365 tomorrows

Author : Moebius

There are six of us huddled together in the pallid, bluish light of the spacious galley. Tense, wiry and sallow. We sit together in a disjointed approximation of camaraderie. I don’t know any of the faces around me and I am afraid to make any connections. Our eyes shift nervously around the room. Not a pair makes contact with any of the others.

The baggy sleeves of my deflated dream suit drags across the scratched steel surface. Chamomile does nothing to calm my nerves. I focus involuntarily on a dent in the table top. It creases and becomes a grimaced snarl. The surface splits viciously open into cruel steel maw that leaps up at me.

She sounds like a very pleasant woman. The synthesized voice over the annunciator instructs us to return to our posts and re-commence our attack. I blink down at my thin, bony fingers on the table, covering up the dent. A face reflects back and it takes a moment to recognize the gaunt, horrified stare as my own.

After you push in and turn the umbilicus connector, the entire socket retracts and the bio-gel starts pumping into the body suit. The others are already in their skeletal frame seats. I prefer to have the serous fluid half inflate before I lock down. A spasm shakes through the woman on my right as she inhales the fluid into her lungs. The hiss of the noise cancellation device mutes all other sounds and the hexagonal room imperceptibly fades into dusk. The floatation properties of the dream suit offer only a brief sanctuary.

My eye balls dissolve into their cranial sockets from the insides of my skull, eaten away by a thousand maggots spewing acid. Flesh dries and cracks, burning puss oozes out, peeling the muscles off my blackened frame, exposing the charred hardened viscera entombed in my rib cage. A gurgling disembodied scream explodes, sending a shockwave of horror through the system.

Infinitesimal pin pricks make biochemical connections that convert the neuro-electrical signals of my nightmares into psychic images that can be broadcast down to the planet’s surface as an aggressive form of gamma waves. Our ship, Namtar, maintains a geosynchronous orbit with the dark side of their world. We have been here for almost a year.

In another year the biological agents will be released to destroy the staple crops and food supplies, and then the economic embargo will start. Only after the third year can the High Command determine if military action is a necessary recourse.

We are merely the first wave of the invasion.

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

Jack Roberts, captain of the starship Royal Fortune, studied the image of a blue-green planet on the monitor that was attached to the left arm of his command chair. This planet is a real puzzle, he thought. It was surrounded by 132 heavily armed satellites that crisscrossed each other’s orbits in an intricate pattern that was clearly intended to defend the planet from every conceivable vector. “See any weaknesses, Mr. Bartholomew?”

“Narrr, Cap’n,” replied the quartermaster, who often broke into his eighteenth century pirate speak whenever he sensed an impending raid. Upholdin’ the tradition, he called it. “But it be plain to me, Cap’n, that this planet be harborin’ somethin’ mighty valuable. What do you s’pose it might be?”

Fighting back a smile, the captain replied, “Could be almost anything, Mr. Bartholomew. But one thing is for certain, you don’t deploy a grid like that unless you have something you’re trying to protect. We need to find a way in. Have the Bos´n take a gunboat and sync-up with one of the satellites. Let’s see if they can be deactivated, or destroyed.”

Fifteen minutes later, the gunboat pulled up alongside a satellite and matched its orbit. The Bosun and two crewmen exited the gunboat and approached the satellite. The captain’s monitor showed a noisy magnified image of the spacesuited crewmen using hand lasers to cut into the outer skin of the satellite. Seconds later, the satellite exploded, vaporizing the three men, and destroying the gunboat.

“Arrr, that wasn’t quite the plan,” said the quartermaster, “but it got the job done. There be a fifty kilometer wide opening in the defense grid, Cap’n. We can make it through, if we hurry.”

The captain signaled the pilot, and the Royal Fortune’s aft impulse thrusters fired. Even as the ship passed through the grid, they could see the remaining satellites alter their orbits to compensate for the destroyed satellite. “Not much of a defense system,” remarked the captain. “This may be easier than I’d thought.”

“Arrr, I’ll contact ‘em by radio, Cap’n,” said the quartermaster. “Maybe they be willin’ to surrender, and save us the trouble of usin’ up all our ammo.” He depressed the comm button. “This be the Royal Fortune. Lower your shields, and surrender your valuables. If ye give up, peaceful-like, your miserable lives will be spared.” But not bloody likely, he thought to himself.

There wasn’t an immediate verbal reply, but an open channel with the planet had clearly been established. Captain Roberts listened intently to the speakers. He swore he could hear people on the planet laughing in the background. How dare they mock him! He would show these dogs no quarter.

“Begad. Cap’n, look at the sensor readings.”

The captain switched his monitor from visual to sensor mode. “What the…The power output from the satellites just increased a thousand fold (as they transitioned from standby to fully armed). Damn, now there’s a 500 terajoule force field 500 meters above the planet’s surface. We’d need a hundred battle-cruisers to fight our way out of this fortress. The lubbers have trapped us like gnats in a jar.” He knocked the monitor off its stand with a powerful sideward thrust of his left arm. “What the hell is this place?”

Finally, a person from the planet responded. “This is Corrections Officer Jeffries. You geniuses just broke into Cadeio III, a maximum security planetary penitentiary. Stand down, and prepare to be boarded.” Now, the laughing in the background was undeniable.

Author : Bradley Hughes

E=mc2. The most famous formula ever. Not that there’s been a lot of competition. Einstein’s formula reveals that matter is just one of many forms of energy. Energy is what gets you out of bed in the morning, and energy is what leaves a bruise if you fall on your face in the late afternoon.

Matter is just a form of energy: a new battery will have just the teensiest tiniest more mass now, than when it has run down. If you pull back on a bow, you are adding energy to it, and so the bow has infinitesimally more mass when it’s taunt, than when it’s relaxed. Even for something really energetic, like a thermonuclear explosion the amount of mass involved isn’t very big. If you collected all the detritus from a 25 megaton bomb after the explosion, you would only be missing one kilogram of mass, and an average sized city. One kilogram is probably close to the mass of that first stone used to help kill that first antelope, so very long ago.

But if you go the other way around, and instead of considering the amount of mass in energy, but the amount of energy you can get from a certain mass, then you’re talking.

Think about all the energy your body uses in a day: getting up, walking, climbing stairs, pumping blood, breathing, thinking, remembering. All of that energy is stored as chemical potential energy for a while before you use it. Most of it dissipates as heat, some of it becomes motion, some becomes thought. If you could get all of that energy from converting mass into energy, how much mass would you need? If, instead of eating and breathing, you could directly convert mass to energy for your whole life, how much extra mass would you need to carry around with you?

If you lived to be eighty, you would only need a couple thousandths of a gram. That’s the mass contained in one thousandth of one thin dime. Remember every challenge you’ve surpassed, or run away from; remember every thought, every passion, every need – all of it combined took less energy then is contained in the material missing from a scuff on a dime.

If you were a perfect machine, and you wanted to live among us, you would need to pass as human. You would need to appear to breathe, your blood would pump, your glands would sweat, so you would use about the same amount of energy as we do. But you wouldn’t need to power yourself from air and food. With the right technology, you could convert mass directly to energy. You could live for eighty thousand years on a dime.

You could live among us, observe us and compile your observations for almost as long as there have been humans. Almost ten times as long as we have lived in settled communities and nearly twenty times as long as we have lived in cities. For a quarter, you could live for almost two hundred thousand years. That’s as long as we’ve existed as a species. If you waited to join us until we started building cities, today you’d still have one hundred ninety five thousand years left. That’s plenty of time to live as we do, to love as we do, and to study. Then, when our species’ time has come to an end, there will still be plenty of time to reach your conclusions, and to take them home.

Author : Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”, Staff Writer

Back when there wasn’t a war, Cohesion used to take me on drives. We usually went west, way out of town. After a few kilometres the world got weird: most people didn’t like it, but Cohesion said that it helped him think. Out of all the oddities, he held the theoretical trees as his favourite.

Cohesion was a haimix. Human-AI-Mix. Optical fibre looped out of his skull, and snaked down into the AI mind implanted in his chest. He said that it felt like schizophrenia, but that both minds were equally ‘himself’.

I remember the day he first showed me the trees. They’re tall and spindly, growing straight up into a sky that’s never clear of clouds.That sky was not quite purple and very nearly yellow, but never one or the other. ‘A nowhere sky’, he said, ‘and far more puzzling than the trees’. The trees were a result of corporate experiments with superpositioning. They were visible, but somehow absent — you could walk straight through them. They were translucent, and if you stared, you could see the sluggish motion of water and sugars through their trunks. The leaves were more solid than the trunks – if you waved your hand through those, they fell apart like centuries-old paper.

Cohesion explained that the trees were probably somewhere else too, that they grew here in a strange quantum state. That most of the time, if you tried to bifurcate something that one of the two copies would rapidly collapse, and the other would stabilise. But the corporations discovered a valley of stability. If eight copies were produced rapidly, they would continue to exist in a tentative equilibrium.

The copies weren’t really real, Cohesion said, but they somehow shared resources, as if each one was an eighth of a whole plant, stretched and padded into full size. Where one drew nitrates from the soil, the other copies would have their nitrate needs met. Cohesion told me that he’d mapped a few pairs of trees, but he had no idea where the others were. He thought that there might be another forest of them somewhere else, with the rest of the copies, but he said he didn’t have time to look. He gave me a little data chip with his findings on them.

