365 tomorrows

Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer

Wzn Izfzuv Tells You How To Live Your Life

This rotation, when I tell you how to live your life, we meet two Newflyers ““ newly infatuated individuals high on emotion. Let’s fly right in, shall we?

Dear Wzn,

I’ve been dating most wonderful Hive mind, sixty sexy individual consciousnesses in four amazing bodies. We’ve been together for about eight rotations and it’s brilliant. They are all so beautiful and talented ““ I know I sound like I’m Newflying here ““ but it’s true.

Whenever we engage in sexual contact, they let me merge a little with the whole. Although it’s only through a skin and wire port even the half merge is amazing. I really want to merge with them fully. I am totally willing to give up my body and I’m excited about being part of the Hive.

However, every time I bring up a true merging, they change the subject. I’m really afraid of scaring them away. Please help!

Thanks!

-Wild for the Hive

WftH,

Trust the Hive darling. Hive minds can be really wonderful seductive things, all that community, all that acceptance and understanding and sense of belonging. But the thing is, before someone joins, the Hive has to understand that person is just right for them. A wonderful lover does not always make a good addition to the Hive!

My suggestion ““ if you want to convince them that you will be good for the Hive, show them how patient you are, show them how understanding you can be that they want to take the time to get to know you. Also, get that merging out of a sexual context! Invite them to merge with you when all of you have your clothes on. Let them get a sense for you when your mind is calm. Remember, a Hive mind isn’t just a cumulative consciousness ““ it’s also hard work!

Dear Wzn,

My personal companion appliance has become moody, arrogant and cold. When I bought him, he was cuddly and attentive. He used to make me romantic meals and read to me ““ but now he hardly looks at me! The only time he even gives me a second glance is when I’m furious and then it can get pretty wild ““ but afterwards, he’s back to his arrogant ways

Do you know any way I can adjust his personality to be a little nicer? He’s a model A244Silver ““ the new line. Is my personal companion permanently shizzed? Do I need to buy a replacement?

-Short Circuited on Mars

SCM,

Just admit it! You love it. The A244 Silvers are engineered to respond to your social needs. If the A244 Silver is treating you like you are less than the dirt on his immaculate feet, then that’s exactly what you want. These things can read social signals better than any human born.

Embrace it! Don’t be ashamed that you want to be treated with distain. It may be fashionable to say that you and your personal companion constantly cuddle, but if you prefer that he is cold and distant till you are on fire with desire than that is more than fine ““ it’s hot! Listen angel-sparks, if you want my permission, you’ve got it. Have a hot time with your cruel personal companion.

If you honestly want his personality adjusted, the dealer will do that for a small fee. Don’t be surprised though, if you find out you liked him mean and sexy better than soft and snuggly.

That’s it for this week, Organics and Electrics! Remember Respect, and Treasure Pleasure.

-Wzn Izfzuv

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

The subject of this image has a real name, but by custom, he uses a ‘messenger-name’: Jay. He’s moving on foot. The ground is broken and rough: with no road, he had to leave his vehicle behind. It’ll be one more day before he has the first in a series of syndications at mining enclaves and towns nestled amongst the mountains.

He’s wearing a bag over a long coat. The resolution of the image is just good enough to make out the individual characters of the public encryption key stitched into the material of the bag. The view from the electronic eye-in-the-sky shows Jay surrounded by a light haze: a mess of wireless signals and RF echoes. Bright panels on his coat betray the slabs of solid-state memory where his primary archive is stored.

He’s just one of a whole series of messengers: they tie together the continent, ferrying the all-important message archives from one isolated region to the next, through territories that are too dangerous or too unpredictable to lay cable. Message latency is generally measured in days, but security is absolute.

We return to the subject just after one of his syndications. Apparently at ease, relaxing with an intoxicant on the terrace of a guesthouse on a mountainside. As well as the syndication, he has also taken on more than the usual number of personal messages from the miners and farmers of the area, and is seeking solitude. Many messengers exhibit these behaviours, including the intoxicant dependence. Some are far more severe than others. Jay has a relatively mild habit, which is one of the reasons he was chosen for this experiment.

Messengers are interesting because there is statistically significant factor of difference between them and all other social groups under study. They display certain shocking similarities to one another, with no reflection on their region of origin. Messengers display a wholly unnatural obsession with security and authenticity. This is harnessed for the public image of their syndicate, a fact that they trade on, but this obsession invariably extends beyone a purely professional interest.

The second subject is one of our operatives, teleoperating a shell. Naturally, we have chosen an attractive female shell for this test, as we have judged that it will significantly increase the stress factor. Naturally, the shell is not a real messenger, but is merely a good fake. Her equipment is of the same specification as Jay’s, and her public key has a forged signature. We call her ‘Clara’.

Other combinations of this scenario have been carried out. When a non-messenger is introduced to ‘Clara’ (or the male equivalent, Cal), interaction is normal. They don’t question the identity of this person, but attempt to ‘get to know’ our operative, intrigued by the exotic persona and the popular romanticisation of the messenger lifestyle. When a messenger is introduced to our non-messenger version of Clara/Cal, the reaction of the messenger varies wildly: some express disinterest, others actively attempt to exploit the mythos of their position for personal gain.

Upon introduction, Jay and ‘Clara’ exchanged pleasantries, and some superficial comments about their syndication routes. ‘Clara’ left the terrace, in order to buy Jay a drink: she left her bag, and therefore the forged signature on her public key, with him. Immediately she was out of sight, he scanned the key. His eyes went wide with panic.

Hidden under his jacket was an edition of the famous ‘messenger gun’.

As ‘Clara’ stepped back on to the terrace, Jay shot her.

Author : James Smith

The girl out of the tank before lunch is Lila. Trip around the network shows the last of her bloodline petered out twenty years ago. Cryos are all from before the Patent Wars, so their sequences are in the public domain. The company turns a nice side profit selling the royalty-free DNA of such orphans through its GeneStock site.

I clean up the cancer that put her into storage, and dump the standard Mandarin package down her language stack, which I had to re-build because the cancer had slowly eaten through it over the centuries. I’m supposed to sequence her now, and she is absolutely beautiful, so I turn to our department’s unofficial protocol. I put her sequence in the system, but also pipe it to my phone. To the phone we give her, I beam a map to the job bank, my contact info, plus a bot that deletes any co-workers’ info. She’ll likely call me. We’ll make a date, and with her sequence I can key my pheromones, the food, the shade of my eyes, to her tastes. You can’t get too specific, but ballpark’s enough to get some ass once or twice, which is all anyone has time for anyway.

With one eye on the tank, I eat a sandwich and surf the city’s cam-net on my phone, tracking Lila’s progress. I watch her get buzzed by a flying cop. It blinds her with a quick retinal scan, reads our logo there, and shouts at her to get along to where she was already headed. The sound’s off, but I’m sure she’s got glossolalia by now.

Fuck. Skaters. I see them before she does. I speed-dial her phone, but she can’t hear it over the traffic and billboards. They come from her 10 o’clock, and all I can do is watch as the first one circles her, drawing her attention, while a second passes a scanner over her hand, yanking the ID out of her chip. He’ll probably have the start-up credit emptied out of her account before her onboard can lock it down. There’s a third. They travel in threes. She comes in low, spins behind Lila’s legs and pops up to slap a patch on the back of her neck. All the wiring we grew there before sending her out has now been hijacked for some American gangster wanting tariff free real-time number-crunching.

By the time the patch dissolves Lila won’t even be able to use her phone, much less remember to call me. She won’t get enough time to acclimate to the zeitgeist– which will change in a month or so anyway– and she’ll come up out of it crazy and useless. She’ll be on the street, begging me for credit, inside of six months.

I sigh, close my phone and reach for my coffee. The tank beeps, and the next idiot tumbles out onto the tile. He’s kind of cute.

Author : Michael Varian Daly

The musky odor hit Tanith the moment she stepped through the portal; man smell. It always got her queasy and excited, made her yoni tingle and moisten.

She marched with purpose down the wide debris strewn avenues, lined with derelict warehouses converted into rat warrens of cubicles called ‘apartment’ or ‘club’ depending upon their usage, the huge facades covered with brightly colored artwork, its techniques crude to sublime, and often violent and sexual in nature.

This was Semefour, a sector of the abandoned dirtside space facility of Bessport and original ghetto of The Men.

The Men were not actual males. True Men were extinct, outlawed for centuries, their heritage diffused and divided into the myriad Mandroids; Y-chromosome cyborgs, a vast genetically engineered servitor class that ranged from the ubiquitous simple minded AgroDroids, patiently tilling fields on a thousand worlds, through the slim graceful Harlequins, serving the personal needs of Sisters everywhere, to the brilliant star spanning Sliders, The Sisterhood’s living spaceships who merged with their pilots, Mind, Body and Soul.

