, “Too risky. If I die of exposure before my opponent, the Rana will be declared the winner.”

The security officer leaped from his seat. “What? With all due respect, sir, I should be the one fighting the Rana, not you.”

“At ease, Lieutenant,” cautioned the Captain. “I’ll choose the appropriate member of the crew, after I select the most advantageous battlefield.”

“How about a densely wooded area?” suggested the first officer. “They’re too big to maneuver. We’d have an advantage.”

“I thought about that,” replied the captain. “But, it only buys time. Ultimately, I must kill it, or be very confident I can outlive it, which may be tough. I’m sure they require less food and water than we do.”

The tactical discussion continued for several more hours, with no apparent solutions. Finally, an officer of the Capellian court materialized in the room and asked, “Your time is up captain. Have you chosen the battlefield?”

“Yes I have. Let’s get this over with.” He stood up and joined the Capellian, and they both disappeared. The security cursed himself for being too slow to stop the captain from leaving.

Five minutes later, the captain reappeared, soaking wet from the neck down. “Prepare to jump to hyperspace,” he ordered, “before the Capellians change their mind.”

Once the ship was safely away from the Capellian system, the captain relaxed. He turned to his first officer, “I selected the middle of Gulf of Mexico as the battlefield. I guessed correctly that a 1000 pound creature from a dry desert-like planet, didn’t know how to swim.”

Author : Michael Varian Daly

Dawn’s light angled off the blank brick walls of the narrow alley. The air shimmered, then expanded like a large soap bubble and softly popped. Iyo stood there for a moment to orientate herself. She glanced up and around. No windows. Bioforms reading only insects and the odd rodent.

“Clear,” she said to no one in particular.

She was flying solo. It would have been nice to have her old unit along, but explaining away a squad of heavily armed Shan dog troopers, five foot canine humanoids, or Corporal Jax, a three quarter ton Marine cyborg, well, the locals might get nervous.

So, Iyo stood in this alley alone, a tall blonde in jeans and a leather jacket. The air reeked of hydrocarbons and decay. The nanites in her lungs and blood were already working hard to offset their effects.

“You’ll get used to it,” she thought, like the dank, moldy air in the catacombs of that scathole Trobathney back…”or forward?” she mused. Transtemporal/Paratemporal operations were still new enough to have not worked out the tenses of their grammatic descriptors.

“Your cover is Camilla Göteborg. You’re a model from Sweden,” her Case Officer said. “Remember, this line is swarming with unmodified males. Refrain from killing them unless you have absolutely no choice.”

Iyo knew all that from the compressed immersion vert. This was just her Real Time cover activation. She also knew she was picked because she looked more like the locals than her mostly dark and therefor potentially ‘exotic’ Sisters.

Not mentioned in the vert briefing was the underlaying reason for this mission. The tactical rationals were addressed in detail. The strategic concepts were clear. The socio-cultural purposes were left unspoken.

Iyo knew them, however. She was only one of hundreds of millions of Sisters who had been born into, and had grown up to fight, The War. It was always there, generation after generation. Once, The Enemy had threatened The Sisterhood with extinction. Now, Victory was almost assured and The War was slowly winding down.

What to do with all these battle hardened warriors?

Retrain them in covert operations and ship them out across all of Creation was the plan The Elders of The Sisterhood devised. Iyo actually thought that a good idea. She knew she’d get into mischief in peacetime and the necessities of ‘blending in’ would help her readjust to non-martial society.

Thus, she found herself in place called Brooklyn.

“Okay, enough woolgathering,” she said using local colloquialisms.

She strode out of the alley, though quaint asphalt and concrete streets, to a promenade overlooking the city’s harbor. The water smelled even worse than the air, but the skyline of the tightly packed urban island across that water held a chaotic beauty.

She knew one of the two ugly boxlike towers that dominated that skyline would be destroyed in the Father/God wars that plagued this period. But that was nearly two decades…’up the line’. Maybe.

“Things change,” she murmured.

Author : J. S. Kachelries

The Gossamer Comet hung motionless 10 meters beyond the Folkestone Colony’s outermost habitation “wheel.” The Gossamer Comet was a one-man “human-powered” spacecraft that was about to attempt to win the last unclaimed Kremer Prize, a £100,000 award for the first person to “fly” unaided, in less than twelve hours, between any two of the 247 space colonies in geostationary orbit.

Generally, all of the attempts to make the human-powered crossing involved Newton’s third law. Contestants would typically launch massive projectiles using a human compressed spring in one direction, and the ship would move in the opposite direction at a velocity proportional to the mass of the projectiles and the ship. Alternatively, contestants would use a hand pump to pressurize a liquid, and release it like a rocket exhaust. The big problem, however, was achieving the correct trajectory. In orbit, there were complicating factors. If the ship moves retrograde (opposite to the direction of Earth’s rotation) its orbital velocity decreases. This means that it is no longer in geostationary orbit, and it starts to “fall” perceptibly toward the Earth. Consequently, after traveling several hundred kilometers, it misses the target low. Some intrepid designers added multidirectional “guidance” capability to their ships. But all those craft ended up rotating helplessly out of control (the rules prohibited gyroscopes on the ship). In over twenty years of trying, nobody had been able to “thread the needle” (i.e., achieve the correct angle and velocity to dock successfully with an adjacent space colony).