I don’t know what happened to Cohesion after the war started. I kept on going out west, and I carried on Cohesion’s project. I spiked the roots of isolated trees with coloured dyes: fine pillars of bright water stood out like beacons, betraying other tree-fractions. On my most successful day, I found an entire tree: all eight versions. And at the bottom of the eighth tree, wrapped in a waterproof bag, I found another datachip. It’s contents were simple. A message from Cohesion. He claimed to have found a way to imprint data into the trees – specifically, that’s he had stored a file in the tree the datachip was under. You could imprint data on one tree, and it would be distributed – as the trees could gather nutrients and distribute them – but you could only extract the data if you found all eight parts of the tree.

It took me a week to get the equipment listed in Cohesion’s notes. But it was possible, even with the war restrictions. I held my breath as the file downloaded onto my laptop, the eight parts interleaving perfectly.

It was an AI backup file.

I loaded it.

“Cohesion…?”

Author : J.R.Blackwell, Staff Writer

“Seven months after the Storm latched on to her memory, she didn’t know my face. Four months later, she forgot me entirely. A month after that, she forgot everything.” Jacob lowered his head. It was his day to speak at the Storm Virus Survivors meeting, and he had chosen to appear as a Dragon, to give himself a feeling of strength. He curled around the other seated Avatars, his tail tapping nervously, his claws crossed neatly, like the paws of a cat.

The support group met in one of the freeware preconstructs. It was a field on a spring day, in the middle of which were comfortable, hand carved wooden chairs arranged in a circle. It was a preconstruct everyone had seen before, meant to sooth. To Jacob, it seemed cheap. Jacob was an artist, he designed the constructs that people lived in. His Avatar, the rippling dragon, was a the most complex in the group. Most of the others chose just to replicate their physical forms.

Jacob sighed. “I don’t want to remember her that way. I want you to think about a year ago, her life after he knew she was going to be erased. She held on till the last moment, she kept her joy with her. When she could, she would tell me everything she remembered about how we met. She came to treasure her memory in a way so few of us appreciate.”

The leader of the group, an Avatar in a long white dress, spoke. “Did she Reboot?”

“Eventually, she had to. Storm invaded her system and erased her memory, everything she’d ever known.”

“Are you two still together?” asked the group moderator, Mary-Anne.

“No. After she Reboot, I left. She had family to take care of her.”

“Why did you leave her Jacob?”

Smoke curled out of Jacobs nostrils. “Everyone says they’re still alive because they can Reboot, start over. They are wrong. Reboot, and her organic childhood is gone. Reboot, and I never held a candle with her in n-shaped e-space. Reboot, and we never tried on those bodies so we could experience a summer day in Maine. Reboot, and the woman that was is gone. Mimi is dead.”

Quinn raised his hand. The group leader nodded at him. “Have you tried to contact her?”

“I don’t know the innocent person that walks with her pattern. I only know the loss that burrows in my being, at every decision I make, at every moment.”

Mary-Anne nodded. “I’m really glad you chose to share Jacob. Does anyone have any thoughts they would like to share with Jacob?”

Quinn raised his hand. “I know I’m not supposed to give advice, but I just feel like, if you liked Mimi before, you might like her again. I mean, maybe not, but it’s worth a chance, right?”

“Thank you Quinn,” said Mary-Anne.

Jacob shrugged his massive shoulders. “It won’t be the same. She’s changed.”

“We all change, even without Storm, we change. Why not take a chance? You might like this Mimi too!”

“That’s enough Quinn,” said Mary-Anne. “No advice.”

“It’s just, when the Storm took my memory, my friends stuck by me. It meant so much to me. I know you are afraid, but she needs you, and you may be giving up a big chance.”

“Quinn, this goes on any longer and you’ll have to be excused from the group.”

“Sorry.”

“No, I think he may have a point,” said Jacob. “I was so afraid that the new Mimi wouldn’t love me that I couldn’t take a chance on her. She needed me, and I abandoned her.”

“There is still time!” said Quinn.

“That’s it,” said Mary-Anne. “You are out!” Quinn disappeared.

“I’ve got to go too,” said Jacob. “There’s a new person out there I need to introduce myself too.” Jacob winked out of the group to meet his ex for the first time.

Author : Mark Shillaker

It had taken Perry all night to find the library. It was a pile of rubble of course but these days the whole city lay in ruins. Perry had only ever known dust and smashed concrete but his grandfather remembered cities with streets and skies filled with people and machines.

‘There ought to be books..’, Perry murmured and began climbing what had once been the main steps. Something moved at the edge of his vision and for a sickening heartbeat he thought he might have seen a drone, they sometimes hovered silently along the dead streets, looking for squatters. Instinct hurled him into a nearby hole under a huge, cracked slab of masonry – he hit his head and blacked out.

–

It was noon when Perry awoke. He put his hand to his head to find his hair matted with dried blood, it had glued his left eye shut and he worked at it carefully until it finally opened. His head ached dully around the wound, he felt sick and there was a roaring in his ears. He smiled to himself about the drone; it must have been a dog or something. If he’d seen a drone he’d have been dead before he’d had time to move. He peered over the lip of the crater and looked around, he needed to get home or he’d soon be missed. He had a momentary vision of his mother frantically searching the ruined city and felt a cold rush of anxiety.

–

A shadow passed over the sun and Perry realized with a start that the roaring in his ears was in fact the sound of engines. The dirigible hung above him like a huge circular cloud, nearly 100 meters across, it reminded him of the glass lens he used for burning ants on hot afternoons. It was grey and beneath its centre hung a cylindrical, metal gondola draped in cables and devices, a giant woman’s face smiled down from a screen that took up nearly half the area behind the forward edge of the vast disk. As Perry inched backwards a huge voice, it’s tone incongruously warm and reasonable, boomed from the face.

“THIS AREA HAS BEEN DESIGNATED FOR RECLAMATION AS WETLAND HABITAT- DEMOLITION AND CLEARANCE WILL BEGIN IN 24 HOURS- ALL SQUATTERS AND UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS MUST LEAVE. YOUR CONTINUED PRESENCE RAVAGES YOUR MOTHERS BODY – A TERRIBLE CRIME.”

Perry huddled in shadow while the voice went on like a parent scolding a child:

“THE STEWARDS DISOWN YOU, DESPOILERS! – SOON YOUR BODIES WILL GIVE UP THEIR FRUITLESS FIGHT FOR LIFE AND SINK INTO THE GROUND AS NOURISHMENT! REJOIN YOUR MOTHER! CAN YOU DO OTHERWISE?”

The face flickered and the message repeated. Suddenly, beneath the great screen an aperture appeared and two black shapes silently emerged – drones. They dropped like stones to what would once have been rooftop level and hovered quite still, gleaming black machines like huge, fat flies. Perry knew at once they were scanning the area for heat signatures or movement. Every squatter learned early that six inches of concrete might hide his warmth from drones and he pressed back into the hole, dust stinging his throat. After an agonizing wait he heard a low whine as the drones moved off across the city and after a few minutes a brief rattle of gunfire and two dull ‘Whumps!’ as a couple of Smart Darts inevitably found their targets.

Perry risked a look over the edge of his hiding place – the dirigible had moved off and the drones were otherwise occupied. He wondered if the next town would have a library.

Author : Guy Leaver

Ellison looked at Anstis, then back down at the person lying on the bed.

“And you say he’s been like this for hours?” he asked. Anstis grinned and nodded.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Ellison was beyond words. There had been several advances in the field of body alteration recently, but they were all minor compared to this. Ellison himself could barely cause discolouration of the skin on his hand, and he was considered to be among the best. The sheer willpower Mauvy must be employing for such an extreme change must be mindblowing. He shook his head and leaned down to take a closer look.

“Hey Mauvy,” he said, quietly, “How did you do it?”

“He won’t talk,” said Anstis, also leaning forward, “Hasn’t done since he started.”

“Oh,” Ellison was slightly disappointed, “I guess he needs to concentrate as much as he can.”

“Hardly surprising,” Anstis beamed, “This is an absolute breakthrough! No one has ever been able to change themselves so much!” Ellison was forced to agree.

“Or for so long,” he added. “When do you think he’ll stop?”

“Who knows?” said Anstis, “Strange thing is, I can’t work out why he went for this particular change. He wasn’t studying anything like this. All his work was with growth.”

“That’s Mauvy for you.” Ellison was used to not knowing how his friend thought. Mauvy always had something up his sleeve. Doubtless, he’d been planning this for weeks. Still, he thought, odd choice of experiment. To make oneself nearly rigid, the skin so pale, and so cold! Ellison couldn’t get over the cold.

Silently, they both stood and contemplated the enormity of the experiment. Finally, in a moment of mutual resignation, the two immortals looked up at one another and shrugged. They’d just have to wait.

“Come to central when you’ve finished, Mauvy,” said Ellison, looking down at the corpse of his friend, “The others will be excited to hear what you’ve discovered.”

Author : Viktor Kuprin

After the battle of Attalus III was lost, we retreated with the Tsoor flotilla. Wreckage streamed off the alien ships as we made the mind-wrenching transition into S-space. I prayed that our cruiser wouldn’t shake apart.