No, The Men were really Sisters. They wore Bitch Rods all the time – detachable bioform phallus’s…big, thick ones, too. They took hormones to shrink breasts and grow hair, lots of hair. They lived The Man’s Way, a throwback cult of ‘masculinity’. They steeped themselves in intoxicants, wrote nihilistic poetry, had bare knuckle brawls, and sodomized each other. They were The Men.

For most, it was a phase. They would Live The Life for a while, then put their Bitch Rod back in its Fake Box and go live as a Solitary in the woods or the hills or the desert on some world for a Solannum or two until their minds and bodies settled.

But some Lived The Life as their Life with total commitment. Like Frank, who had been one of The Men for well over a century now. That is who Tanith had come to see.

Tanith was a Jane, a Sister who sought out The Men for pleasure. She couldn’t call Frank a ‘lover’. Sex among The Men was ritualized consensual rape.

She turned, went into a shadowed door, up narrow stairs. Frank was waiting for her, ‘his’ wiry black hair, beard, chest, legs, making her body vibrate with an atavistic thrill. Frank took her straight away, brutally, with a cruel smile that no Harlequin pleasure server would ever match.

Time passed too quickly.

They smoked and drank, coupled with fury and languor. Frank sang her songs. Two friends came over, got drunk, had a fist fight, then all three of them ‘raped’ her for hours.

On the afternoon of the third day, Tanith stumbled down the stairs, bruised, sore, and wholly sated. On her way out the door, Frank had smacked her on the ass. “Say hello to your husband,” ‘he’ laughed.

“My husband,” she thought smiling. Her darling Maddox, thirty six thousand tons of Slider floating serenely in orbit. She knew he would relish every single detail.

Let’s say that you’re surfing the majestic tubes that make up our internet when you stumble onto a nifty flash fiction website.  What a fascinating idea, you think!  New short stories, every morning!

Now, lets say that after a bit of poking around, you decide to start at the very first story and move on from there.  A fine task for an afternoon, right?

Wrong.

A fine task for a weekend, right?

Wrong.

You’d better put on a few pots of coffee, because if you spend five minutes reading each story posted here, you’ll have a fine task for three and a half days.

Today, 365tomorrows turns 1000 stories old.

Would you like to bake us a cake?  If so, you’ll need about two pounds of birthday candles!  Would you like to print the stories into one book and keep it on your nightstand?  It’ll be almost as thick as three copies of Moby Dick!  Would you like to mail me an American quarter for every story written?  You’d better have a lot of postage handy, because that package would weigh thirteen pounds!

That’s about as much math as my liberal arts major brain can handle in one night.

Whether you’ve been a fan since the beginning or you’ve only recently found the site, we’re grateful for your support and we hope you stick around for many years to come.

-Kathy

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

Nate Sorelli ruled the playground like Napoleon ruled France: with an iron fist and a mind like a laser-cut scalpel. With the knowledge of Sun Tzu and strategies selectively culled from the Roman and British Empires, Nate Sorelli was an architect and a general. He had a loyal army of boys who let no one tread on his territory, and his territory didn’t stop at the schoolyard’s boundaries. To the colony’s children, it was Nate Sorelli and not his parents who owned all of Shi.

In the early days of the colony, physicians played it fast and loose. Frontier medicine had different rules, and when his early tests showed mild retardation, his parents didn’t even need to pull strings. The neural implant had never been approved for children, but if Nate Sorelli was any indicator, that lack of approval was a terrible oversight.

Nate had a network. He didn’t need to threaten kids for their lunch money: they willingly handed it over. A quirk of his lips could start and end playground fights, but Nate never threw a punch. He didn’t like getting his hands dirty.

The teachers, too, were under his thumb. They didn’t realize it, of course, but he could redirect lessons with a few choice words, and he steered the curriculum like a rudder steers a boat. They thought it was their idea to move him to the C class with the older kids, and the following year, they thought they made the decision to bump him up to B. There wasn’t a test he couldn’t ace. The colony’s library had been committed to memory, and the only thing keeping the wealth of the internet out of his mind was the communication delay between Shi and Earth. It was no surprise when the home world sent a team of doctors to study him.

The study lasted three minutes: as long as it took to process the data from the CAT scan. Three Shi doctors lost their licenses. His parents were fined extensively, and paid twice that in bribes to maintain custody of their son.

Despite the setback, he maintained his rule. The other children continued to revere him, and although the scandal was teachers’ lounge gossip for weeks, they considered the decline in test scores a result of the stress of publicity. No one saw the first cracks in his empire. Certainly not Nate Sorelli.

Lunch money came more slowly. Paper bills turned to coins, which turned to crinkled wrappers. Without funding, the army of children grew restless, but it was over a month before they disbanded. There was no coup. No new ruler, no interim leader. Political issues were eclipsed by video games and dodgeball. The teachers noticed the change, but there were no complaints. The other kids’ performance improved. Overall, Shi’s school was well-ranked among the colonies.

At recess, Nate Sorelli took to playing jacks. His reflexes were still sharp, and he liked the smooth texture of the rubber ball. His previous loyal subjects played hopscotch and football in the nearby field as his hand shot out, snatching three silver stars before catching the ball in its descent.

Author : Sharoda

Jerry and I stood in the locked room looking through a large window at the woman in the hospital bed. The door next to the window led into the room, it had a green light over it showing it was unlocked.

“I’m not going in there”, Jerry said. “Becka’s gone! That’s not her in there; I buried her 6 months ago”.

“I know. I was with you at the hospital after the accident” I said.

“Screw this Ken” he was shaking; seeing the clone with Becka’s face lying on the bed in the lab’s hospital ward was pushing him to the edge.

The accident had been horrible. Jerry still had terrible scars but with Becka gone he didn’t care.

“Call security so they can let me the hell out of here” he was starting to get really angry. Getting into or out of this part of the lab complex was difficult and required a lot of security access that Jerry no longer had. He hadn’t been able to work in 6 months but I had to bring him in today because we were going to wake her. Jerry started pacing back and forth in front of the window staring at the Becka clone.

She was cutting edge science. She was literally a perfect physical copy of Becka and her mind was everything we could salvage before she’d died.

“Please Jerry”, I begged, “A lot of people, a lot of your friends, went to a lot of trouble, for you. Please at least wait until she wakes up”.

He stopped pacing and turned to look at me. His face was red and he was shaking. He turned back to the window and started pacing again.

I looked at the security camera in the corner and shrugged. We waited, no one came. “I’ll go find out what’s keeping security” I said and badged myself through the opposite door.

One more door and I was in the observation room. Johansen stood there with his expensive suit and slick hair staring at the monitors and speaking softly to the techs. I’d made a deal with this particular Devil to make this happen for my best friend.

“How come…” I started to say.

“It’s waking up” Johansen said, cutting me off. Everyone looked at the monitors.

The Becka clone opened her eyes and slowly looked around. She couldn’t see through the large window, it was tinted glass on her side.

Jerry stopped pacing.

She sat up.

Jerry leaned close to the glass. There was still tension in his face.

She put her face in her hands and rubbed her eyes the way she always did when the lights were too bright.

Jerry stood with his hands on the glass. His head slowly shook back and forth but the tension was gone.

Becka stretched her neck and flicked back her hair. I’d seen her do it a thousand times.

Jerry’s hands fell slowly to his side, his mouth was open. He moved to the door and turned the knob.

“Jerry?”, she said, head still in her hands.

“Becka?” he said softly.

“Oh honey, I had the worst dream” she said and raised her head. He stopped at the bed and sat down; she started to cry when she saw his sad scarred face. She pulled him to her breast and wrapped her arms around him and held him while he cried.

“We’re going make a fortune”, Johansen said.

“Ya”, I said wiping my cheek. “probably”.

Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer

He’s from the time before the bio-enhancements, before organs could be grown from a single cell. Age hollowed him out, and though his plastic face looks young, he’s just a shell. When I lean on his chest, I can hear what I imagine to be gremlins, moving around on the inside of his chest. Gremlins pumping streams of blood, moving his limbs and squeezing his heart.

His arms are hard and lumpy but he always sleeps with them around me, holding me to him at night. I used to slip out from under his embrace but let him embrace me. Bruises be damned.

He’s looked into bio-growth, but it’s expensive, and his system functions just fine. He’ll last for ages and the surgery, so simple for someone going from birth-wear to bio-wear, would be intense for him. He would have to replace his system, one part at a time, attaching bio-enhancements to clinking mechanical cogs. As soon as he would adjust, it would be time for another surgery, another hospital stay. Anyway, he’s not a man of the present he’s a man of our clattering, noisy past.

“They don’t make parts like they used to.” He tells me. He refuses to buy new parts. He searches instead for old parts and he fixes them up as he’s wearing down, rasping with the use of only one lung or hunched over an antique with a drill in his one working hand.

“What about when you run out of parts, when all the antiques are gone or broken?” I ask him, over and over.

He smiles his half metal smile and puts his one arm around me. “We’ll worry about that when we come to it.”