But today, Allen Bryan, a 25-year-old graduate student in Physics, had a plan to improve his odds. He had spent months preparing for this attempt. Seconds after he was notified that the twelve-hour time limit had begun, he exited a hatch and clipped a tether line to his spacesuit. He then began turning a winch that caused a circular hull plate to move inside his ship. He climbed into the newly created cavity, and satisfied that he was aimed correctly, released the preloaded spring. As shocked onlookers watched, Bryan launched his body at an angle slightly outboard of the Gris-Nez Station, which was 358 kilometers “behind” the Folkestone. Of course, his more massive ship moved slowly in the opposite direction. Bryan had meticulously controlled the mass of the ship, the tether line, and his own mass. As he flew on a trajectory outboard of the Gris-Nez, he began to drop toward the Earth because of his retrograde motion. His plan was to overshoot the Gris-Nez, but cross its orbit five to ten kilometers on the far side. After eight hours of flight, the 500-kilometer long Kevlar tether line had played out. Bryan was safely beyond, and below, the Gris-Nez, with his tether line “draped” across the outer wheel of the space station. Bryan began to feverishly crank the winch on his spacesuit to reel himself in. He continued to shorten the tether line until he lightly crashed into the Gris-Nez colony two hours later. Exhausted, he scrambled into an open cargo bay.

“Very clever, Mister Bryan,” said a member of the Royal Aerospace Society’s Human-Powered Spacecraft Rules Committee, “that technique significantly increased your margin of error. Very clever, indeed. However, the rules clearly stipulate that ‘the pilot and the ship’ must arrive at the space station to claim the £100,000 prize. I suggest, sir, that you get busy manually hauling in your ship. You only have two hours left on the clock.”

Author : B.York, Staff Writer

Tommy Texas was born in Sienna where his ma and his pa taught him to thank others for the luxuries they had. They thanked Peter for the ability to cook; they thanked Kimberly for the ride into town, and they thanked their grandpa Jeremiah for the television shows they watched each and every night.

In Sienna, Tommy Texas was loved by everyone. Tommy was loved because he had a big family and everyone there loved big families. All the townsfolk knew that more people meant they could have more luxuries and so Tommy Texas was someone they liked to see very much.
When Tommy got older, his parents wanted him to be a police officer but Tommy worked in construction anyways. He thanked Delilah’s father Robert for letting him use the lift and the vehicles to do his job each and every day. Tommy helped build the city bigger so that more would come to live in it. He knew that would make others happy to have more people in town.

As time went by, Tommy wanted to go to college far off but his ma and pa told him it would be a waste for him to leave town and surely the townsfolk would never be happy about anyone leaving the town. So, to be fair to his parents, Tommy stayed in the town of Sienna where he went to school and thanked Fred’s brother Ian for the ride over to school each and every day.

While Tommy was at college he met a girl named Felicia in one of his classes. Tommy and Felicia loved each other very much and eventually the two got married. The town was so happy that they got married because Felicia came from a big family, too. Her grandfather was the first one to thank for the lights at the town hall so that made Felicia’s family famous.

During the wedding, the pastor thanked Felicia and Tommy for getting married and wished on them a big and happy family. He also thanked a few people for the ceremony and then let Felicia and Tommy kiss so they could go off and have a family.

As the years went by, Tommy and Felicia had many children and so the townsfolk lavished them with gifts and thanked them for everything they were doing for the town. Tommy and Felicia were happy to have so many children- it made them feel blessed. They thanked Tommy’s parents for the house they lived in and also the cool air during the summer seasons.

Tommy and Felicia’s children grew up quick and they, too, learned to thank others for the things they had. They thanked grandpa and grandma for the cool air and the house they lived in each and every day.
Though one day years later Tommy got sick and died in the winter. Felicia was sad for bit and so were the children who were much older now. The town had a big celebration in Tommy’s name and they even brought the celebration to the plant where they liquidated his body.
Now all the boys and girls in Sienna thank Tommy Texas for heating the school in the winter. They learned to thank others for the luxuries they had and knew that someday someone would be thanking them, too.

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

It was a no-call assignment, and Carson hated no-call assignments. Attempts to contact the McCaulty family through conventional mail had been unsuccessful, though he noted that the lever of the mailbox had been raised, indicating recent use. They had no telephone, of course. Carson shifted the car to manual control as they left the grid and pulled onto the gravel trail.

“Are those real cows?” Kristin asked. He nodded. Her eyes were wide.

“You’ll get used to it. Is your defo shield charged?” he asked. The car came to a stop behind a rusted-out manual pickup truck, and Carson yanked on the emergency brake. Kristin nodded and followed him up the gravel path and he looked her over one last time before ringing the doorbell.