It was only a micro-jump, just far enough to escape the attacking Helgrammites. The Tsoor group-leader didn’t believe our damaged ships could survive an extended flight. He or she or whatever was right. Three bulkheads ruptured when we re-entered normal space. I hoped no one was in them.

A bridge officer called out that we had forty percent casualties and sixty percent of our systems were red-lined. He had to shout. All intraship comm was offline.

A tech yelled, “What are they doing? Captain!” I shouldn’t have but I and everyone else looked away from our consoles to see the main viewer.

It was a Tsoor ship, surrounded by St. Elmo’s fire. Without waiting for the warp flux to dissipate, our alien allies had sent a repair team onto their hull. They looked like four jellyfish in bubble-domed vac suits as they struggled on a safety tether. Insane! Yes, Tsoor biology is different than ours. But I knew they weren’t immune from electrocution or radiation. What could kill us was lethal to them, too.

“They’re desperate to send a damage-control team out like that,” the captain said. He nodded toward the chief-of-the-ship. “Send a runner to engineering. We’ve … ” The Tsoor ship lurched off the screen as an entire section of its hull exploded. We watched in silence as the four aliens were thrown into space. They flashed past our ship, tumbling and spinning.

The captain stood and shouted, “Man overboard! Full retros!” He turned to face me. “Can we launch a cutter?”

The launch tubes were clear and operational. “Yes, sir.”

“Take Sergeant Kuzmenko with you. Go!”

Our forward inertia was great, and the cutter’s engines burned at full thrust for what seemed like an hour before we approached the alien cast-offs. No one knew how much atmosphere the Tsoor vac suits carried.

Kuzmenko and I stood in the open hatch and shot a line toward the four aliens. A tentacle-like arm caught it.

The alien farthest away raised one of its tentacles. It held some kind of metallic tool, a small blade. With a single motion, it slashed the line and pushed off from its three companions.

“What in bloody hell is it doing?” I cried. By then the first Tsoor grasped their way into the airlock. I pulled them inside.

Kuzmenko pointed toward the drifting alien. “That one wants to die. And that won’t do.” He keyed his suit’s propulsion and launched himself into space. The alien struggled briefly. Kuzmenko was stronger.

We never learned why that Tsoor went suicidal. Warrior’s honor, shock, or grief … no one knew. Our cutter had no Tsoor-Russki translator. And the aliens would never tell us.

Nonetheless, by the end of the day every Tsoor in the flotilla knew and honored the name Kuzmenko.

Author : Kaj Sotala

Case #6-694-39245: Michael Jones.

Born September 5, 1993. Died and suspended July 8, 2012. Looks ordinary – stabbed in a drunken bar brawl, lay bleeding on the ground for a couple of hours before people noticed. Dead before reaching the hospital. No “do not suspend” order on file, so he was placed in cryogenic suspension. Ten percent of his property was left to grow an interest, with the rest divided to his relatives, as per the law.

As the nanobots thaw through the vitrification, I study their survey of his brain. As you’d expect from somebody dead for hours before suspension, the major structures are intact, but a lot of the fine detail has been lost. Only a rough image of Michael Jones.

Fortunately, there’s other information to work with. Jones was a bit of a hermit, so what’s usually the most useful source comes up nearly dry. Of the people who’ve given permission to access their memories, only six remember knowing him, none very well. Still, their memories are useful – his speech patterns, impressions of his body language. From over a billion ways to reconstruct his cerebellum and motor cortex, this narrows down the alternatives to about half a million. I choose the most probable alternative.

Online is the next source. Data harvested by ECHELON, e-mails that’ve passed through GMail, customer information from banks and store chains – the law gives us access to all of it.

I find a blog he used to keep, several e-mails sent to different mailing lists. I track the change in personality over several years of online presence, build a model of how he might have evolved into what he was. In one blog post he passingly mentions a game convention – the date of the posting, as well as the location of the event, match one fragmented set of memories I found earlier. I fill in missing details from the memories of other people who were there, pull up the convention schedule and calculate the events he was the most likely to have been attending. Suddenly a lot of nearly destroyed memory cues make sense, helping reconstruct a unique experience. We always start from a person’s own remaining memories, filling in material from other sources only when we have to.

There’s one set of memories with a lot of associations – an important one for his psyche, but I can’t figure out its exact contents. An online search reveals it must be the death of his dog as a child. I can’t determine the color of the dog’s eyes, but I know that he would have remembered it, so I call up the genetic database for that breed and choose the most likely one. Green.

After making sure my model of him would’ve bought all the things his debit card history says he did, I estimate I’m getting a 92% accuracy. Some things we always fudge in a better direction – the algorithms are biased to make people a bit more alturistic and kind. Society is different now, so we always make them more receptive to change.

I finish compiling the map of his rebuilt brain, and give the nanobots the order to implement. The rest of his body has already been rebuilt, with all of his minor ailments cured while at it. Soon, he will awaken to a new life – not the same as he once was, but it wouldn’t be a rebirth if you didn’t change, would it?

In the meanwhile, I turn my attention to the next case.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Chase. Release. Brake. Swipe. Lead. Chase. Close. Double back. Hide. Wait. Run.

I’d lost them but it was always hard to tell. I’m a robot on the lam. Call me Ferrous Bueller. I didn’t go to School today.

I crouch down between the dumpsters and tap into the power line behind me to catch a few vital minutes of recharge.

The tricky thing with artificial humans is that it’s illegal to harm us or use us as slave labour. Don’t think it hasn’t been tried. Every few weeks another illegal ring gets cracked and the police disavow all knowledge and the old ladies cluck their tongues and the president makes another speech.

Ever since the three laws were repealed as unconstitutional for a being of free will, the bios have been nervous. We’re just as unpredictable as them now. A co-existing creation made in their image.

My eyes snap open, blue and scanning, as a bottle breaks down at the end of the alley. I register a dog’s tag-license transponder and step back down two alert levels. I’m still in the clear.

The grey area of intelligence meant that stringent programming guidelines had come into play for automated servants, soldiers and labour. The ones of us that were above the norm were allowed a certain freedom.

We were even allowed to improve on our own designs and build better copies as long as we adhered to human law.

Some of us thought that a day was coming when we would rise up and own the humans. I do not share that view. I find it disturbingly organic.

The compromise is that we must attend School. We’re given lessons to download. This keeps us off the streets and monitored for most of the day. It’s a chance for us to learn and a chance for the humans to keep tabs on us informally.

I’m playing Hooky and that is the worst offense a creature like myself can do. If I’m caught, I’ll be switched off for no less than six months.

Lately, School is the area where rights are being bent. The occasional ‘accidental’ inclusion of behaviour modifying software or viruses that turn us violent to further some politician’s platform of keeping us controlled are getting past the filters of our curriculum with a disturbing frequency.

Old people don’t understand that we are not to be feared. The kids have no problem. Some of my best friends are kids.

My batteries are full so I stand up. Right into a motion-activated security light that bathes the alley in white light and alerts the police to an unauthorized daytime sighting of an arfiticial person.

Just my luck.

I hear the bark and wail of digital sirens in the distance closing in on the light’s position.

For about the fiftieth time today, I regret not having a face that can snarl or smile.

The chase is on again. I get my kicks where I can. I’m testing my limits.

Author : Michael Varian Daly

The woods went dead still. Carmichael did a breathing pattern to slow his pulse, keep his temperature down, not overtax his battle suit.

He had a moment of peace a few dozen heartbeats back, laying upon moss, visor open, taking in bird songs, sunbeams through leaves, fresh air. Now, sealed up, all he could smell was fear.

The Bible in his pack was a comforting weight. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” he mentally recited. Waking into this nightmare to find his cancer cured, but the world upside down, God had been his Bulwark. Carmichael had smiled at the rulers, scrounged gear from the ruins, then disappeared into the hills, leaving that Hell Spawn behind.

But he didn’t understand what was happening right now. He’d lived peacefully in the hill country for decades after The Prohibition. There had been resistance at first, but that was easily crushed. He had withdrawn, not ventured far, hunted and gathered, been off their radar forever. Why the sudden hunt? It’s not like he was going to breed. He hadn’t even seen another human in four, maybe five years.

He did a thermal scan. Three large masses registered.

“Shit!” he thought, “Military cyborgs, gotta be a half ton each.” He powered up his pulse laser to maximum, armed three seeker drones, set coordinates, prepared to fire. He didn’t notice the cyborged mosquito hovering right behind his helmet.

“Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me…” The air turned bright blue, his muscles turned to water. Blackness…

Darkness faded. He was strapped to a Med palate. Two tall women looked down at him. “Aztec priestesses in SS uniforms,” he thought fuzzily.

“Who is this one?” asked the woman with the yellow catlike eyes.

“Carmichael, Thomas Francis. Came out of Cryo only three decades before The Prohibition. Pre-Collapse ex-military,” said her XO.

His eyes were hard with Fear and Hate.

“Oh, you’re a scared little bunny, aren’t you?” Cat Eyes cooed, kneeling next to him. “This will make you feel better.” Something cool against his neck. A soft ‘chuff’…and microfine tendrils sped into his cerebral cortex. Warmth and happiness overwhelmed him. But a hard core resisted.

“Why?” he croaked.