When his system needs fuel, his forehead glows orange with an unfamiliar mark. It’s the logo of the company that made him, long gone, absorbed, dispersed, back from the days of the big corporations, before the big crash. He’s old. I’ve said that. His fuel is rare and expensive. It is harder to find each time his light goes on.

“What about when all your fuel is gone” I ask him.

He cups my chin in his metal hands and brings his bronze forehead to my flesh one. “Our lights will all go out someday.” He tells me. “But my personal forever will be with you.”

His plastic and metal casing cools my flesh.

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

The Locus is the focal point of our operation. It exists for a period of one year, at the south pole of the nascent earth. That year is constantly recycled: we’ve been in operation for twenty-four years, subjective. Geologically speaking, we leave just before life shows up. After our first accident, and the creation of the beta timestream, we frameshifted to treating millenia as moments. Just to be safe.

We draw personnel from all six timestreams now, but back at the founding only the alpha stream existed. Well, that’s a lie, but a useful one. The other streams probably did exist, but we just didn’t know about them. We’ve got more scientists than field operatives here at the Locus, and arguements can get quite heated as everyone defends their pet theories.

The first accident was right when we set up here. We misjudged our recycling period and ended up leaving a crate of assorted garbage out in the cold. Almost immediately, our gear went nuts, claiming to have picked up an alternative set of destination co-ordinates.

Turns out that can of garbage was found at some point in the seventeenth century, and the broken electronics contained within were enough to accelerate development towards an information society by about eighty years. Naturally, we tried looping back on ourselves and cleaning up the garbage, but it made no difference. The beta stream was there to stay.

The gamma stream was created intentionally by one of our researchers, to see if it could be done in the lab. He didn’t have permission to do it. We looped back to stop him, and suceeded. But our gear still had access to a third timestream. Gamma is regressed: the scientist managed to stop the industrial revolution before it happened.

Delta and epsilon were all accidents of one sort or another, mostly made by gamma personnel during training.

Zeta was my doing. There’s a long-running joke that everyone kills Hitler on their first solo soujourn.

I did.

Delta’s Hitler was the worst. He succeeded where alpha’s Hitler failed, and ended up smashing both Russia and the United States.

So I killed him, and in doing so, I created Theta. Killing Hitler didn’t create a peaceful timestream. It didn’t stop the war. Killing Hitler killed everyone. Mutually Assured Destruction suddenly didn’t look all that mutual anymore, and the sky burned.

The Locus authorities threw me in a cell: one day, recycled forever.

They won’t kill me for it. They made that abundantly clear. I have to serve six billion life sentences, subjective.

They tell me that they’ll keep me alive for as long as they can.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

”Say what you want”, said Shane to the house A.I., “ever since the war, this part of the world has spectacular sunsets.” He was on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean.

“Incoming. Three sigs.” stated the house A.I.

The airhounds had caught up to Shane just as he was starting to relax.

The house defenses sent up lift-tickets to confuse the semi-sentient missiles. One of the airhounds cranked left with an angry twist of its rudder and stabbed into his neighbour’s house, crunching centuries-old stucco. Napalm gushed forth in an almost sexual explosion from its black nozzle before blooming flesh-rending fire across the inside of the building. Luckily his neighbours were on vacation.

“I’m going to miss this location”, Shane thought to himself as he dropped his drink and jumped over the railing. There were other safe houses around the world being dummied up but this one had been Shane’s favourite.

Had been. Already he was thinking of it in the past tense. The training goes deep.

Running as fast as his muscled form would allow, he dashed down the courtyard towards the water. His terrycloth robe hung open and flapped behind him like a flag of surrender. He was getting close to the pier when he felt the force of the blast.

Shane was built for strength, not agility. It was a contest between the armoured plating on his back and the shrapnel of his exploding mansion before he leapt off the edge of his pier. The concussion wave picked him up and kicked him forward.

His robe blackened and shriveled in the flame before he thudded into the waves.

He dove deep into the pale green water. Twisting around and looking up, his government-supplied eyes saw nothing but flames. He registered the ambient temperature of the water going up a few degrees.

Shane’s hair had been burnt off and the salt water was doing nothing to make his back wounds feel better. He was bleeding a lot. He could take a lot of bullets but a shark could probably still take his leg off.

He had a few tanks of air stashed around with beacons on them. With a few head nods, he called them up. The closest was fifteen feet away. He started swimming.

Jackie had gone out to get groceries and wasn’t due back for an hour. Shane hoped that she would believe him killed in the blast.

Incoming had said three airhounds. It was possible that a third was still above the fire scanning for him.

Shane had to swim as far as his augmented legs could carry him before surfacing.

Grabbing one tank and heading for another, he devised a route up the coast in his head that would get him closest to a populated beach where he could steal a few tourist identity cards and bail up to Europe.

”What the hell,” though Shane, “it’s been a while since I’ve seen Denmark.”

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Two hours ago, Pete had been pulled gasping from a tank of jelly. Now he sat in an immaculate office, wearing borrowed clothes with his employer staring him down from the far side of a granite slab desk top.

“Welcome back, Pete.” Terrence Carter, syndicate heavyweight and the man Pete ran data packets for. “I must say, you look better than you did the last time I saw you.”

Pete sat straight in his chair, tentatively rolling and flexing muscle that remembered thirty eight years of abusive mileage, but didn’t feel a days wear and tear. “What happened Terry, what’s going on?”

“You were running a very special package for me Pete, one we couldn’t copy, one we had to risk transporting as original data.” Terry paused, pulling at each of his white shirt cuffs in turn, evening their length against the dark fabric of his suit. “You had an incident Pete, for some reason you seem to have hidden my package from me. I don’t know exactly what went wrong in your head, Pete, but when we finally… recovered you, what remained of you no longer had my package installed. We want it back, Pete, I want it back.”

“What are you talking about? I don’t remember that, I’m not on an assignment yet.” Pete shook his head, his face a puzzled frown. Sometimes he had episodes if he stored data too long, there could be cross talk, and data fragments without context drifting in his head caused all sorts of unpredictable things, some unpleasant, but he couldn’t remember anything about this.

“Of course you don’t remember, you’re not the Pete that carried. We just finished growing you from the backup sample we took before we briefed the original you.” Terry pushed himself back from his desk, steepling his fingers. “We keep insurance in case things like this happen, in case we lose a good carrier, especially one with a package installed.

“So I’m a snapshot of myself, from before I left?”

“You’re a cleaned up version of the old you, rechipped and hot-wired to carry. You were the best we had Pete, so I was a little disappointed when you betrayed me.”

Pete ran a hand across the fresh stubble on his head. “What do you want from me now?”

Terry’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I want you to figure out where you put my package Pete, I want it delivered.”

“Wait a minute, if I’m a snapshot from before the briefing, I don’t have any memory of what happened later. That knowledge died with the original Pete,” he shuddered involuntarily, “I mean the original me.”

“True. You don’t know exactly what you did, but you can figure it out. Situational familiarity, behavioral predispositions, pattern predicability. Faced with the same objective, and in the same circumstances, you’ll know what you would have done, where you would have gone. Quite frankly, you’re the only one who can figure out what the hell you’ve done with my package, and I suggest you put some effort into doing just that if you want to get another day older.”

Pete regarded his employer as he weighed his options. He couldn’t help but wonder what bled out of the package he’d been carrying to make him want to risk crossing the syndicate. He also wondered whether he’d been dead when they’d found him, or if death had come later.

One thing was certain, he was being given a second chance, and a short leash. He’d better be very careful not to slip up again, one way or the other.

Author : Grady Hendrix

Fear gripped his guts! Fear turned his spine to water! Fear packed his bowels with ice and made his fingers tremble! That’s what Jim thought he should be feeling, but instead his mind was a blank white eternity with a billboard in the middle and written on the billboard in mile high letters:

I’m scared.

I’m scared.

I’m scared.

“You scared?” the grizzled grunt next to him asked.

Jim nodded weakly.

“Good man. First thing, don’t hold yer assault cannon like that. S’not a crotch warmer. Second, just think about the mission. Clears yer head.”

“Is it true that when the landing ramp drops the first 20 soldiers get their heads blown off?”

A mechanical voice sang out.

“Attention: negotiated settlement talks have closed inconclusively. Prepare for full military deployment.”

“That’ll be us, then,” the grizzled grunt grinned.

Jim threw up in his mouth and let it run down his chin. Didn’t matter. He’d be dead soon, anyways.

“There, there, son,” the grunt said. “Focus on the mission. We’re here because we have to be. Earth needs resources she don’t have, so we go to our friends and ask them to share, and when they don’t share we don’t got a choice. We have to take.”

“But why?”

“Take or die, son. It’s the way of the universe. Survival of the fittest.”

“Pardon me,” a grunt on the other side of Jim said. “I think applying social Darwinism to our situation is entirely uncalled for.”

“What? Yew advocating some kind of Ricardian system of comparative advantage?”

“I’m merely suggesting that rather than fulfilling a pre-existing survival instinct, our species is demonstrating choice.”