Long seconds passed before the door swung open a few inches, and a portly woman ran her eyes over the two of them. “Are you Mrs. McCaulty?” Carson asked as he flipped open his wallet. His badge caught the light and projected a holographic image of his face.

“I got no business with you.”

“We’re here to discuss your son.”

Mrs. McCaulty squinted suspiciously. “There’s nothing wrong with Herbert.”

“Then you won’t mind us asking him a few questions.”

“He don’t talk yet.”

Carson reached for his report pad and scrolled through the relevant information. “He’s nearly five, correct?” he asked as he moved his foot into the crack between the door and its frame. “We’re just gathering information about the case.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Herbert.”

“Are you familiar with the Re-Ability program?”

“You’re not sticking nothing in my son’s head,” she said, this time with an edge of force. Mrs. McCaulty leaned against the door, but Carson didn’t let it close.

“I think you might be misinterpreting this visit,” he said. “I’m here to tell you about the federal assistance program. Your son may qualify for-”

“You ain’t sticking nothing in my son’s head,” she repeated.

Carson revealed no evidence of frustration or unease, though Kristin had tucked herself behind him with a nervous expression across her youthful face. “Re-Ability implants are no different from pacemakers or any other medical device,” he said calmly. “If he’s struggling, there’s a solution. Surely, as his mother, you’d want him to have the best life possible.”

“You ain’t-”

“I’ll just leave you with this information,” Carson said. His hand slid through the crack in the door, holding a bouquet of holo-readers. She snatched them from his grip, and he barely retrieved his hand before the door snapped shut. Carson’s frown was almost invisible as he turned back to the car.

“She isn’t going to read those,” Kristin said as she grabbed the door handle.

“You’re learning fast.”

“So what do we do?”

He slid into his padded seat and yanked the door shut with a little more force than necessary. “Level two,” he said. “Forward it under neglect and endangerment.”

Kristin gave a short nod as she slid in and pulled her door closed. “Are they going to-”

“If he doesn’t have that implant before he’s six, he’ll be permanently delayed.” Carson snapped as he threw the car back into manual and it spun. “Don’t feel sorry for her. He needs treatment.”

“Alright,” Kristin said. Her voice was meek as she reached for the console panel.

“Label it priority,” he added. The car jerked abruptly as it reached the end of the driveway and reunited with the grid.

Author : Adam Wiesen

White. Sterile. No roof, no walls, no floors. No shadows. Make a sound. Hear anything? Of course not: no acoustics. You look nervous, Ben. Don’t. We’re not there yet. This is just a test. Plugged into your parietal lobe, running a line into your implant. The real deal takes way more power than I have in this little box. No, for a full-on semiotic transplant, you’re going to sit in the Big Chair down in Valley Stream, and they’re going to plug you right into the Nassau County grid, along with the rest of the recalcitrant douchebags who can’t seem to stop shitting in society’s mouth.

You’re sweating, Ben.

That’s okay.

I’d be scared, too. I mean, this little corner of eternity’s hardly scenic, and you’re slotted for a good thirty years. Where do you sleep? Oh, Ben, you really don’t get it, yet, do you? The whole point to this is you don’t sleep. Don’t eat, don’t talk, don’t hear, don’t listen. It’s just you and the the long white nothing. The Little Bardo, they call it. No sleep. What’s sleep when we’re technically plugged into your REM mode, anyway? No, you’re doing your full thirty wide awake. The Nassau County grid dumps into the National Readjustment Processor down in Quantico, where your personality will sit in happy reconstructed nothing for the entire stretch of your bid.

It could be worse, Ben. In the old days, they filled the Little Bardo with all sorts of terrible stuff. The best bits from the Bible, used to scare you to sleep at night. Fire and brimstone. Punishment, y’know? Retribution. No one really came out of that in one piece, though. Lot of catatonic freaks. Couldn’t control their piss function. Terrible smell. Lots of screaming. Then they tried to pamper them with a Heaven meme. That worked like bunk. I mean, for half you rotten sons-of-bitches, Heaven is raping kittens and stabbing nuns. Ever see a smiling coma victim? I hear half the Federal budget that year went to buying clean sheets, just to cover up the number of wet dreams you freaks had. So, then they came to this. Nothing. Nada. Nirvana, baby, for thirty years. The Little Bardo. Time to think, right?

Ben, we have a toilet for going to bathroom. Someone’s going to have to mop up after you. That’s not very considerate is it?

How are you going to receive visitors? Your mother? Ben, look at me. Does this place look like it’s got the facilities to hold your toxic miserable ass for thirty actual years? We’re going in through the parietal lobe, champ. That controls time sense. You’re going to be in and out of here in twenty minutes.

Author : Jeremy M. Hall

“Welcome to Chrono-Real Estate-Advertising. How may I help you?”

“I’m here to buy from March 1, 1650 to March 30, 1650 for the entire city of Jamestown, Virgina.”