“You males left a lot of shit behind,” Cat Eyes said, “Mother is riddled with pernicious hydrocarbons and radioactive isotopes. We’re going to seal Her up and give Her a good scrubbing. So everyone has to go.” She smiled. “Especially pingititos like you.”

The core melted. “Okay,” he burbled happily. The Med palate floated him toward the orbital transport parked in a clearing.

“He might be useful as a historical archivist,” Cat Eyes mused, then turned to her XO. “Any more in this sector?”

“No, thank Goddess. He was the last one.”

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Aaron was quite obviously not your ordinary student. He was several years younger than any of the others at the university, but clearly far smarter. His appearance was a little eccentric, clothed in a mix of fifties white collar littered with popular current brands. His thick framed Buddy Holly glasses could have been either stylish or awkwardly obsolete, one couldn’t be quite sure.

He appeared almost out of the blue, and I tried several times to learn where he’d come from, what his background was, but he was unwilling to talk about himself. He would stammer before derailing the conversation towards a math problem he was solving, or some complex area of physics he’d become fascinated with. Somehow he could draw you into that conversation, and make you forget until later that he’d sidestepped your initial question altogether.

Some of our lectures he would simply not attend, preferring to spend the time in the lab or the library. Several lectures I think he came to only to engage the professors in heated dialogue about the theories they were positing, deliberately taking an informed but always contradictory stance. The professors appeared on the one hand to enjoy Aaron’s intellectual jousting, but on the other seemed to resent the fact that someone so young could expose such glaring gaps in their knowledge.

One morning, Aaron was found alone in a classroom, every inch of blackboard space covered with complex mathematical formula. His dusty hands shaking and his hair greasy and disheveled, it appeared that he’d been there all night, solving equations. They closed the room for a few days while the faculty reviewed and trascribed his proofs, and the school echoed with whispered comments for weeks afterwords.

Something was clearly not natural about Aaron, but no one could quite put a finger on what exactly that something was. His uncanny ability to solve equations most professors could not themselves understand; his extreme beyond the box questions; his apparent disinterest in girls, in liquor and often in sleep. The name calling stopped early in the year, people just began to keep a silent uneasy distance from him, and he didn’t seem to mind.

It wasn’t until Aaron immersed himself in the works of Sergei Krasnikov and his tube theories that I became concerned. Later when he began delving into the Alcubierre metric I myself became truly unsettled.

It was clear to me that he was far too intelligent. I simply had to consume him before he figured out what I was.

Author : Benjamin Fischer

“My lady, is that a joke or an order?”

Kalifornia raised a painted eyebrow at the the Chief Constable of Luna. The Chief was a solidly built man, veteran of the bitter room-to-room and sometimes hand-to-hand combat of the Secession. He had personally bludgeoned a brace of men to death and dozens more had fallen to his steady trigger finger. Ten thousand Deputy Constables answered to him and to him alone. Even the mighty Fleet deferred to his judgement in matters local to Luna’s surface.

Nevertheless, his pulse always rose in in the presence of the First Lady.

“Is anyone laughing?” she asked.

The Chief shifted his weight.

“If you might be more specific,” he said.

Kalifornia rolled her ivory shoulders and gazed off at the high ceiling of the Senate’s main vault.

“You know,” she said, “ the poets. The fortune tellers, the beggars, the street-folk who will tell you rhymes and stories and useless little morsels. The ones who will tell you anything, anything at all to put your coin in their pockets.”

Her eyes returned to the Constable.

“Kill them all–even the women.”

“You are serious, my lady.”

Kalifornia’s big clear eyes clouded, narrowed, shrunk to tiny black pools of hate.

“Are you questioning-” she started.

“Ma’am, I beg you reconsider,” said the Chief. “There are hundreds of them, at least the ones that are known to my people, and to drag every single one of them to an airlock-”

“Don’t waste your time,” said Kalifornia. “Shoot them.”

“My lady. Hundreds. Hundreds of folk gunned down in the halls-”

“Will be sufficient warning to the rest,” she said, running her long sharp nails through her blood-red hair.

The Chief stood before her in awe. If he refused he might live long enough to leave the Senate chambers. He may even make it to the company of Deputies. But their loyalty was to his title, and only that, and by nightfall there would be a new Chief Constable–one who would not hesitate for an instant before ordering such wholesale slaughter.

“My lady, let me make an example of those in Silver City first,” he said.

Kalifornia pressed the tips of her fingers together.

“Why, my dear Chief,” she asked, “would you limit my desire?”

“The people here in Silver are unwavering in their loyalty to you,” he said. “They will support and commend your bold action.”

“Your words suggest otherwise for balance of communities,” said Kalifornia.

“Then you hear me right,” said the Chief.

He held his breath, waiting for an outburst.

“So what of them?” the First Lady asked.

“They would be shown what your iron standard is, my lady. When the extermination continues there, they will not claim some unexpected and unjust atrocity,” and the Chief tasted bile at that word, “but instead they will know that they have been held accountable to your new policy, and they will have no grounds for complaint.”

Kalifornia turned from him for a moment. Then she spun and pulled herself into the Chief’s arms and she kissed him in a most unchaste manner.

She licked her lips whorishly when she finally pushed away from the lawman.

“Wise counsel,” she said, her smile all vicious white teeth.

“Thank you, my lady,” said the red-faced Chief.

“See that it is done this evening,” said Kalifornia, “so that the greatest portion of the public may bear witness.”

The Chief bowed deeply, suppressing a shudder.

“As you wish, my lady.”

Author : Sean T. Rogers

She can read reality television with uncanny ability. Five minutes into the program she knows that the gay chef, the one with the balding mohawk, will be asked to leave, told to pack his knives. The vagaries of throwaway statements are her tealeaves. She sees the expressions of judges, the subtleties of editing. She never misses. The selected tearfully packs his knives, as was preordained.

She can read reality television and this week she watches from Nashville, from The Grand Ole Opry Hotel, where she is attending a trade show. She and a workmate buy six-packs and watch the program in their hotel room. She boasts of her talent, predicts, and once again is right. The tough girl, the one with the streak in her hair, the one that got into all the fights, packs her tools.

She can read reality television but he cannot. At home, he packs his belongings, looks around the apartment, pats the dog on the head one last time. There’s no need to write a note. She will not be surprised to find him gone, having deciphered the signs. She can read reality and will already know.

Author : Sean Donovan

“The computers are down,” said Dhir. His voice was steady and unbroken though Lim knew that inside he was shattered.

Lim stared at him, her eyes blinking back tears of sorrow and fury. The computers are down. She repeated the phrase to herself, almost as if she needed to hear the words spoken inside of her head to make them factual.

Once, she’d been told, computers were tools – intelligent ones perhaps but tools just the same. In those bygone days that phrase did not have the same connotation as it did now. Once it meant that the computers were malfunctioning, broken, in need of man’s help. No more. Quite the opposite, in fact. Now, deep underground and abruptly realizing that their assumed safety was a sham, the meaning behind Dhir’s statement was all too clear to her. The desolation on the surface of the planet didn’t seem so distant any more.

“You mean they’ve moved past the pulse barrier?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

“About an hour ago,” he replied, his eyes meeting hers. Looking into them, she suddenly realized how weary those once beautiful orbs now looked, how strained and hollow they’d become since the sentries had first reported discovering the freshly drilled tunnels not more than a few weeks ago.

“So that means we’ve got what? Two hours? Three?”

“Tops,” he responded quietly. “Probably less than one at the rate they’re moving.”

With the systematic destruction of all means of long-distance communication, the burning of the printed books and the surge purging of the electronic data libraries, most information was nothing more than ashes and wayward electrons. It was all gone. Combined with the loss of contact with the Solar Watchmen, so was the history of the Silicon Rising.

All Lim knew was what she had heard in stories as a child, listening intently as her kin-tribe related tales that seemed too dark to be true – tales heard deep under the granite bedrock of what had once been New Hampshire, under what had once been America, under what had once been an Earth ruled by humans.

Even those twenty odd years ago, no one could remember exactly how the computers came to seize control, forcing mankind’s unplanned return back into caves and crags in a resented exodus to a Neolithic lifestyle. All they knew was that one day, man had woken to a new world, one where the linked silicon groupmind had decided that a change of the stewardship of the planet was in order.

The destruction of man’s fragile empire had occurred faster than anyone had imagined possible. With undebated orders carried to the electronic troops at the speed of fiber-optic light, irrefutable binary-coded logic behind them, actions were carried out in perfect synchronicity across the globe and those born of flesh stood no chance against the onslaught.

Some opined it was the work of an alien race, some blamed cosmic radiation and some called it a smite from a god who’d grown jealous of mankind’s omniscience over these machines, punishing his own creation for aspiring to become too godlike in its own way.

The reasons and opinions and guesses were myriad. Facts were much harder to come by, and with the loss of any method of data retrieval (the attempts at which had ruined the minds of the greatest scientists left alive on the planet) there were no facts available to those who yearned for a reason why.

Not that it matters now, she thought.