“Naw, naw, naw. You’re saying that we’ve become predators. S’what I’m saying too.”

“No, I’m suggesting we’re practicing a style of economic expansionism rather than pure species survival.”

“Yeah, but ultimately it doesn’t matter does it? As the great Mr. D said, “˜It’s the most adaptable to change that survives.’ They got it, we need it, they won’t give it, so we take it. Economics is personal.”

“Touche’. A bit reductionist but I yield to your aggressive reasoning.”

“Aw, think nothing of it. Incidentally, yer point of view is interestin’ but simply not appropriate to the field of battle.”

Jim’s head was spinning. The drop ship hit the dirt.

“Why thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

The warning klaxon went off and the grunt grabbed Jim by the combat armor.

“Come on, kid. Up and at “˜em.”

The landing ramp warning light started flashing. Outside, the sound of multiple missile impacts.

“Think of the mission,” the grunt shouted.

The landing ramp crashed down, the sound of a planet at war rushed in, and they came out shooting in the middle of the Ablixian town square, burning office towers falling before their eyes.

Jim heard them give the Marine warcry and he screamed it too as he blasted away in all directions and prayed that his head wouldn’t get blown off. It was a warcry, a mission statement, it was everything the Earth needed now that it had exhausted its own supply.

“Give us your celebrities!” he screamed.

Author : Matthew Reshonsky

Ariel groaned as John held her tighter on the motel bed. For a moment he was lost in the experience of her perfect-ness. The way that her body always seemed to fit the contours of his own with the perfect blend of softness to touch and hold. Over the last three weeks he had even grown to love the smell of ozone that always clung about her.

She breathed in deeply and he relaxed his hold. “So John, how was work today.”

“Eh, nothing much happened. All I could really think about was getting back here to you.”

“You’re the sweet but I know something had to have happened you’re so tense.”

This gave John pause, when he was with Ariel he always forgot about the world. Except today he had reason to be troubled. She must have sensed it, that was one of the things he loved about her the way she was always able to understand him.

“I caught the news feed; some Jack off politician is going to ban full force field holography making your job illegal.”

“They’re always trying to do that, don’t let it bother you.”

“Well the pundits say it’s going to pass this time, a broad ban on everything except medical use.”

“So we don’t have much time left, do we?”

“A week maybe two.”

She pushed her face into his chest a squeezed him so tightly that he was having trouble drawing breath and then she released.

He gently nudged her head back so he could look into her green eyes.

“I have something I want to tell you. I went and-“, he was abruptly cut off when she vanished. The all too familiar feeling of emptiness returned to the center of his chest that he was only able to push away when she was in his arms.

“Shit.” He reached over to the bed stand and counted the dollar coins left in the roll, only ten left.

He quickly slid them into their slot on the headboard when she reappeared.

“Anyway, as I was saying I went and saw an agent about putting a lien on one of my kidneys to see if was enough to buy a home unit and your program from the motel before the ban goes into effect. In order to get enough I’ll have to hawk my heart and one of my lungs too.”

“You can’t do that. What if you can’t pay them back on time?”

“I should be able to do it, I won’t be spending money here so that alone should be enough to make it on time, worst case scenario I’ll live on ramen for awhile.”

“Then you do love me.”

“What can I say, I have a thing for chicks with pink hair.”

“How much do you have left for tonight?”

“20 minutes.”

“So just enough for a happy ending.”

“As happy as it gets anyway.”

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

Using his pincers, Brachyura meticulously trimmed the crust off the edges of his sandwich. Satisfied that it was all removed, he rapidly consumed the meal in a nibbling motion that was too fast for his human visitor to follow. Brachyura arched his two protruding eyestalks backward over his brow plate and cooed. “Wow,” he exclaimed, “that’s the best thing I ever tasted. What’s it called again?”

“Peanut butter and jelly on sourdough,” answered Mike Kramble.

“And this exquisite white liquid?”

“It’s called milk. Listen, Brachyura, let me talk to our Governor. Perhaps I can convince him that this incident was just an unfortunate misunderstanding. Maybe I can persuade him that you didn’t mean to kill the maintenance workers.”

“Oh dear, Mike, you keep using that nasty word ‘kill.’ I didn’t kill them. I simply ate them.”

“It’s the same thing, Brachyura.”

“Of course it isn’t. It’s just eating. I was hungry; they were food. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s what we do on Beta Hydri. Doesn’t your species eat meat?”

“We don’t eat sentient beings, Brachyura. Listen, you’re wasting valuable time. In a few minutes the guards are going to come in here and escort you to the beach. They plan to execute you in front of your friends and family. They want to make an example out of you, to discourage any future attacks. Please, Brachyura, I can beg for clemency if you show any sign of being remorseful.”

“Mike, I’m not remorseful. I’m just full. Besides, it’s not a problem. I love our beach. It’s next to the ocean. I can finally go home.”

“Brachyura, you don’t understand. You’re not going home. There’s a twenty-foot high electric fence around this island. We had to build it because you guys think that it is okay to eat us. We only want to live here in harmony with your species.” Mike could hear the escort detail coming down the main isle. A minute later they unlocked the large cage door and slid it to the side. The guards used their cattle prods to motion Brachyura out of his cage. Electricity was the only effective weapon against the four-foot tall by ten-foot wide crustaceans. Bullets only ricocheted off their super-hard exoskeletons. As Brachyura walked down the corridor, his eight legs skidded erratically on the hard concrete floor. When he stepped out of the makeshift warehouse prison onto the soft sand, he paused. He spread his foreclaws apart and raised them toward the noonday sun. Momentarily startled, the guards jumped backwards and extended their prods.

“What a beea-uuuuu-ti-ful day,” proclaimed Brachyura. Then he lowered his claws and turned toward Kramble. “I will miss you, my friend. I will also miss peanut butter and jelly on sourdough. Perhaps in a few years, the relationship between our two species will improve, and you can make me another sand-d-wich.” With that, he bowed his head in a respectful gesture. An instant later, the back of his shell split apart to allow four large wings to unfold. In a maelstrom of blowing sand and debris, his massive body lifted off the beach. He hovered for a second, then majestically turned and flew over the fence. He splashed into the ocean approximately 100 yards offshore.

“Well, I’ll be damned” remarked Kramble with a smile. “They can fly.” Then he suddenly realized the colony had a serious problem. “Whoa, I guess that kind of makes our electric fence worthless.”

Author : Jacinta A. Meyers

“Oh!” Justice jumped, spilling the two hundred year-old cabernet all over his ratty clothes. “Y’know what we got here, fellas?”

The other two looked at him. He was grinning like a fool, strings of diamonds draped over his neck and clothes dark with the wine.

“We done confiscated the king’s music box!”

“Music box?” Burgess arched a brow.

“Saw it on the Web-waves.” Reaching a grubby hand out, Justice touched the glass. “It’s old. Worth millions, I reckon.”

Citizen ran a hand over his chin. The rings on his fingers glistened. “Worth more than the crown jewels themselves?”

“Not sure, but it’s worth lots. And hell, anything’ll help the rev’lution.” Justice nudged Burgess with a knowing elbow. “Eh?”

But Burgess was staring into the dome. There was a boy inside, sitting on a small patch of marble. A violin lay beside him. The child’s eyes held such sadness, it hurt to look at him. “How old you say?” He asked absently.

“Well, from the twenty-third cent’ry at least.” Justice was nodding. “They made ‘im look older though. Costume and all,” he pointed to the elaborate waistcoat, the lace at the boy’s neck and sleeves.

Citizen leaned forward eagerly, a hungry expression on his face. “Don’t suppose we could take a listen…”

“Don’t see why not.” Justice shrugged. He stepped forward and gave the gilded base a kick. “Come on now, play you bloody thing.”

The boy got slowly to his feet. He tucked the violin beneath his chin and raised its bow in his hand. He began to play.

At first they heard nothing. Then, gradually, they began to notice a low rumbling. The air filled with a sound, the most delicate thing imaginable. The men stood staring in awe, listening.

“How’s it work?” Citizen whispered.

“He’s makin’ the glass vibrate from inside…” Justice whispered back. “That’s what we’re hearin’. Like a bell or somethin’.”

“It’s beautiful.”

But Burgess was weeping, big fat tears rolling silently down his cheeks. He couldn’t bear it. Taking up the bar they’d used to pry the box’s case open, he swung it at the dome.

There was a soul-shattering clatter. Shards of glass shot everywhere. Justice and Citizen stood there, mouths agape. “What’d you do?!”

The boy stared too, then dropped to the ground. Burgess went to him, held him up, watched as he began to age rapidly before their eyes. The skin of his face crinkled like old paper. But he was smiling, the violin still clasped in his shriveled hand. “Merci,” he whispered. “Merci.”

Author : V.L. Ilian

Vice manager Hans Heidelberg exited the elevator with unusual nervousness. He knew the chief was awaiting his report but never in his life had Hans been so unsure about himself.