“Sir, we can’t do that.”

“I have a suitcase with several million dollars that says you can.”

“No, sir. We cannot do that. We do have a nice spot in upstate New York on August 30, 1921 that we have on sale. Upstate New York is a hot commodity in the Pre-Branding market.”

“No, ma’am. I want that time period for Jamestown.”

The gentleman opened the suitcase that he was carrying, showing off large stacks of hundred dollar bills.

“Listen sir, I’m sure you’re big in the Pre-Branding business, especially to carry that much cash in a briefcase, but there is no way we are going to let you buy any time period before the Nineteenth century, especially in an area that big. The Historical Protection Commission would be down our throats before we could even place your advertising, and they would be yanking our Time Equipment through our tonsils. In fact, there isn’t a reputable Time and Space Advertiser that would take your offer.”

“I can’t believe this crap. I have several million dollars cash, and you aren’t going to take it? And for what? Because of some government regulations. You people are-”

The receptionist’s phone rang and she picked it up.

“Yes, sir,” she said into the handset. “This is a TC level three. You have a B three million ready? OK, the code is alpha gamma omega beta. Yes, sir. I’ll be sure to let him know.”

“What’s this?” the customer asked. “I heard three million there. Are they considering it?”

“Say hello to the dinosaurs,” the receptionist said, and then hit several keys on a small terminal. The customer had a shocked look on his face as a small pinhole appeared behind him, then sucked him in backwards. The last thing the receptionist saw of the man was his bulging eyes and the tips of his shoes. She looked at her watch, and then counted to five, at which point the customer returned the same way he’d left, except for the stain in the seat of his pants.

“I hope you enjoyed the T-rex greeting. If you continue to bother me, or any other employee of Chrono-Real Estate-Advertising, we will file for a Harassment Clause which would allow us to send you back to Mister T-Rex and let him finish the job. Do you understand?”

The customer only nodded, his face still frozen in fear, and with his briefcase clutched, white knuckled in one hand, he slowly backed out through the door.

Author : J.R.Blackwell, Staff Writer

The old man may have looked like Santa if he smiled, but red faced and spitting he was closer to a vengeful devil than the spirit of giving. The old man cornered Uill with his sizable bulk. “You are not a poet.” He said, stepping closer. He stunk of rotted food and oil. “You are The Krugar, a War Lord, the greatest military mind of my generation.” The old man gripped Uill’s lapels and shook him violently. “Snap out of it General! Come back to us.”

Uill trembled. “Mister, please just let me go, I’m going to be late to class.”

The old man kept one of his meaty hands on Uill’s thin shoulder and used his other hand to reach into his coat pocket. He pulled out a bronze metal and pinched it between his stained fingers. The medal had a half opened eye impressed on its surface. As always, these kinds of medals made Uill feel sad and angry, a press of emotions that intensified the stabbing pain in his head. The man shook the medal in front of Uill’s face. “I earned this after you commanded us on Mars. Do you remember Mars? You remember the Driell and the fire?”

Uill could feel the headache coming, the pain that always came when people talked about his old life. “I’m not The Krugar. I never commanded you. That man wasn’t me. I was reborn. Now I’m a student of poetry.” Uill held up his left hand, where his university glowed on his ring finger. “Look at my ring.” He waved his hand in front of the old man’s face. This is the Capital University student ring. The Krugar went to military school, right? I can’t be him. I go to Capital University.”

Shaking his head, the old man rummaged in his coat. “Don’t try to confuse me. I know who you are. I know what they did to you. I know they tried to make you reborn. But you are The Krugar. You wouldn’t forget, not with all the machines in the universe.” The old man pulled a knife out of his coat and flicked his thumb on the blade. The blade began to spin. “You’ve got to be in there somewhere. Maybe I can cut you out.”

Uill held up his hands. “Please. No. Poetry. I do poetry. Cloudless climbs and starry skies, suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, do not go gently into that good night.”

“Forget poetry Krugar.” The old man waved his hands around his head. “Forget it. Don’t you hear the news? The Driell are returning. They are coming back. Only you can beat them. Like you did last time, remember?” The man lifted his arms where the lights of the city sparkled against that velour sky. “There!” he said, pointing excitedly to a streetlight, dropping the knife. “That star! There, that glory star. ” The knife blade sparked on the pavement as it spun. The old man didn’t notice. “You remember the song, Glory Star?” The old man put both his hands over his heart and closed his eyes. Then he began to sing, his voice surprisingly clear. “Glory Star, Glory Star, bright and bold The Krugar’s Company.”

Uill knew the words. All eighteen verses. He heard them in his wild dreams, those spastic glimpses of long stretched hours of tension followed by moments of terror and then after, long, brilliant songs, his mind on fire. Uill ran out of the alley, back to the university, back home to his life.

Author : Viktor Kuprin

When the alien ship reached us, we were down to four hours of oxygen and nothing in our prospector ship’s food storage.