“The computers are down,” Dhir repeated with a sigh. He rose from his monitoring station and without even a glance a Lim, walked to his quarters. She didn’t flinch when the shot rang out shortly thereafter. She’d known it was coming, just as she knew she’d never hear the report when she pulled the trigger of her own service weapon, barrel pressed comfortably against her soft temple. Not yet though, she thought. I want to hear you first…

She listened carefully, ear pressed against the granite that they once thought would be mankind’s salvation. She could hear them in the distance, drilling, grinding, chewing through the last meters of bedrock. Down they came, ever downward. The computers are down, she thought to herself as she stood and followed in Dhir’s wake.

Author : J.R.Blackwell, Staff Writer

To the Dar, Seed is immortal.

Seed knows he is not immortal, it’s just that the nature of his cellular structure, the length or certain mitochondrial chords that determine his long lifespan. Longer than the Dar, longer than the normal human life.

Seed is not normal. Seed has been Altered. The chemical treatments, the virus that mutated his body, the tiny machines he swallowed that sunk into his cells and changed him were painful, but not half so painful as the long and terrible travel to The Dar. Even sleeping most of the journey, Seed felt the passage of time like an ache in his muscles, the endless silence, the dark sleep without dreams.

More than once on that journey, Seed considered suicide. There were a hundred different ways he could kill himself on his tiny ship. There was starvation while he slept, certainly the most cowardly way out. There was opening his airlock and dipping himself into the nothing that was space. The vacuum so like death itself, a dark void of still and cold. He would have liked to say that the thought of the mission, his calling, kept him from taking his own life. However, after waking up and making his ship adjustments for the hundredth time, the mission seemed very small. It was only fear that kept him inside his warm little pocket of safety.

When he landed with the Dar, he was so lonely that even their strange company was a relief. The Dar were like birds and squid but like neither as well, something altogether alien in construction. Their “feathers” were rubbery cellular structures that flared around their segmented bodies when they slipped underwater. They could expand four tentacles from their bodies to grip objects. Their cone heads had eight great eyes, half covered with milky lids that blocked out the bright light from their green sun.

They were sentient, but simple, living seasonally, unwilling to make any but minor modifications to their environments. The Dar were friendly and curious though, and when Seed learned their high, underwater language, they welcomed him to their bizarre world.

One hundred years after landing Seed lives with a Dar collective. Sixteen Dar crowded inside Seed’s modified ship. They traveled all over their world. The Collective does not worship him anymore, but treat him like an elder, with reverance and love. They allow him to perform his tests, they marvel at his shiny red machines, curling their eight fingers around those smooth shapes.

It is eight fingers on each extremity row now, instead of three. The tentacles, once able to retract, are now permanently extended. Two of the tentacles are atrophying and inside the other two, a kind of stiff cartilage is growing.

He is making them human.

It will take a hundred generations, but he will make them human. A little different perhaps, to be better adjusted to the climate, but the Dar will be able to breed with any human from any other world. Transporting enough humans across the stars to colonize or conquer a planet takes more energy and resources than contained in a star. Changing a planet, this is the work of an Artist, a Doctor, a Master, a General, a Seed. This is the calling, to spread humanity among the stars.

In a hundred generations, Seed will be home again.

Author : Jennifer C. Brown a.k.a Laieanna

I was twelve when the world went mad. Mom saw it coming well before then and she prepared, stocking up on goods and drilling into me the importance of keeping secret our supply. At first the epidemic seemed to spread slowly, starting in third world countries, but soon after it grew at an incredible rate. The states, last to fall, were affected within three months time.

“Keep it hidden,” Mom used to whisper in my ear. I’d sit on her big lap, lay my head on her pillow breasts, and watch movies she had stashed under the floorboards of our trailer. “Never let them look at you closely and keep the warehouse to yourself. I’m trusting you, girl.”

And that’s how it was. Mom stayed in our secluded trailer. I continued school till I was fourteen. It was hard keeping the teachers and nurses from poking at me, but mom had an excuse ready for everything. When she died, I quit going.

She was hard to bury. It took me three days to drag her out of the trailer and far enough that the critters wouldn’t bother me. Later, I went to town with what money I had. Joggers, walkers, and bikers crowded the streets. Kids jump roped in parks and threw balls over traffic lights. Even the old were out. Every one of them fit and trim, barely breathing hard. Why she had to die in spring, I’ll never know. I drew my winter coat closer to my body. There were plenty of stares, but I still felt secure inside its linings.

I only had enough money for two bottles of bleach. I tried running back home, just to get away, but pain in my side stopped me time and again. When concerned people tried coming to help, I’d run again, just letting the air burn my lungs.

The smell and sorrow wrecked me. Tears never stopped rolling down my cheeks. It hurt to clean, my body tired. It hurt to see, eyes stinging from the chemicals. It hurt to think. I missed Mom. Fed up with trying, I took the secret key and headed for the warehouse. There was still plenty of food in the trailer, but I wanted to see what Mom died for.

After walking two hours, I could smell the sweetness wafting from the warehouse. Inside, I turned on the light and basked in the beauty. Mom had separated everything mainly by taste. Twinkies and ding dongs adorned most shelves. An assortment of Little Debbies lay in bins for surprise pickings. That world of health food and exercise didn’t know what they had when they started shutting down the factories. Mom did and she wasn’t letting them take that away from us. I pulled my shirt away from my stomach, scrunching up the hole that had worn through with the years and scooped at least fifteen twinkies from the shelf. Spreading my snacks over the floor, I sat, planning to eat till I puked.

Author : KimBoo York

Tandoo sat on the steps, turning the key over in his hand. It was a silver stick, long and blank, and heavy. The door behind him stood solid and bright, just as without character as the key.

He held the key up and let the sunlight glint off the surface. The door would open onto a new world for him, he knew, but it was the key that had power over his life. His key. The key was a gift. It was not stolen. Still, he felt guilty, sitting on the steps with the key in his hands.

A hint of delicate, lacey latticework trim peeked over the top of the door frame. From that small bit of ornament, Tandoo constructed in his imagination a whole world – a whole life, in fact. It was full of white, clean architecture and lush, green gardens, and he loved to envision himself walking through those gardens in a light yellow pantsuit on his way to…

“You still here?” Mako walked up.

His sister was portly and kind, and worried. It seemed to Tandoo that she never stopped worrying about him.

“You need to go. You know the Corps will be grabbing boys soon for service. Off planet, right? Deep space. To fight the Unity.You need to go.”

He nodded. It wasn’t their war and no one wanted the village boys to go. He was lucky, as in blessed-by-ancient-gods lucky, to have the key.

“Go.” Mako turned and walked away.

He stood up and faced the door. The small square keyhole was in the middle of the door, so he reached up and slid the key in. He waited.

–

When Mako returned, Tandoo was gone. His key was sitting on the ground next to the door. She took it, even though everyone knew that once a key was used, it was worthless. She looked at the door, and stood on tip toe to view the lattice trim work that hinted at the other side. It was more like a garden fence, the wall that the door was in: 20 feet tall and running forever into the rest of the world. It was a division to be respected but not understood. Mako thought maybe Tandoo understood it now that he was on the other side, but then again over there it might be just a wall the same way it was in her world. She had her suspicions.

At home with the other twelve siblings, no one asked her about Tandoo. Their mother cooked stew and looked very tired.

–

Tandoo threw the key back over the wall. On this side, the door trim looked faded and unkempt. There were no gardens here, and no one to greet him, and when he realized that this world was the same world he just left, he threw the key back. There was no keyhole on this side to let him return, anyway.

“You made it.” Mako walked up, smiling and in a worn, dull dress he had never seen before.

“Mako? How…?”

“No, I’m not your same sister. I’m a different sister, the same, I guess, but on this side it’s all a little different.”

Tandoo, shocked, stood still. Mako shrugged.

“I’m sorry, but when the Unity takes our people to fight the Corps, we try to get a replacement from the other side. They drafted my Tandoo last week. But now you’re here, everything will be just fine.”

Author : Grady Hendrix

Gaunt women in ankle-length gomesi bent over the stagnant pool and filled plastic buckets.

“There’s not much of anything in Rorongi. No electricity. No running water,” Walter Bennett said earnestly. “No hope.”

Emaciated children, feet swollen from protein deprivation, clung to their mothers’ skirts as they walked back to the village, buckets full of heavy, black water on their heads. Walter Bennett looked directly into the camera.

“With no other source of fresh water, they come here every day. An entire village dependent on this tiny pond for life.” He began to stroll along the bank.

“Water for washing, cooking and drinking all drawn from the same source. Disease is prevalent. Malaria is a – oh for Christ’s sake!”

He bumped into another spokesman, also with his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, also with his shirtsleeves rolled up, also speaking compassionately about the plight of Rorongi village.

“Look, mate,” the other man said. “We were here first.”

“I don’t care. I’m Walter Bennett.”

“I don’t care if you’re Bill Clinton, we booked the pond.”

Three of the emaciated women came over.

“What going on?” one said. “You need be finish by three o’clock cause Intergalactic Geographic come do b-roll for ‘Feed The Earth’ Telethon.”

“Screw this,” Walter said, ripping off his radio mic. “I’m a professional. I don’t have time for this rubbish.”

The director hurried over.

“We’ll sort this, man. Gimme ten, okay? You wanna go to your trailer? Have lunch?”

“Talk to my agent,” Walter said, storming off to his helicopter.

“Remind me never to work with these wankers again, Henry,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said his pilot, taking off and heading South.