“Mr. DeVries… The report on the 2 hour outage of our mainframe is complete.”

“Well… get on with it.”

Hans took a deep breath imagining the scene where he gets fired for incompetence in interpreting the data.

“Less than 24 hours ago the mainframe started constructing a profile for a new employee, Joana Baker, a young graduate student who’d been accepted as a research assistant. 6 seconds into the profile build a speeding ticket threw up a red flag with the plausibility checker.”

“How can a speeding ticket fail a plausibility check?”

“It seems it had been issued exactly 54 minutes earlier in Singapore. The AI established that Joana Baker could not have traveled from Singapore to her interview in a 20 minute window. However this did not freeze our mainframe. A series of programs started running to check for mistakes, identity theft and a number of other theories.”

Hans put his thumbdrive on chief’s desk and pressed the little button on it. The file of Joana Baker appeared on the display surface of the desk in front of Mr. DeVries.

“It turned out another Joana Baker who lives in Singapore received that ticket.”

A second file appeared next to the first one that also read Joana Baker but the photo was of the same person. Different hairstyle, different clothes but undoubtedly the same person.

“The puzzle is their biometrics match 99%”

“Separated sisters?”

Hans pushed the little button again.

“Researching this other woman threw up several other plausibility errors. We discovered a third woman named Joana Bakker living in Amsterdam.”

A new file was being displayed, again of a woman who strongly resembled the first.

“Are you certain this is correct?”

Hans swallowed dryly and continued.

“All 3 women are exactly the same age and match biometrically 99%. This time the results attracted the interest of a background program that had been running continuously for 20 years. It had the credentials to prioritize itself and it did so by putting every program on hold. This resulted in the freezing of all our operations.”

“What program is this? Who gave it these permissions?”

“When queried it identifies itself as Project Harper Detector v3.2.”

Mr. DeVries changed his expression noticeably.

“No links, no ownership info and there’s no project Harper in our database. It was so firmly rooted in our mainframe we couldn’t stop it without cutting all the power. We were ready to do just that when it finished and returned the mainframe to normal operation. It… gave us some results”

Hans pressed the little button again, the first three files shrunk and the desk was filled with files. All variations Joana Baker, all 99% match to the first, spread all over the world.

“In total we’ve identified 27 Joana Baker… s. Born on the same date, in fact if we take into account errors in hospital clocks… they’re all born at approximately 13:30GMT.”

Hans waited to be fired.

In a moment that is rarely witnessed Mr. DeVries smiled broadly.

“Project Harper was a classified research initiative… we tried to create ripples in the fabric of the universe. The theory was that if we could disrupt space-time we could create anomalies that we could detect and find out how the great machine ticks. After 11 years of failures the project was abandoned but we left an AI running to spot data anomalies just in case.”

Hans looked down at the 27 files.

“…The universe threw an exception error?”

“Yes… Now we just have to figure out how.”

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

“I mean, what I’m saying is,” he said, “is that going skinny dipping never killed anyone.”

Her eyes trembled back for a second and her look softened to a vacancy that let him know that she was accessing.

“Brandy and Jorge Garcia were killed in 1956 by their own village for skinny-dipping.” She replied. “It was seen an indecent behaviour for an unmarried couple. There are twenty such incidents on file and 48 more hits unexplored on the subject.”

She took the fun out of everything.

Every open-ended argument about what the capital of Zaire was, or what actor starred in that action film ten years ago, or how the words to that song were sung was suddenly a five-second conversation that ended correctly and abruptly.

His friends teased him about going out with a girl with implants. They said that she was obviously slumming it by going out with a kid too poor to afford brainwork. He told them all politely to get fucked. He was in love with her.

The implants were trying his patience, though. He realized that the inadequacies of his own memory and lack of connection to the network were basically the reasons that he had conversations at all.

The only things that she wanted to speak about were the unknowable answers to age-old questions like “what is life?” and “which religion is best?” and even then she had volumes of theories to draw upon.

They had a lot of sex together which was pretty mind-blowing considering all the tantric volumes that she studied and downloaded but afterwards, he got the feeling that while she knew, well, everything, she really didn’t have a personal opinion on anything.

When he asked her how she felt about something, she’d get a confused look on her face and he could see the effort it took her to frame an answer. In a way, she was even more naïve and simple than he was.

That’s why he loved her and that was the reason why she loved him, he thought. He could challenge her in ways that her implant-ridden, philosophy-obsessed pals uptown could not.

He was wrong, of course, but it was a fantastic summer for both of them.

Author : Asher Wismer

“There’s a bug in my drink,” said the customer.

I lifted the glass and held it to the light. Sure enough, a little fly floated midway, almost obscured by the amber liquid.

“Sorry about that.” I poured him a replacement, and he went back to his table satisfied.

The bar was busy tonight. Several people had requested The Game on TV, and I had reluctantly turned it on. Naturally, that spawned a group of Moral Authorities to come over and berate me for allowing “pornographic filth” into a family establishment.

The Game patrons tip better. I told the Moral Authorities to look elsewhere for their superiority complex.

Over in a corner, three women were drinking too much and giggling. Occasionally, one would glance over at me, look away hastily, and giggle even louder. I knew what was coming and prepared myself.

Sure enough, after a minute one of the women came over with a twenty and a smirk. “You got a minute?” Her voice was noticeably slurred.

I nodded, and she placed the twenty on the bar. “I hear you can make a woman orgasm with one kiss.”

“Is that so?” I glanced around; people were watching The Game, and the room was loud enough. Still….

“Go ahead,” she said. “See if it works. You can keep the twenty either way.” Her eyes were heavy-lidded. I wondered briefly if she would remember. Her friends would, though.

Unless….

I quickly poured three shots of my special brew from under the counter and put them on a serving plate. “Lean over this way,” I said.

She smirked and did, and I kissed her, careful to keep my lesser libido in check. Her skin flushed, her eyes widened, her shoulders rolled. A trembling began at her loins and worked up her stomach to her head, and I placed a hand under her arm to support her.

“Take these three on the house,” I said, walking her back to the table. She sat down heavily, shell-shocked, and her friends whooped. The Game drowned them out. I winked and went back to the bar.

It was always a risk, but the special brew would make their memories fuzzy and other people would remember The Game better anyway. With luck, she would never notice the babies hatching in her body until it was too late.

Under the cover of the bar, I refilled the Brew bottle from my proboscis, then cheered a particularly good beheading.

Author : Joshua Reynolds

“Are you sure this will work?” the President asked. He was broad, clumsy and permanently flustered. These were his only defining qualities, and his election was still regarded as something of a fluke.

“Of course, Mr. President.” The GENErevolution representative said confidently, clone-bank teeth blisteringly white in the finest smile medical science could provide. He gestured and the corporate doctor leaned over the President, gloved fingers clipping, fastening and generally making the President exceedingly uncomfortable. The last was not part of the doctor’s job, merely a benefit given his current circumstances.

“The procedure has become a staple of the GENErevolution services packet. We use only the finest cloned neural webs from our celebrity DNAbanks. Great men, Mr. President, great men.” The representative continued, watching the doctor work. The doctor tapped the President’s skull-implant harder than he should have, causing him to jump.

“Ow!”

“Stop moving please.” The doctor’s hands gently rotated the President’s head back into position with calm precision. Inside of course, he was seething as only a man of high education can. Six weeks earlier, the President had railroaded a bill through Congress that allowed corporations, like GENErevolution for instance, to clone and brain-bump valuable employees as part and parcel of company insurance programs. Since the clones were the property of the creating body a cunning corporate body, again GENErevolution for instance, could in fact lay-off the original employee and use his clone at cut-rate cost instead.

The doctor, a graduate of the New Bethesda surgery program and worth six-figures, had received his pink slip in the mail that morning. He had also received a gold watch because GENErevolution was like a family and all about tradition.

The watch, having been designed by a disgruntled former employee in the souvenir division and newly cloned himself, did not work.

Thus, the doctor poked the President again.

“Ow! You’re doing that on purpose!”

“Please don’t move.” The doctor said, unsmiling. The GENErevolution representative, who had not been cloned as the new practice was waived for management-level employees, leaned forward, hands behind his back.

“Don’t worry Mr. President, a complete neural overlay is nothing to fret over. It’s quite old hat these days, ha-ha-ha.” The representative’s laugh was as artificial as the rest of him. It was borrowed from a popular comedian, royalties pending, of course.

“Ha-ha?” the President said. “And I’ll still be me, right? I mean, I’ll have all the moves and such, but I’ll still be me?”

“You’ll be fine. Completely unchanged, save for the mesmerizing skills of Gene Kelly implanted into your cortex. All we’re really doing is giving your neural network a good shoring up to prevent any synaptic burn and maybe give you a few smooth moves, ha-ha-ha.”

“Good. Good. The Sin-Lu Treaty Annual Ball is tonight at the Chinese embassy and I’d like to make a good impression.”

“Oh you will, you will. Right doctor?”