It was the Tsoor who rescued us, the ones who look like walking man-of-war jellyfish. Oh, they were nice and polite enough, and they even had a Tsooriski-to-Russki translator unit, thank God!

But they didn’t have any human food.

When I queried my hand-comp’s database, all it said about Tsoor nutrition was “Some terrestrial protein and carbohydrate compatibilities.” We didn’t have any choice. We were starving.

The Tsoor like to take their meals sitting in pools of their home world’s sea water. Anton and I sat soaking in the briny liquid when the biggest Tsoor brought the food, a metal pot filled with ball-shaped mollusks.

“God help us,” Anton muttered under his breath as our server crushed one of the gray shells with its tentacle-fingers, yanking out a still-quivering slab of pink-white meat.

“Shhh! Don’t offend it!” I warned.

After days without food, I didn’t care how badly it might taste. Or smell.

Big Tsoor picked up a shallow stone bowl filled with yellow powder and rolled the mollusk flesh in it. It offered the morsel to Anton.

“See. Food,” said the alien’s metallic translator voice.

Anton slowly accepted the dusted meat from Big Tsoor’s tentacle-fingers, pulled down his respirator mask, and leaned forward to sniff.

“Alan, I think it’s sulfur! They season with sulfur!”

Big Tsoor stood motionless, watching.

I urged Anton on. “Wipe some of the powder off and try it. Come on, it’s waiting for you to taste it.”

Anton used his thumb to clear most of the Tsoor seasoning off a side of the slab. He shut his eyes, bit, chewed, and gulped.

“It’s like a big prawn, but it reeks of rotten eggs,” he said between gasps.

Big Tsoor cracked another shell and another. We silently wolfed down the gritty shellfish.

When the pot was half empty, Big Tsoor held out its tentacled-hand towards us.

“Culinary exchange,” announced the translator.

Quickly I thumbed my hand-comp: “Tsoor guests at a formal dinner are expected to offer their hosts a token gift of food or drink in exchange for the meal.”

“It’s part of their hospitality custom. I’ll be right back.” Dripping wet, I ran out of the mess hall, across the airlock that connected our ships, and rushed to our all-but-empty galley.

Yes! On a rack was a half-filled bulb of Anne Bonny Cocktail Sauce. I squirted it into a bowl, hurried back to the alien dining hall, and sat back down in the warm brine.

I pointed to the shellfish and pantomimed rolling the meat in the red sauce. Our host understood, and it shoved a sauce-covered mollusk into its mouth sack.

Big Tsoor turned red, then purple. I could see its plum-shaped eye throbbing. Its tentacle-fingers clenched into tight coils.

The alien bolted straight up. Anton screamed. I tried to jump out of the pool.

Through the chaos, I could just make out the translator.

“Very tasty.”

Author : Benjamin Fischer

“Have a seat, Jim,” said the General.

“Is this what I think it’s about, sir?” the Colonel asked, shutting the hatch behind him.

He sat down. Across from him, a LED nameplate proclaimed “Major General David Pietz USAF, Commander-in-Chief Colonial Expeditionary Force” on a broad, glass-covered aluminum desk. Behind it the General reclined in a plush leather chair halfway turned to face a bank of monitors behind him. Blown up to maximum magnification were the latest from the reconnaissance office–an impressive fleet of spaceships, moored like the petals of a flower around a long, cylindrical space station.

One of the ships was highlighted in red.

“Your thoughts?” asked the General.

The Colonel shook his head.

“Yeah, that’s her,” he said.

“The Charleston,” the General nodded. “Old Chucktown. Lost with all hands. Five years, six months, and two days ago.”

“You still keep track of that too?” the Colonel asked.

“Yes,” General Pietz said.

They sat in silence.

“Definitely, positively destroyed in a meteorite collision,” the Colonel finally said. “They found pieces, they found bodies. No doubt at all.” He was paraphrasing a report.

“And yet the Colonials seem to have repaired her,” the General responded.

The Colonel snorted.

The General sighed.

“OK, Jim, confession time,” General Pietz said. “I don’t know whether to be completely pissed or crying with joy.”

“Yeah, it took the wind out of me, too,” said the Colonel. “She could be alive.”

Pietz let out a sharp laugh and turned away from the telling images. He set his elbows upon his desk and leaned towards his guest.

“Oh, she most definitely is,” he said, his face half-smiling, half-grimacing. “My girl was always tougher than that. I knew a handful of damn buckshot couldn’t have killed Marissa.”

The Colonel swallowed.

“So that means?” he said.

“Yes. The god damn rumors,” said Pietz, “are apparently true.”

“Apparently,” agreed the Colonel.

“Well, here’s another one, for you to spread,” said the General. “Tomorrow, at twenty one hundred, we’re deploying. Our eventual objective will most likely be those facilities at Lagrange Two. And the fleet defending them.”

“Jesus,” said the Colonel.

“To say I am disappointed in the Security Council would be a gross understatement,” said Pietz.

“Jesus,” repeated the Colonel. “We’ll have to use nukes. There’s no other option.”