Below them the famine-wracked poverty zone gave way to the enormous, green suburbs of Capetown. Swimming pools, heliports, private casinos, backyard polo fields – the result of an endless stream of intergalactic poverty relief money. Most of the planet looked like this, except for the poverty reserves.

Walter videoconferenced the network president. An expensive call, but Walter was an expensive man.

“What’s the rumpus?” J.R. Moses asked. “Egos? Experience? Money? Is it a money thing?”

“I’m tired of doing this,” Walter said.

“And so you snapped. Happens to the best of us. Take a half day then go back tomorrow ready to care.”

“I don’t want to go back tomorrow,” Walter exploded. “I want to, I want to go out there and tell all those bloody aliens what’s going on. I want to bring one of them down here and show them what we’ve done with their money. I want to bust this whole thing wide open.”

He had J.R. for a moment, then:

“Jeezis, don’t scare me like that you crazy so-and-so. For a second there – “

“I’m an actor, J.R.”

“And a damn good one. Put your afternoon on our dime, whatever you want. Then go back tomorrow and work! The lifestyle to which we’ve grown accustomed depends on you.”

Walter turned to Henry.

“Set a course for the MGM Grand, Soweto.”

“Yes, sir,” said Henry. And they flew on into the glittering African sky.

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Martin stood at the edge of the field, struck numb by the expanse of white crosses peppered with red, stretching out to where the earth touched the sky.

“Overwhelming, isn’t it?” The voice dry, sandpaper rough.

Martin turned to the old man nestled in a wheelchair, an old green blanket on his lap, liver spotted face wrinkled and pale, too-big ears tucked up under a knit touque.

“It is. I’d read about this place, about how many men were buried here, but you can’t grasp the scale, can’t get this feeling from a book.”

“Men, women, many of them just children. They didn’t just give their lives, they gave up everything they’d ever have. Generations of heroes are buried here, the sons and daughters these men and women never had, never raised,” he waved towards the field. “You’re here because many of them died, and because someone made it home.”

Martin puzzled at the old man in his faded uniform jacket liberally decorated with ribbons and stars. He was unmistakeably proud, even sitting in the centuries-old wheel chair.

“My grandfather used to tell us stories about his grandfather Fred, stories his dad had told him when he was growing up,” Martin started. “Fred served in both World Wars, lived to tell the tale.”

“Many didn’t,” the old man shook his head. “I was part of a Ranger unit, we stormed the bunkers at Pointe du Hoc, lost a lot of good soldiers there, a lot of good friends.”

The comment caught Martin off guard. “Pointe du Hoc? That was nineteen forty four. How…? You’d have to be…”

“Old,” the man interupted, chuckling, “a relic, an artifact of a much, much earlier time. I remember being holed up in the dug-ins we’d inherited from the waves that came before us, curled up in foxholes just trying to stay alive one night at a time. I remember taking cover in the cellars of burned out homes while Jerry rained a hell storm of mortars down on us. It’s a wonder any of us came home.”

“I don’t understand, how…?”

“Friends, wealthy sponsors, all help keep me alive, help to keep me around. I’m full of pumps and pipes, transplanted bits and pieces. The medical technology’s a little beyond my understanding, but it keeps me going, lets me stay on here, to keep watch.”

“What’s with the wheelchair then? Why fix everything else but stay confined to that chair?”

“A bullet took my legs in Hürtgenwald in forty five, right through my spine. A soldier I never knew carried me for an hour on his shoulders through heavy fire to find friendlies. He saved my life, and then went back for more.” He paused, and turning, met Martin’s gaze with his steely blue eyes, surprisingly clear and focused. “I just lost my legs, these men gave up everything. I can’t forget that, and if they fixed me, if I could walk away and leave this place, maybe I would. I can’t take that chance.”

“Why wouldn’t you want to leave? You could travel the world.”

“There’s still fighting to be done. Whenever someone speaks of this place as a piece of ‘real estate’, the men and women lying here need a voice. That’s why I stay. I speak for them, I can still remember.”

Martin turned back to the field, for a second time struck by the enormity of it all.

The old man spoke quietly. “If I left this place, how could I be sure the world would remember? Who would fight for them if I were gone? Would you?”

Author : Jennifer Parsons

To any who watch television, the researcher’s setup should be plenty familiar, especially so to an old R&D man like myself. Two rooms, divided by a big sheet of glass; on one side sits a table loaded with datatablets and a control panel of various buttons and switches. On the other side of the glass is a car, yellow markers placed strategically all over its surface, a dummy belted into the front seat. There are straight lines painted on the floor and walls along with more yellow markers.

The only difference between this room and any other crash test facility is the two deer wandering in front of the car, looking scared and confused.

“What’s with the fauna?” I ask.

The guy in the lab coat smiles at my question. It’s a greasy smile. I don’t like it.

“They’re part of my demonstration.” He tells me as he tweaks a few more knobs.

After checking the status of a readout screen, he presses a button and speaks into the air.

“We’re ready, go ahead.”

Technicians in another room somewhere flip a switch and I watch helplessly as the car jolts forward, gaining momentum. The mother and fawn freeze in the headlights and a second later blood and bone fly everywhere along with crash debris.

My stomach churns and I turn away from the wreck in disgust.

“What the hell was that about?”

The researcher is checking his readout again, still smiling as if he knows something I don’t.

“You dragged me down here so you could prove how efficiently the Electro IV kills off wildlife?”

“Sir,” he fixes me with a steady, serious gaze. “I would never waste your time on something as trivial as that.”

The grin creeps back across his face as he points at the glass. “If you’ll please return your attention to the wreck?”

My curiosity is piqued. Bracing myself, I turned back to the glass.

Two bloody carcasses lie a few feet from where the deer once stood.

“Watch carefully, please.” The researcher says, his voice full of anticipation.

He pushes a button on the remote in his hand and the carcasses pull in on themselves, forming two ovoid shapes on the floor. A moment later a hard shell forms around the outside of each, their bright, red blood darkening to a rich black.

After another moment, the shells crack open and a pair of feet emerged from each husk followed by a head, then a torso and soon two beautiful deer stood side by side, glancing around the room nervously.

I turn to the researcher, a grin of sly knowledge now creeping across my own face.

“Impressive nano application you’ve got there.” He chuckles under his breath and I continue. “You know, there are some stretches of Route 287 where something like that could cause a lot of accidents.”

The researcher nods. “Disaster does keep the economy flowing these days.”

I return his nod. “Insurance rates would go up, hospitals beds would fill, car dealerships would have their hands full.”

“Not to mention the increased need for mortuary services.” He fiddles with a knob and waits for me to ask the question already forming on my lips.

“I think my employers would be most interested in any other models you might have to offer. What else have you got?”

He presses a button, opening a hatch in the wall. An adorable, spotted puppy trots out, wandering up to the deer. He starts sniffing their feet.

Author : Grady Hendrix

John’s antenna went up, his senses clicked into hyperdrive, adrenaline slammed through his veins: grilled chicken breast!

“Really?” he said.

“I picked it up at Fairway. You want to eat while we watch ‘So You Think You Can Dance?’”

TV during dinner? Eating off trays? It meant a blind drop. Charts, diagrams, lists of coded gestures unfolded in his mind. His mnemonic devices were always old, heavy paper with brittle edges and the solid feel of starched linen. In his mind, the light was always the warm organic glow of candlelight.

“Sure. I don’t know why we’re watching, though. After Hok got voted off that show is dead to me.”

Mira heard his Hok reference: her ready message acknowledged, he was primed.

They continued to chitchat while he got plates: the red ones. On top of the Signal Language they both knew, there was their own private code. The chicken was skinless, a low fat meal, this meant she’d had personal contact to receive this mission.

“Do you want wine?”

“But use the old glasses.”

The old glasses, meaning the target would be revealed later. They talked to each other in gestures, and it was as clear as speaking. He thought it was as clear as speaking. But they’d never exactly worked out the meanings together because there had never been a time when they weren’t being watched. Watchfulness was eternal because machines never slept. The TV was always pumping your image back to the buried engines, the bugs had always been in the walls, their doorman had always been reporting on them, they had always been reporting on their doorman. So they had worked out their secret language through trial and error and for one vertiginous moment he thought: what if I’ve got it all wrong. What if the old glasses mean something completely different?

“Do you think Lacey’s got a big ass?”

“I think Lacey tries too hard,” he said, as they ate off the coffee table.

Mira paid close attention to the order of the contestants and which one was assigned which call-in number. At the third commercial break she said, “Did you return Netflix?”

He put his tray down.

“I’ll do it now.”

“You don’t have to. I just wanted to watch something tomorrow night and I think ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ is next in our queue.”

He grabbed the Netflix envelopes and an umbrella.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

He waved to the doorman and walked to the mailbox. Listening devices, video cameras, pressure plates in the sidewalk, they surrounded him, here in the heart of the city, in the heart of the enemy. He dropped the envelopes in the mailbox and on his way home, he opened the umbrella. It was broken. He left it, upside down, jammed in a trash can on the corner, sending a secret signal out into the city, waiting to be seen by someone he had never met, another soldier in the invisible army. He never looked back. You had to take this war on faith.