“Of course.” The doctor said. He glanced at the neural tray, containing a cloned neural web tattooed with the letters ’G-K’.

These letters did not stand for Gene Kelly.

That night, at the ball, the President pulled a ceremonial Shou Dao sword, dating from the Song Dynasty, off of the wall and attempted to behead the Chinese Prime Minister while shouting “This is for building that bloody great wall, you bastard!” in ancient Mongolian.

The Board of Directors for GENErevolution could not be reached for comment.

Author: Roi R. Czechvala

They think we are unaware during the Freeze. They say our brain activity is too low for rational thought. At best they say we might experience vague fleeting dreamlike states. They think we sleep. They’re wrong.

It’s been two years since our last Thaw. It has been two years in which to think. Two years to plan. Two years to become seriously pissed off.

As the Thaw begins, our orders and classes in the weapons and equipment we will be using are given to us intravenously. Small electric currents are fed through our bodies to stimulate and exercise long dormant muscles. A high protein/carbo/steroidal soup is pumped into us to get us battle ready. I’d prefer a beer.

Their failing was in thinking that we are asleep in cryo. They have no idea that the brain feed works both ways. While they are monitoring us, we are monitoring them

They never expected us to learn. They never expected us to communicate with each other in cryo, or communicate to the other ships, to the other Icemen, let alone a distant planets surface. They didn’t plan, nor expect us to have any knowledge, or even goals beyond our military download. How wrong they are. How arrogant.

Finally the Thaw is complete. Twenty nine of us emerge from our lockers. The non-cryos refer to them as “Cryo Stasis Emersion Tanks”, but they are identical to our lockers in garrison, sans the vent holes.

There are twenty nine Cryos in this drop ship, plus our lieutenant, a non-cryo, and a handful of other NCs to run the ship. We are drop troops; the Icemen. Little more than bombs sheathed in flesh; set to explode in a fury of berserker combat. An expendable weapon as far as they’re concerned. If we survive the fray, and we usually do, all the better, it means promotion, for the CO, we’re just ammo. If we are terminated, oh well, they can always grow more.

We draw our combat loads, and fall into formation to await any updates to our previously downloaded orders. Our Lt. takes command from our platoon sergeant. Funny how our commanders are all non-cryos, and therefore non-combatants. It’s like they don’t trust us. Ha, I make me laugh.

“Gentlemen”, our Lt. speaks in something less than a manly voice. “as you are already aware there has been an uprising in the Martian Confederation and we’ve been called upon to quell the disturbance. The rebels are cybos.” Cybos; he spits out the word just like somebody calling a black man “nigger” two hundred years ago.

“The reason,” the little NC prick continued, “for the soldiers treachery is uncertain at this time, but you have been ordered to eliminate the problem with extreme prejudice. You have all been issued atomics to achieve this end. You drop in twenty minutes. That is all. Any questions?” Icemen have no need to speak. We have orders. Besides, we already know the reason.

“Very well. Platoon disMISSED.” The Lt. executes a crisp about face, steps off neatly with his left foot, and crumples to the floor with a .50 caliber hole pierced neatly through his skull. I use incendiary rounds; cauterizes wounds instantly. I hate blood.

Yes, we will drop in twenty minutes, we will meet the “cybos” on the field of battle, and we will embrace the Cybernetic Soldiers as brothers in arms as we face the real enemy. The “trueborn” humans who hate us, despise us, and inherently fear us.

Mars will be ours, and what more fitting place for a race of warriors.

The Icemen Cometh…

Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer

Kala waited till the sun rose above the mountains, and then got up out of the dirt to find Awn. Kala was covered in dirt and dust, some of which had gotten into the metal shoes that were locked to her feet. Awn was standing in a stream, cleaning the dirt off the vicious red brand mark on her thigh.

“You’re going to have to get dirty again come sunset,” Kala said.

Awn splashed water on her chest. “I’d like to feel human for a couple hours.”

Kala dipped her feet in the stream, letting the water get into her shoes and soothe her bruised feet. “I like the dirt. Makes me feel as if I’m less naked.”

Awn raised an eyebrow “Oh, you’re still plenty naked, Commander.”

Kala sat down. “We’ll make it, Ensign. We will.”

Awn laughed bitterly. “Sure. If the Leeches don’t eat, shoot or discover us and if we make pickup.”

“We’ll make it.”

“Why do you think they picked us for this mission?”

Kala leaned back on her muscular elbows. “Youth. I just got the rejuvenation done, and you’re young. Both of us know the Leech language and I’m a veteran.” Kala smiled but she knew Awn was expendable. Awn was just there to watch Kala’s back, watch her get the work done. They were commodities.

The weak green sun dipped behind the mountains and the Leeches rode into view. Kala didn’t know where they burrowed themselves during the day, but at night they rode on their skittering mounts, and drove them forward, towards their final destination.

Kala had to remind herself that genetically, these Leeches had human ancestors. But now, with their translucent skin, white lidless eyes and gaping circular mouths, they were only human in the barest outline. The Leeches drove the human herd, engineered to be mindless beasts, over the rough terrain.

On the third night, their feet sore in their metal shoes, the herd and the Leeches reached the military compound. They drove them into pens and negotiated loudly the price for wild humans.

Most of the herd fell asleep, but Kala and Awn remained awake, waiting. Soon, they would have their chance to fulfill the mission. The Leeches assumed the humans were stupid. From inside of the military compound, they could easily reach their target and then slip out into the night to await pickup.

Then the armored Leeches came to the pen. They smacked their round mouths together and pointed in the pen. They dragged one human out, and then another, slicing into human flesh with their rows of slender teeth, sharing flesh with each other, clamped on waists and thighs and shoulders.

They dragged Awn out of the pen. Awn looked at Kala desperately. Kala had the weapon: an electric charge hidden in a fake finger. Enough to kill her target, but not enough to save anyone. Kala buried her face in a pile of sleeping humans and looked away as they tore Awns flesh from her body.

When the sickly dawn came, Kala slipped out of the pen and through the compound on the route she memorized. She entered the sleeping chamber of the Leech General and flipped back her finger. She touched it to the Leeches face. It jerked once under her touch. Kala had hoped for something more, but that was all, a gentle death.

The sun rising in the sky, she walked out of the compound back into the dessert, her bloodstained shoes leaving a trail in the sand.

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

Robert Meier quietly walked between the rows of tanks. Each tank held a blank, a three hundred kilocredit backup body for whoever could afford the fee. They were low-maintenance, but regulations meant that a pair of eyes had to check each tank at least once a day. Every now and again he had to tweak the physiological mix that suspended each body, and about once a month, someone came to pick up one of the blanks. It was a job that no-one really wanted.

Robert took it because he had thought of a plan to bring a little more happiness into the world.

Set apart from the rows of blanks, a small cluster of tanks were given over to creating clusters of tissue-neutral organs and antigen-free blood. Most of his job was the preperation of these for shipping to the nearest hospital. Robert whistled to himself as he filled one-unit bags with blood, laying them out carefully on a desk for packing. This was his favourite thing to do. He had no morbid fascination with the artificial blood, but instead smiled at the chance to be philanthropic. The blood was his conduit to good works. It carried his gift to the sick and the ill; something to lift them and show them what life could be.

Once forty bags were filled, he got his syringe and the case of vials from his jacket, and pushed three hundred and fifty milligrams of metaescaline through the seals. Anyone who needed blood today would walk in Robert’s world for twelve hours: bright, vivid, fast and full of wonder. He packaged up the blood carefully, and called for a courier to take it away.

It was easy to lose track of time with the tanks. Once in a while, one of the blanks would talk to Robert. He could listen to them for hours as they spoke on any kind of subject. Normally it was one that he had some knowledge about, which was always a good thing. It was just getting dark when a young man with a hospital ID badge knocked on the door, asking for an extra few packets of blood. Robert happily fetched three from the fridge, bags that he’d prepared earlier. The man – a pathologist, his badge said – thanked Robert, and left with the blood.

The following day, the pathologist was waiting at the door when Robert went to work.

“Hey there!” Robert greeted him cheerily.

The pathologist punched him, hard, in the jaw.

On the ground, Robert woozily pressed a hand to his throbbing jaw, and decided that this man probably wasn’t real, Real people wouldn’t object to be freed for a few hours.

Later on, a police car came to pick him up. He recognised the faces of some of the officers from amongst his blanks. He tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t stop talking some nonsense about him being a murderer. Robert knew he hadn’t killed anyone, so just ignored them.

Author : J. S. Kachelries

The host of the very popular holovision show slithered to the center of the stage. The thunderous ovation of 1500 tails pounding on the floor died away as the host’s three antennae motioned them to quiet down. The holocameras panned slowly from the audience to the host. “Thank you…thank you…welcome to Alien Encounters. Tonight is our final show focusing on the sentient life form on Sol-3, in the Sirius Sector. As our regular viewers will attest, these earthlings are a very entertaining species. They have to be the easiest species in the galaxy to mess with.