“Eventually, when our hands are untied, yes,” said the General. “And that’s why I called you in here.”

“Sir?” asked the Colonel.

“When Lieutenant Colonel Pietz and I last spoke,” the General said, “she was convinced that full independence was the only reasonable course for the Colonies. She told me that any sort of half-measure was an invitation to open, violent rebellion, and that she sympathized with secession. I disagreed. It was not a pleasant discussion.”

“Lord,” said the Colonel, his eyes wide. “She told you.”

“Almost,” said the General, shutting his. He snorted softly. Then:

“Jim, I’ve known you and you’ve known me for damn near two decades now, so listen to what I say very carefully now. This contest will be for control of mankind’s future. We can not lose. I say again, we can not lose. If at any point–if at any point you feel that I am holding back even the least bit-”

“You’re not the only one who misses Marissa,” the Colonel said.

The General opened his eyes, and they were cold.

“I expect everything up to and including the last full measure from everyone, myself included,” he said. “Marissa will be very hard to kill.”

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

“I’m sorry, if I’d have realized you were coming tonight, I’d have prepared a more substantial demonstration.” The Professor addressed the Investor nervously, moving piles of notes and abandoned test equipment out of his way.

“Your message stated there had been a significant development.” The Investor stood unaffected amidst the chaos, collar turned up against the chill of the room, gloved hands clasped behind his back.

“Yes, we’ve made an exciting advancement.” The Professor ceased his tidying, and strode to the corner of the room, hefting a small wooden shipping crate from a half full pallet of the same. Stepping over the clutter, he carried it to the middle of the curved array of alloy beams that seemed to be the focal point of the laboratory. The structure itself was easily half again as tall as he was, resembling a giant sectioned orange, exploded and suspended in mid air. He deposited the crate at the approximate center of the array, and stepping beyond its perimeter he began to key noisily at a terminal while he spoke. “We had spent all of our efforts initially trying to find a way to accelerate a mass through spacetime, and quite honestly, it had us stymied completely.” He paused for a moment, thoughtfully. “So we reinterpreted the question.” The Professor alternated between keying instructions and monitoring the feedback on several attached displays. “If we didn’t ask ‘how do we accelerate matter through spacetime’, but rather simplified the question to ‘how do we move matter through spacetime’, we discovered that we could apply our theories in a different way, and we were able to successfully move matter through spacetime by decelerating it. Like this – watch!”

The Professor, satisfied with the data presented on the displays in front of him, stepped to a panel off to one side and pushed a pair of levers all the way forward, watching the crate with palpable excitement as it seemed to come into sharp focus for an instant before fading slowly from view, to disappear completely a few seconds later with an audible snap.

Pulling the levers back to their starting position, he turned excitedly to the Investor, who had stood motionless and silent through the entire demonstration.

“We’re not exactly sure where the crates are going, hopefully they’re not falling on someone’s head in another dimension, but the physical properties of the matter making up the crate remains completely intact the entire time, or at least as far as we can monitor it. In fact, we’ve…”

“You reinterpreted my directive?” The Investor’s voice stopped the Professor cold. “You wasted my time, my resources to build a matter decelerator? I know how to decelerate matter through spacetime.” He was shouting now, eyes smoldering on the verge of inferno. “I. Know. How.” His words sharply punctuated, delivered in coarse staccato. “If I had wanted you to recreate what I know, I would have specifically instructed you to do so, wouldn’t I?” His voice boomed as he closed the distance to the Professor, forcing him backwards through the steel tines of the array.

The Investor stopped to lean heavily on the control panel. “You were supposed to make me an accelerator.” He sighed deeply, in sudden resignation, throwing the levers forward again, and not watching the horrified features of the Professor pulled into vivid focus, face contorted in a silent scream as he faded and snapped out of his own plane of existence.

“You were supposed to find me a way to go home.”

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

The sound of a bugle woke me up. Damn, reveille. I hate that sound. I swore an oath to myself that I’d fix that one day. I unzip my “bunk” and float out. As I began to put on my uniform, I smiled again at the poster on the far wall. It was Elmer Fudd wearing a spacesuit holding a K-138 phaser rifle. The caption read, “”Shhhhhhhh, be vewy vewy quiet; I’m hunting Piewits, heheheheheheh.” That always cracks me up. I swear, if I capture a pirate one day and he pleads, “But it’s duck season,” I’ll probably let him go. I imagine that some of them are probably decent folk, just raiders trying to feed their families, who would flee rather that hurt someone. But I don’t kid myself; there are some really bad ones too. Sadistic bastards that kill helpless passengers, including women and children. I blast those guys first, and then ask if they wish to surrender.

Halfway through morning chow, the battle stations alarm sounded, followed by the commander’s voice, “Prepare for battle men, we have Morgan Bartholomew’s ship on our long range sensors. “Morgan Bartholomew,” I said to my mates, “he’s the worst of the lot. The captain won’t break off this pursuit, even if Bartholomew flies onto the sun’s corona. We’re going to have to board her too. They won’t let themselves be captured.”