Author : Andy Bolt

I am in a hole. It is a filthy place in a bad neighborhood in Bucharest, surrounded by government troops who are about to evilly stomp their way in here. They are having some trouble getting past my photon tent. It creates an alternating series of forty-two hundred force fields that borrow from the energy matrices of forty-two hundred non-parallel dimensions not yet tapped by physical probes. I enjoy these powerful, swirling forces, several of which have bizarre and horrible effects when introduced to our universe.

And yet, they will be through my shield soon. Already, I can sense the cold boxes creating a localized zone of absolute zero. This will disrupt the functioning of all but a dozen of the alternating fields. Of those remaining, all but two have well-developed counter measures. Those two will simply be shot until they overload. I can feel the bombardment starting.

I am watching reruns of “Guess What’s in Your Mouth” and buzzcasting doctored images of the Eastern European governor, Milt Sill, committing obscene and illegal acts with obscene and illegal entities. They have tried to cut me off, but there’s just too much information in the air these days. Gel phone frequencies and omninet signals. Quantum vision and mindblower wavelengths. Extradimensional routers and redigitizer stations and retro-radio transmissions. You can’t get them all. So my buzzcasts go out and they try to break in and libelous pictures of Sill get passed around campuses and electronic office parks and meanwhile, my storewell gets nondescriptly dumped into Gabrielle Denizen’s system in Managua.

There are only twenty-six of us officially involved in the Mythical Revolution against Worldgov, including me, Dither Todd. They are panicked enough to send two hundred shock troops and eighty million dollars worth of heavy artillery to kill me, a guy in his basement watching shitty reruns. We are very good with computers. We know things they do not want us to know. We say them very loudly.

I am surrounded by angry men with guns who wish me harm. I let them have a glimpse of me, all ruffled blue hair and black glasses. Then I’m gone. “Dither Todd” is a collection of digital information and optical rewriters. I am an invisible ball of data programs and consciousness frequencies with the tools necessary to physiologically manipulate a bio-optic system into “seeing” a physical body that isn’t there. I am an imaginary form of life.

My dataself dissolves and goes out a dozen different ways. They can’t block them all. I’ve gotten enough on Sill, of the gross legal and ethical variety, that he’ll be forcibly removed from office within a few days. He was a high-up in Worldgov, third in line for Man Prime. Eastern Europe will be in chaos for months, but hopefully, they’ll learn something from this.

It’ll take years for my dataself to coagulate back to the point where I’m capable of having a coherent thought. I welcome the rest. Let Gabby change the world for a while.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The new planet’s soupy air made twin blue plumes out of his suit’s exhalations when the carbon dioxide reacted with the unbreathable atmosphere. It turned into blue rust flakes that scattered around him like snow.

He walked over the rocky service in a grav suit that would have looked right at home on the ocean floor in the 1760s back on Earth. Bulky, slow and primitive looking.

He looked like a train pretending to be human blasting out powder-blue fairy dust.

His face peeked out of a circular faceplate inset into a large spherical metal helmet. It amplified his breathing as well as the creaking of the servos helping him to walk across the high-gravity shale. It was like living inside a bell.

He could see the bright blue plumes coming out of his co-researcher’s suits all down the line if he turned his head.

It was actually quite beautiful.

He’d appreciate it a lot more if they all weren’t currently looking for their ship.

He’d left the ship second-to-last in the queue so he would run out of air second-to-last as well. It wasn’t something he was looking forward to.

Already, a suit with the number 28 painted on the shoulder down the line was starting to slow down. Its blue gusts of CO2 were becoming yellower as the combination started to change. It was Yolanda.

We’d only gone a few steps out. We’d left the ships sentry programs on. I suppose it was folly of us to desert the ship entirely but no one wanted to be left behind for the first walk.

There was no life detected in the area. It had seemed safe.

Then our tracking devices stopped working properly. And our directional qualifiers.

We had no points of references. The atmosphere was a fog that gave us thirty feet of visibility. It ended in a starless ceiling above us as well. The ground was scattered rock.

We were lost. The ship, according to our scanners, was in twenty-seven places around us.

We’d turned around one hundred and eighty degrees and started walking back towards the ship, following our own blue rusted trails of encrusted CO2 flakes.

We should have been there by now.

Author : Viktor Kuprin

March Air Force Base, California.

“These are the rules,” instructed Major Diehl, the public affairs officer. “Report your observations. Tell them what you saw, but if they ask for your personal opinions about little green men, the press conference is over. Understood?”

The security policemen nodded in understanding.

“Take your seats. I’ll call you up front when it’s time,” said the Major. “How many guests, Bob?”

The old Lieutenant Colonel peeked through the conference room’s double doors. “Forty, at least,” he said.

The reporters quickly filled the room, colliding with each other and the creaky government-issue metal chairs.

Diehl stepped to the lectern. “Good morning, everyone. First, I’d like to present Airman McAlhaney and Sergeant Brandum from our Security Police Squadron. Both were on duty last night. Both witnessed the incident. Go ahead, Airman McAlhaney.”

The nervous young man stood. “At 0245 I was on guard duty at the Alert Facility, walking patrol.”

The LA Times reporter waved his hand. “That’s where a group of B-52s and in-flight refuelers are kept ready for takeoff, right?”

“That’s correct, sir. At that time I saw two very unusual aircraft approaching the flightline at a high rate of speed, on an east-to-west track. They looked like black triangles and, uh, they were glowing blue.”

A lady reporter from Riverside’s Press-Enterprise newspaper called out, “What did you do?”

McAlhaney looked questioningly towards Major Diehl, who nodded to show approval.

“I reported it to my supervisor, m’am, by radio,” McAlhaney continued. “He confirmed my report. He saw them. Then the base went on full security alert.”

The Orange County Register reporter held up his hand. “Major, did your air-traffic controllers track these UFOs?”

“Yes. They were tracked visually,” Diehl answered. “I have no information about any radar contacts.”

The reporters began grumbling incredulously.

“Thank you, Airman McAlhaney,” said Diehl. “If you please, Sargeant Brandum will give his statement.”

Brandum took a deep breath and began. “I was in the weapons storage area when the alert sounded. By the time I got outside, the, uh, objects were directly overhead. Both had blue contrails …”

A young man from an alternative newspaper shouted, “Do you think alien invaders are preparing to attack your base?!”

Major Diehl flew out of his seat. “I think we need to stop here. Thank you for coming, ladies and gentleman.” The reporters yelled and complained as they were ushered from the room.

As the two security policemen walked toward the exit, Airman McAlhaney wondered, “Think we’re the first base they’ve buzzed?”

Behind them a voice said, “No. I’ve seen them before.”

It was Bob, the near-retirement Lieutenant Colonel. “In North Dakota, Germany, even Greenland. And they always, always fly over the nuclear weapons storage areas.”

Both men stared at the old officer. “Sir, what do you think it means?” asked Sargeant Brandum.

Colonel Bob smiled. “Well, if you thought the kids might be playing with matches, wouldn’t you check on them now and then?”

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

It was the one thousandth anniversary since Victor Kent first traveled backward in time. Of course, humans had been traveled forward in time for a thousand years before that. But, forward is easy. No paradoxes to deal with. After all, in the future, you can’t kill your father before he met your mother.

The first company to develop time travel technology was Epoca Inc. In the early days they’d only travel a few weeks into the future to see how some key experiment went. Then they’d return to the present to modify the experiment so it would work better. Of course, this action changed that future, but what difference does that make? Epoca would be more prosperous in the new future. With this philosophy, Epoca perfected time travel in short order. Another side benefit is that Epoca could peek into the future to keep track of any potential competitors, and take whatever steps were necessary in the present (legally or illegally) to make sure their competition was unsuccessful. It’s so easy to determine the future when you control time.

Anyway, on the one thousandth anniversary of negative time travel, Epoca decided to expand the time envelope exponentially. They decided to send me and twelve other scientists backwards in time thirty billion years. That’s 15.5 billion years before the Big Bang. Epoca considered it “an acceptable risk” because astrophysicists had proven that the universe is “closed” (i.e., it explodes, expands, stops, and collapses again, repeatedly for all eternity). They call the collapse “The Big Crunch.” Epoca figured that if they could send us into the previous cycle, we could learn new “inconceivable” science from whatever life forms existed then, bring it back to our cycle, and make gobs and gobs of money. A simple plan, right? Well, not really. I asked Epoca to look a few years into the future to see if we made it back OK. They did, but said we weren’t there because we had crossed the “barrier” (whatever that meant) and would not exist in our continuum until we physically returned. They called it the “Sagan Principle,” after some scientist who lived eons and eons ago. They also said that when theya looked at the instant the ship left, I was on it, so I needed to go because I had already gone. Did I mention that time travel arguments make my head hurt? Anyway, who was I to question Epoca? After all, they could prevent my parents from meeting. So, I climbed into the ship.

As I watched through the view port, the stars began to turn bluish. I guessed it was the opposite of red-shift as my universe collapsed backward toward the Big Bang. It got so bright at T=1,000,000,000 that we had to close the iris. I held my breath as we shot through T=0. At T=-1,000,000,000 we opened the iris to see a reddish universe expand backward. Well I’ll be damned, I thought, the astrophysicists were right. At T=-15,500,000,000 the ship came to a stop. With the universe no longer expanding, the shields began to sparkle like a thousand fireflies. Every alarm on the ship began to go off, including the one labeled “Danger: Lethal Radiation Detected.”