“For those of you unfamiliar with the show, we sent three teams of college students to Earth with instructions to convince as many earthlings as possible that ‘extraterrestrials’ exist using as little evidence as possible. The team producing the highest gullibility quotient will win an all-expense vacation for five at the Holiday Spa on Orion-3.

“Our first team, from Dorfox University, matted down a circular pattern in a vegetation field on one of the planet’s island countries. Despite the fact that no spaceship would leave such a simplistic impression, the earthlings became obsessed with wild speculations about alien visitors. The Dorfox team followed up with some really bizarre geometric patterns that had no practical significance whatever. Despite the 80/20 rule, very few earthlings accepted the simplest solution. They think we’re sending them complicated, encrypted messages. Hellllloooo. It’s not a complicated message guys, it’s ‘Get a life!’

“Our second team, from Darrvah University, shredded a weather balloon and scattered its remains across an arid silica wasteland. Not only did their news media go overboard, but they are still obsessed with the ‘alien crash site’ decades later. The really funny part is they think their government is involved in a conspiracy to cover up the incident. The more the government denies a cover-up, the more convinced the fools are that there are flying saucers and alien bodies hidden in a secure warehouse. It makes you wonder if these beings ever heard of Occam’s Razor. To this day, local souvenir shops still sell millions of little green humanoid dolls that are supposed to be us. Do you believe their arrogance? They think all intelligent races must be bilateral beings that look like them. Unbelievable!

“Finally, our third team, from Gihhel University, mind melded with an aspiring actor and had him broadcast an audio only “breaking news story” about aliens invading their planet. It was hilarious. Thousands of people were convinced we were going to turn them into slaves and sex toys. They grabbed projectile weapons to fight us off. Do you believe that? They thought they could chase away a superior, technologically advanced race with pop guns. And slaves? Why would we want intellectually challenged earthmen as slaves? That’s what robots are for. And sex toys? Hey, I’ve seen their women. I’d rather mate with a Cassiopeian swamp lizard.

Anyway, these are the three finalists. Will it be…Crop Circles, Roswell, or War of the Worlds? Which set of contestants made the most number of earthlings look like the south end of a north bound usagiuma?” The host reached into his pouch and pulled out a datapadd. He paused for dramatic effect. The audience began chanting for their favorite. He flipped open the padd and read “And the winner is…”

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I knew what had happened.

Lisa Sagan and Andrea Hawking were helping Petra Turing make sure my vitals were stabilizing. It was Henrietta Einstein that was chairing the ‘wake. I could see my dear Shelagh Newton looking down from the observation booth with tears of joy in her eyes.

I’d been caught and killed. They’d had to wake up another copy of me.

I needed to know how much memory I was missing and if the Two-X project was still functioning.

We’d wrested control from the governments. We were the smartest minds on the planet. We’d taken over from the war-mongering males and turned the entire continent into a matriarchy that was feared and respected.

It wasn’t enough.

We need the world to be with us if we were to conquer space.

“Don’t try to move” said Carla Marconi. I bristled at the sound of her petulant voice but remained still. Soon, I would leave this hospital bed and be debriefed and rebriefed. The project was safe. I could see that much from here.

The black ceramic hummed above us in the nuclear cooling tower. Miles long, it crackled with barely restrained power. It wouldn’t be long before the world would fear us and have no choice but to obey. It was regrettable but the quickest solution.

The weapon is of my design.

My name is Tamara Tesla. A glorious future awaits.

Author : hraesvelgr

“Solar Systems are easy to program. Way easier than I thought.”

“Told ya so,” I could hear the Director’s voice crisp and clear. “Did you enjoy the challenge?”

I smiled down at the still water of the lake before me, reflected in it a perfect image of Earth and its moon as viewed through the dome of my Surveyor Station. The sight was pristine, perfect; not just the beauty of reality as a canvas, but now that I knew every detail of the situation’s physics, now after I had run millions upon millions of equations, sorted through mathematics that had previously been beyond my imagining, I could appreciate the movement of the planets and satellites in a way no other human being would ever be able to.

“Yes,” I answered plainly, after a long pause, having almost forgotten the phone at my ear. “I mean. I love what I do.”

“Someone will be there in the morning to check on your productivity, but from the sound of things, I’m guessing all those recommendations were right about you.” The Director’s voice had a certain allure to it; one that told of a promotion, maybe even a bonus or an upgraded  Surveyor Station. “Once I get the report, kid, there’s a chance we can talk about getting you to work on Letser 920. It’s a sixteen-planet job.”

More work! I stifled a small laugh of sheer joy, still eyeing the reflection, watching as the moon drifted gracefully so near earth that it looked for a moment that the two might touch. “I’m up for anything you can throw at me, boss. Now that I have a handle on it, I could probably even build a solar system from scratch.” There was a flash of light in my little lake, reflected from above where the sun was peeking out from between the two celestial bodies. My distracted mind thrummed over the math of the event for a moment, and there was a little tick in my subconscious telling me that the sun was still three hours from that sort of dawn. The Perturbation Theory could account for that, maybe. But, really…

My thoughts paused to reprocess what was going on, taking their time, going over the calculations I’d run and trying to figure what had…

Happened. I snapped my head away from the reflection. Looking up, I saw with my own eyes, the flash of light hadn’t been from the sun; Earth had just suffered a head-on collision with its own moon. “Son of a bitch!” Goodbye, Africa.

For several seconds I just stared upward, speechless, only partly hearing the director’s inquisitions about my sudden explication. I could see it all now: the perturbations that had gone wrong, the prophetic calculations of what was to come, the Earth breaking apart, the orbits of the other planets all skewed into catastrophic spirals. It was to be a dead solar system. And what’s worse, it was going to be hell for me to score even a two-planet job after the Director heard about this one.

Author : =arkhein

Deeg snuck out of his parent’s cabin late on the last night.  He had noticed the elevators had cameras in them, so he took the stairwell instead.  There would be consequences for his actions, but if he could avoid some of them, that would be nice.

The stairwell turned out to be a narrow tube, thirty stories high, with a flimsy ladder welded to the inside.  The sight of it made his eyes bug, but he climbed in anyway.  She would be there.  She probably was there already.

“Are you going to be at the homecoming party at the Core tonight?  Veena had asked.  Deeg distinctly remembered the rainbow sparkles in her long blonde hair and the overwhelming scent of strawberries.

Rather than asking what the ‘Core’ was, Deeg just nodded and said “of course!”

Halfway up the tube, Deeg was exhausted and sweaty.  His hand slipped, and he fell.  Deeg almost screamed, but realized he was falling much more slowly than he should, and grabbed the ladder quickly.  Taking a deep breath, he pulled himself up hard and sailed upwards several feet before slowing down.  The rest of the way up, he took superman leaps.

“Oh, I’m going to be there too,” Veena had said, looking down at the ping-pong table intently and twisting the hair near her ear round her finger over and over again.  Deeg opened his mouth to ask her if she wanted to play another game, but she set the paddle on the table.

“Well, I gotta go.  Bye,” she said, making eye contact with him for a second, then rushing over to a gaggle of giggling girls who were playing a dancing game in the corner.

As he approached the hatch, a thumping sound came to his awareness.  Deeg opened the hatch and dance music blared.  He pulled himself inside.

The Core was a huge circular compartment, over a hundred feet across.  Thin poles ran at all angles across the cavernous room, bearing multicolored, spining lights. People moved up and down the struts via handholds, and then swung themselves out into the air, dancing and flailing and spinning.

Deeg’s eyes were on the huge, circular windows on the walls throughout the Core.  Most showed some part of the huge white ship they were on, the cisluar ferry Atluntos.  Its bulk was the huge habitable ring that could be seen in all directions.  The Core was at the very center of the ship, attached to the ring with huge struts.

Then he saw Veena.  She was at the nearest window, peering out.  She was dressed in a rainbow colored body suit covered in lights that pulsed with the beat of the music.  Her golden hair formed a floating, shining corona about her head, and Deeg gasped.  

Veena looked up, saw him, and grabbed his arm.  She said something, but Deeg couldn’t hear.  She said it again, then pointed at the window.  He looked out.  There was Earth.  It wasn’t full, but still glowed brightly against the blackness of space.

She moved forward and he could feel her breath on his face.  It made him dizzy.  She bit her lower lip slightly and looked into his eyes.  Then she kissed him.  It was sloppy and rough and the taste of strawberries filled his mouth.  His hands moved to her back and behind her head, and he returned the sloppy, wonderful first kiss.

* * *

Years later, the only thing he could remember about his teenage vacation to the moon was a strawberry smell, and the reflection of the crescent Earth glowing brightly in Veena’s eyes.

Author : Todd Keisling

“People of Earth, hear me!”

The transient stood in the center of the station and held a large placard that read “THEY’RE WATCHING.” The few commuters who paid him any attention allowed a large distance between themselves and this poor, confused soul.