“That’s fine by me,” said the Sergeant Dobson. “I’ll buy a case of Martian beer for the person that vaporized that scum. Let’s suit up men.”

We caught up to them midway between Uranus and Neptune. No place to hide out there, so they had to fight. We punched a dozen holes in her hull, but they kept fighting. Unfortunately, we couldn’t just blow them up. Bartholomew generally kept prisoners alive knowing that it would force hand-to-hand combat. So, we boarded her.

Fighting on a ship exposed to the vacuum of space was eerie. No sound, except the tactical information being transmitted to our headsets. Fighting was fierce, and we lost a half dozen good men, but we killed all the pirates, including Bartholomew himself. I made a mental note to become buddies with the trooper that bagged that bastard.

In the end, we rescued fifteen prisoners, mostly women. No doubt their lives had been hell. But they’re in the infirmary now, and at least they’ll recover physically. All in all, it was a good day to be a pirate hunter. We had a big celebration in the mess hall that evening. The captain even let us break out the contraband liquor that we weren’t supposed to have. After several hours of bragging and exaggerating about our heroic accomplishments, we toasted our fallen comrades another time, and headed to our quarters. Well, except for me, I had a final mission to complete before sacking out.

The following morning, the address system woke us up with Herb Alpert’s Brasilia. Much better, I thought.

Author : Grady Hendrix

“Wait!” he said. “Look at that!”

“What the hell is it?” she asked, slamming on the hovercar brakes.

“You’ve never seen one?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“You’re in for a treat,” he said, bouncing up and down with excitement. “Come on.”

He scrambled out of the hovercar and onto the blasted earth.

“I haven’t seen one of these since I woke up,” he said, jogging over to the green patch. “It’s called a tree.”

“I thought they all died in the Great War?”

His knees buckled a little and she caught him. It had only been two months since he’d been cracked out of his hundred year cryo-sleep, one of the first old growth humans to be brought back into this postwar world, finally judged capable of leaving the Citi-Dome and going on patrol with Sara-10.

“Steady on,” she said.

“They haven’t given me much history yet, but I haven’t seen a tree or a plant since I woke up. Look,” he said. “Its leaves change color with the time of year. See those tiny green things? They’re buds, new parts of the tree will grow from them. They’re capable of so many things that we can’t do…” a tear slid down his cheek.

Then a high pressure stream of burning liquid fuel hit the tree and it exploded into a fireball.

“What are you doing?” he screamed.

Sara-10 ignored him and burned the tree until her flamethrower was empty.

“We lost a lot of good men to bastards like that,” she said as the tree crackled.

“That’s maybe the only tree left alive after the Great War and you killed it?”

She slapped another fuel tank on her flamethrower and hit the tree with another blast.

“Who do you think we fought the Great War against?” she asked. “Fucking trees. Taking up all the land, breaking up our cities with their roots, killing everyone – “ she broke down crying. He reached to comfort her but she slapped his hand away. “Let’s just go,” she snapped. “I have to report this.

The tree watched them depart, cursing the mobile ones.

“We’ll be back,” it thought as it died. “There are more of us…we will water our roots with your blood…”

Author : Sarah Klein

“You must think yourself pretty clever, Mr. Culler,” Parkinson said, snickering. “Look at all these devices you’ve rigged up to catch an intruder. Do you notice how I’ve been able to avoid every single one without losing a drop of blood?” He cackled.

Culler said nothing as he awoke from a drugged slumber, taking in his surroundings. He had been propped up in a chair and he was handcuffed. He clenched his teeth and very, very slowly eased his cuffed hands towards his pants pocket.

“You know, I’m just as smart as you, maybe even smarter,” Parkinson said evenly. He pressed the barrel of the gun against Culler’s temple. Click.

Culler had managed to get a couple fingers inside his pocket. He kept a straight face, looking ahead, groping silently.

“We were supposed to be partners! PARTNERS!!” Parkinson roared. “And you dismissed me! Why? Because you ‘felt like working alone’. Do you have any idea what that did to me, you worthless snob?!”

Flecks of spit hit Culler’s cheek as he grasped the lockpick and began to carefully ease it out, hoping he was being subtle enough. But Parkinson was too far gone to notice.

“You ruined my career!” he screamed, pushing the barrel in harder. Culler braced himself so as not to fall over. “You made me a disgrace! No one will even look me in the eye, much less work with me! All because you had to have all the glory yourself!” His red eyes bugged out as he trembled with rage.

Culler picked the lock without trouble, the small noise covered by Parkinson’s hysterics. He sat calmly with the cuffs still around his wrists, and slipped his hand into his other pocket just as subtly.

“You ruined my life,” Parkinson whispered darkly, “so I’m going to end yours.” He prepared to pull the trigger, but after a blink, saw only empty space. His mouth dropped open in surprise.

Click. A pair of handcuffs fell to the floor. Parkinson whirled around to see them, fallen on the floor – and unaccompanied by a person.