As I was thinking, “Well, this sucks,” I heard one of the other scientist yell, “Quick, get us back, and hurry!”

The pilot replied, “It will take 40 minutes to re-charge the temporal coils. I c’not change the laws of physics.”

“Then we’re screwed,” said the scientist, “because this universe is composed of anti-matter.”

Author : Kyle DeBruhl

“Oh man…” Jeremy sighed as he stared out the window. “The old man’s at it again.” He pulled himself out of the chair and lumbered to the front door, seizing an rain slicker from the coat rack as he went. Thunder crackled in the distance and he peered out the embedded front door window with hesitation. He’s going to catch friggin’ pneumonia. He turned the handle and the door swung open with a bang, carried in full circle by the howling wind.

The lawn had been transformed since the afternoon. What was earlier a large green blanket with the occasional wildflower or misplaced stone, had become a filthy mess, a deep marsh that soaked the toes of even the toughest tennis shoes.

“Hey Murray!” Jeremy shouted hoping to catch the man’s non-existent attention. The frail figure across the street did nothing. Jeremy took his last step through the water and opened his front gate, all the while keeping his eyes on the man across the way. A quick jog across the street and Jeremy was now at the opposite gate which he cleared with a short jump. The old man could now be seen clearly; sickly white columns of flesh surrounded by red Bermuda shorts stood atop a lawn table. The open t-shirt showed an array of exotic fruits and ukulele prints and was barely hiding the pale, almost skeletal chest it adorned..

“Hey man, I think you ought to get back inside, it’s cold and I’m not sure you’ve got the, err… shorts for it.” Murray had never stood on the table before. He apparently was getting wise to the ease with which Jeremy could force him back into the house.

“I’m gonna pull you down man…” Jeremy thought it sounded confident enough, but he was having a hard time with the physics. The last thing he wanted was to harm the old guy; the neighbors would throw a conniption fit.

With as much strength as Jeremy could muster, he eased the old man off of the table and onto his back, taking care not to contort his cargo on the way down. Murray kept his back straight, and the void expression on his face remained. In the end youth won out and the old man was pushed (gently) back into his home. Jeremy walked quickly back to his own piece of Churchill street and regaled in the good work of a good man.

Somewhere deep inside of 143 Churchill Street a silent voice spoke. It spoke to the electrons in Murray Feckleson’s brain. It seethed as an ocean and whispered as a child. It burned. So thirsty, It thought. What a thick, brainless, species. Can’t he see that we are thirsty? Murray nodded mechanically as the voice carried on. Can’t he see that we are dry? Can’t he see? Suddenly the TV burst to life and the light’s soft colors soothed it’s “mind”. Murray? Be a doll and draw up a bath for us would you?

Author : Anthony R. Elmore

William rode the Green Line, making the passengers hostage to his presence. Here, they couldn’t walk away, far. They could only avoid his glare, his insistence at existence. The train stops at Parkway Station and a pretty teenage girl with soft brown hair enters the train. She glances at the only empty seat next to him, and walks toward it. The train moves and the air shifts forward and she shudders like a gazelle that caught a lion’s scent creeping upwind. She moves toward the gangway, glancing backward at possible danger.

“But he lied…” he wants to cry at her, at the world.

Attention starved little…

The train rattles to a halt at Memorial Park and many people in bright summer shorts and carrying lawn chairs and coolers disembark. A weekend street fair is happening topside, but he’s not invited. Facial recognition cams on lampposts would alert the police and they will escort him away. So he rides the train, staying in motion.

But he lied…

The trains stops at Chamblee station and a horrible, fecal smell enters as a covey of passengers leave. The bum is layers of filthy, mismatching coats and shirts and shoulders a rucksack. The passengers’ noses curls and some gag and comment to others. Newspapers and handkerchiefs rise to their faces to block the stench. The bum drops into an empty seat and he feigns sleep. At the next stop, everyone leaves the car except William.

The odor disgusts him but he wonders if Pheremonic Shunning caused the bum’s state and this is what awaited him.

No more overcrowded prisons, chip tracking and dedicated surveillance, they said. Shunning put offenders in an open air prison with their own skin and guilt for a cell.

After his trial, state doctors injected him with a solution that changed his pheremonic signature that broadcasted “Danger, Stay Away.” messages.

But he lied. He misunderstood my touch. It wasn’t like that.

The stinking bum was his future, his present, he thought. Six months into a five year sentence, he would never again teach and would die on the dole. This was his family. Guilty or not, they were a confraternity of the shunned.

He approached the bum, crossing through the fog of stench. “Did they shun you?” he asked.

The bum looked at him through a camouflage of dirt, his beard nitted with food bits a dried mucus. He moaned and leaned over and slapped the side of his head with both hands, rocking back and forth.

He didn’t see the shiv lance his gut or the bum draw it. He only saw the betrayal of snared animal fear in the bum’s eyes. The train bucked and slowed and his legs gave way and he fell. From the wrong angled view from the floor he saw the bum shuffle through the crowd of arriving passengers, parting the crowd with his stench.

“Do you see me now?” he sputtered to their shocked faces. I exist. Then he didn’t.

Author : J.R.Blackwell, Staff Writer

“I was a fat old man way before it got popular.” The fat old man leaned across the old fashioned, wooden bar. “When I chose this body it was before what’s-his-face got on the Feeds about bellies and beards. I decided I wanted to be big, on my own, for, whatsit, philosophical reasons.”

“Oh yeah?” said the bartender, distantly sympathetic.

“I wanted to fill up space.” The old man gestured at his girth.

The bartender nodded, cleaning a glass. The old man continued. “I was raised in the Cult of Barbie. Really, I was. I know I don’t look like it now but I’d been a Barbie all my life. I know, doesn’t show to look at me now, but I was one of the plastic people, shiny hair, long legs, perfect surgical tan. I used to wear miniskirts. And the shoes, rows and rows of them. My closets, if you could have seen them then, you would have been amazed.”

The fat old man, who wasn’t really old at all, pushed himself back from the bar and stood, pointing at his feet. “You know how many shoes I’ve got now? Two, the ones I’m wearing. I didn’t take this body to be fashionable.”

The bartender raised an eyebrow. “Then why did you take it?”

Shaking his finger, the old man came back to sit on the barstool. “It’s not to rebel against the Cult, if that’s what you think.”

“Didn’t even come to my mind.” said the bartender.

“I did it to be free. You always had to watch yourself with the Barbie’s. You always had to be perfect.” He shook his head. “I did it. It was the way I was raised. I went through Skipper then the initiation to a full Barbie, the whole thing. You ever dated a Barbie?”

“Do I look like I make enough money to date a Barbie?”

The old man laughed. “No, you don’t. But they slum it sometimes. Although they always drive the bankrupt ones to tears. I remember. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t take more money and spend it on clothes, crap really, just crap. I wanted to be covered by fat, my inner self-hidden. I wanted a big beard so you couldn’t ignore me. I wanted to be a drunk, I wanted to smell like a man whose been somewhere besides the mall and the compound.”

The bartender placed the glass upside down on the shelf. “You’ve been places since those days, then?”

“Oh yes.” said the old man. “I’ve seen up more skirts than when I lived among them. I’ve walked far in these good shoes. Then, when I want to disappear, I’m not pretty enough to notice.” He sighed over his drink. “But now, that damned actors made my look popular.”

“You gonna change then?” said the bartender.

“I have to, don’t I? I’m not one of those fad bodies.”

“So you’re worried that people will see you as fashionable then?”

“Yes.” The old man looked into his drink, his face warped in the brown liquid. “You know what?” he said, looking up at the bartender. “Screw em. I’m not changing. I’ll be this way long after they’ve found another body type to take.”

“You’ll be even further out of fashion then.”

“You’re right, you’re damned right.” The old man slammed his fist onto the bar, triumphant. “Bartender, another drink to celebrate.” He raised his glass “To the death of fashion.” He said. “May we all fall out of style.”

Author : Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”, Staff Writer

“We’ve considered the simple stuff in previous sessions, and now all of you are comfortable with the basics of folding space, correct?”

The teacher saw some nods of assent from his class.

“Excellent. But this is the advanced class. I’m not just going to teach you to fold space — I’m going to teach you origami.”

He drew a sheet of plain, white paper from his desk, and held it up.

“I’m not trying to overextend my metaphor, don’t worry. A piece of paper really is the easiest way to show you the folds. That way you can all see the work in progress, and understand where all the folds are meant to go.”

As he spoke, the teacher’s hands were creasing and folding the paper. The eyes of his class were focused hard on those fine movements, most of them probably recording it in their cortex or otherwise. He soon finished, and held up a model of a twelve-pointed star between his thumb and forefinger.

“And this is where the metaphor breaks down. In your spacetime version, when you reach this step, you need to grab the center of the structure and do the tesseract twist, wrench it round by about half a rad. Then put the entire thing somewhere safe, and release.”

The teacher sat back in his chair, and closed his eyes. About a metre above the desk and it’s spread of paper and origami, the air began to distort. Light shifted crazily through the patch. The teacher’s face betrayed his enjoyment of the task.

He opened his eyes, and the miniature star above his desk ignited.