His heart sank as he remembered the theme of the project they were supposed to share.

Invisibility.

He felt his neck being squeezed. As his vision began to blur, he heard a voice.

“You must think yourself pretty clever, Mr. Parkinson…”

Author : J.R.Blackwell, Staff Writer

Maja’s ancestors conferred in her head before the date.

“Wear a dress!” said her great grandmother.

“Not that one!” cried her great grandfather “He will think you are a whore, and will offer you money for sex.”

“Old man, you are behind the times.” Said Florence, Maja’s grandmother. “Dresses like that aren’t considered slutty. Showing her nipples is a sign of strength nowadays, don’t you ever pay attention to the modern media?”

“Oversexed tripe.” Muttered Maja’s great grandfather.

They chattered on among themselves. Maja put down the orange dress and pulled out some pants and a long-sleeve shirt. She called her car to come to the front of the house and pick her up to take her to The Last Drop coffeehouse for her date.

“What if Maja marries this man.” Said great grandmother “I’m not sure if he would make a good husband. His job isn’t all that great.”

“It’s got lots of potential.” muttered Maja.

“Would you like to change your destination?” asked Maja’s car in a friendly voice.

“No! No.” said Maja. “I’m talking to myself, disregard. ”

“Look at that.” Said Florence “You are making Maja nervous before her date! You old fogies. All of you shut up until she asks for our guidance.”

“You mind your own-”

“Honored ancestors. Please allow me some peace?”

“Fine,” said Maja’s great grandfather, “but only because you asked politely.”

At the restaurant Maja missed the end of Tachi’s joke, listening to her great grandfathers lecture on the indecent table manners of the youth of today. Tachi was offended, and then surprised, when she told him why she had missed his witty banter.

“You have what, where?” said Tachi, his silver fork still poised in his hand.

“My ancestors.” Shrugged Maja. “They’re all in my head. They got their personalities patterned and I carry an electronic implant that carries them with me.”

“But why?” Tachi put down his fork, shuddering while he imagined his grandmother in his head at all hours of the day.

Maja leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “They guide me. They care about me, love me, they help me make choices.”

“They’re with you all the time?” Tachi fidgeted with the tablecloth. “Even when-”

“Even when what?”

“Even when you are in the bathroom?”

Maja sighed, relieved. Sex was a touchy subject with her ancestors. “Yes, all the time, even in the bathroom. They don’t really care much about what I do in the bathroom though. They care more about what I’m wearing or who I’m going there with, where I’m sticking my credits, my job, the entertainment I watch. You probably think this is weird.”

“It’s different, sure, but not weird. I mean, my grandparents live in a polyamorous commune where everything thinks they are teenagers. At least you’ve never had to worry about your grandfather stealing your girlfriend.”

Maja snorted. “I guess not.”

“That actually explains a few things about you.”

“Like what?”

“Well, when we met, at Rudolf’s party. I remember thinking how elegant you looked, both modern and refined all at once. Classic, I guess is the word. You’re classic.”

“He thinks we’re classic!” cried Florence. “Oh, what a nice man.”

“He’s trying to get into her pants.” Said Maja’s great grandfather.

“Thank you.” Said Maja.

“Do your ancestors say anything about me?” asked Tachi.

“Rude.” Said Maja’s great grandfather.

“I don’t think they’ve all made up their minds.”

“What about you? What do you think about me?”

“I’ve made up my mind, but you’ll have to stick around for dessert to find out what it is.” Maja smiled.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The correctional facility did not work for me.

I left the building with the need to make up for lost time.

I waited exactly one day and sixteen hours before I grabbed someone and dragged him into an alley to resume work on cleaning the world like I was destined to do.

I guess the cops didn’t tell me about the remote probation device they’d installed in me.

I had my hand drawn back to start working on this terrified man the way the voices had directed when all of a sudden my body felt like it was on fire. My muscles spasmed and I collapsed to the ground in the dirty alley amongst the needles, newspaper and grease.

I stayed there for half an hour. People went through my pockets and found nothing. They stole my shoes.

I woke up angry.

I punched the dumpster beside me, denting it with my hands. My body erupted in searing pain again as I did this. My muscles spasmed and I collapsed to the ground for a second time.

The probation device was wired to my body’s pulse and respiratory system. It was wired to my brain waves.

I needed to remain calm and positive or I would be shocked into convulsions again.

No problem.

I practiced on cats and stray dogs for three months.

Now I can kill an animal with no change in my heartbeat or breathing. I can do it with nothing but positive thoughts in my head. The creator would be proud.

All the time I’ve been practicing on the animals, the voices have been demanding I resume my job. They don’t understand about the probation device. It’s maddening. It’s been torture knowing that I can’t resume my work until I perfect my innermost emotions.

It’s time now. I’m ready to do a human.

I leave the front door of the cave of boxes I’ve made in my squat like a trap door spider coming into daylight.

For the second time in my life, I feel like I’ve been released from prison.

I have to make up for lost time.