“The Shadow Government that controls this planet does not want me to tell you what I know. They know I know, and I must make haste before they triangulate on my position.”

His voice was studious and eloquent. It came as a shock to the few who noticed. This dump-dweller, with his drab army fatigues, plump winter parka (despite the Summer temperatures) and vacant look in his eye, was the speaker of such intelligent diction?

Those who managed to hold his stare did not do so for long. Their eyes were distracted by the carefully sculpted hat of tin foil on his head.

“We are the last remaining few! When Atlantis sank, it was only part of their master plan to enslave humanity. They keep us in bondage by partitioning out the airwaves in small, digestible chunks, easy for our tiny minds to swallow while they withhold that which they do not want us to know.”

One of the few commuters actually paying attention spoke up and said, “I thought Atlantis was a myth?”

“That’s what they want you to think,” the vagrant countered, pointing in the young lad’s direction. “They want you to believe that. Area 51 isn’t really a secret lab for testing alien spacecraft. There are no aliens. There never was a moon landing. We are alone, but they want us to fear the possibility of extraterrestrial existence. They pump our minds full of Hollywood glamour and lies. Fear is their bargaining chip. It’s their foothold over civilization—so it has been, and so it always will.

“But I know. I know too well. They couldn’t keep me contained at Groom Lake, and they won’t keep me contained here. They think they can steal my brainwaves and turn me into one of their sheep—”

He pointed to the tin foil hat. He didn’t notice the approach of two security guards.
“—but I know how to beat them. The men who run this Shadow Government want us to remain asleep in our beds of fear, and their—hey, let me go!”

The vagrant offered little resistance. While one guard handcuffed him, the other took his sign. As they ushered him out, some commuters heard him say, “They can’t keep me! They’ll never get my brainwaves!”

And then they were gone. The station returned to its normal hustle and bustle, the low drone of human voices and shuffling feet. Across the lobby, two men in black, three-piece suits and fedoras put out their cigarettes, stared at one another for a brief moment and then erupted into laughter.

“And all this hoopla about Area 51! Everyone knows it’s one of our subterranean retirement centers,” one said.
“‘The men who run this Shadow Government,’” said the other.

“I know! It’s absurd!”

“As if there ever was such a thing! Men and their self-absorbed fantasies. The human mind still astounds me. Do you think it’s safe, letting the last few run free like this?”

“Oh, I’m sure the Collective knows best. As long as they don’t know the truth, Plan X will continue.”

“I suppose you’re right, Krelyx. ‘No moon landing,’ indeed.”

They cackled as they vanished into a passing crowd of commuters.

Author : Salli Shepherd

In Fresno, California, Kalisha Henderson jacks herself in to a palm-length, slimline psii-pod and closes her eyes. She is young, barely in her teens, and her mind soon fills with images of pink, prancing horses with horns of silver.

She hasn’t yet learnt to hold her impressions well or long enough to leave a decent neural imprint. Soon the horses shred and tatter, fading into cartoonish, equine ghosts. With a low moan of despair, she watches her popularity rate spike briefly and then plummet again to almost zero. She’ll have to try harder, much harder, if she is ever going to succeed. She also realises her Subscription is running out and, in anticipation of that terrible loss, weeps loudly into her hands.

On the other side of the world, Peter O’Flaherty is enjoying the fruit of being a Master of his art. From Peter’s psii-pod and thence into ArtiCon’s main gallery flows a horrifically lifelike pack of Hell Hounds, slavering and many-limbed, set loose on a roomful of barebreasted cat-women. Millions watch the carnage, enthralled, and for every minute they do so a credit leaks from their account to ArtiCon’s coffers. Peter will see one ten-thousandth of the money, but he doesn’t care. His popularity rate just went through the roof, and the subsequent endorphin reward meted out to him through the Subscriber chip embedded in his temporal lobe sets him shivering, pleasure dripping wet and warm down his thigh.

They are just two, among six billion Subscribers.

Kalisha’s little burst of misery, a mere drop in the ocean, is nevertheless a  source of great happiness to Narghaflog. Roughly the size and shape of an inflated sleeping-bag, the alien hooked up to ArtiCon’s artificial brain by hairlike microfilaments quivers and blubbers in joy. What fuel these creatures provide! What manner of mesmeric delicacies! Narghaflog’s entire planet is beholden to It for this cheap source of food, fuel and entertainment. And to think, It almost passed the place by. With a pulse of neurons and self-satisfaction, the great Arcturean explorer transmits a message to Its second-in-command.

“Lhamayaoh! Plant discord in that large spike on Subscriber #27985362, immediately.”

The lesser creature does as It is bidden, proceeding to insert a twin trend of manufactured outrage and disapproval into Peter O’Flaherty’s rating stream. Immediately, a massive wave of murderous anger drives response levels off the chart– Peter’s dedicated fans and followers, numbering in their millions, won’t stand for the creations of their favourite Dream-Weaver being sullied by unfavourable critique.

Moments later, the slug-like denizens of Arcturus let out a telepathic roar of approval as a tide of human rage floods at the speed of Thought across space, permeating their depleted auric channels. Narghaflog allows a final shudder of pleasure to wobble Its colourless flesh before turning back to the neural monitors, thanking the Spawn-Source for happy accidents and the limitless vanity of artists.

Author : DarlingDante

Dr. Hammond mopped the sweat from his forehead, his round red cheeks heaving in labored breath. He’d maintained a manicured composure during countless conferences, lectures, and even the couple of morning news shows he’d smiled through, but on the day of the test, a beaded crown of anxiety hung on his brow.

Newspaper headlines around the world read: “Hammond’s Miracle Machine”, “Energy from the Air”, “A New Beginning”, and so on. He knew the technical aspect of his work was lost on most of his colleagues, let alone the average individual, but as long as he flashed a chart or a diagram on TV, and the people who were supposed to know what they were talking about agreed with him, that was good enough for everybody.   

A smiling head popped into his office from the hallway “Almost show time Dr.!” Dr. Hammond barely nodded in acknowledgement. The flimsy familiar office chair that he’d grown old and fat in creaked as his weight shifted slowly off its edge. “Showtime” he muttered to himself.

He could see the machines busy with activity. Engineers checked over every inch of the mechanisms and, from the distance of the observation window, looked like ants swarming on a stick jabbed in their nest. The Nevada sky was clear, and although he couldn’t see them, he knew that there were thousands of spectators from around the world huddled in a half circle behind the safety mark. Little villages of onlookers had popped up out of the desert around the testing site in the weeks before. He had been so angry that a member of his staff had been careless or stupid enough to leak the location then, but now that the day had come, he knew it wouldn’t matter. His life’s work was framed in the long glass in front of him, as if some grand or mad painter had seen the whole of him and spread it out on crystalline canvas. The observation room was private by his request. He wanted silence at the climax of his life.

Dr. Hammond’s moment of reflection was interrupted by a hasty knock, followed by the door to his sanctuary being flung open. Robert, his chief assistant, dashed inside with a bundle of computer printouts tucked under his arm. Robert was the only other man alive that had understood some of the critical workings of the project, and in some minor ways contributed to its fruition.

“Dr. we really need to talk.” Robert sputtered, catching his breath. His words sounded discordant in the vacuum of Hammond’s haven.

“Well what’s so important?”Hammond spat back with a look on his face as if he’d been struck.
“I know you’ve told me to relax and enjoy myself, but I couldn’t help going back over the numbers, and some things just didn’t add up.”

He turned his back to Robert, again fixing his gaze on the edifice that was preparing to activate.
“The numbers are fine.”

“Doctor, I really think we should take some time to look this over…” Robert trailed off, and after a moment’s hesitation said: “We are going to have to reschedule the test.”

A small smile crept across Dr. Hammond’s wide cheeks.

“The numbers are fine.”

The countdown blurred into a hum of syllables sounding to Dr. Hammond like a backwards count into anesthetic sleep. There was a brilliance that seemed to darken the crystal sky, then a violent shake that split the awful image of achievement into fragments. As the concussion rushed toward his outpost, Dr. Hammond pressed his palm to the glass.

“It’s finally finished.”

Author : naquoya

It ended as it always was. Just me with my thoughts bidding farewell to the only friend I really knew. At least he was the only one who really knew me.

There was no grave site. No urn to hold his burnt remains. No, there was just my memories of him, which will fade in time I guess. He told me they would. He told me they always do. How do you let go of something you have held onto for so long?

My shrink said it was just a faze. It will pass, it had to.
“These drugs are designed for your condition” he told me. He never told me what that condition was.
“But I don’t want to lose him.”

My shrink didn’t understand. It was his job to not understand. My family, they just wished I would grow up and be normal.

Sometimes I feel I was born into the wrong body. Or perhaps the wrong time. Or perhaps the wrong place. But I once found the place for me. He took me there.

“Did I tell you about the time he took me to his home?” My shrink gave me that look. The look that says ‘what am I to do with you’. What he did was up the dosage. He always did. It cost me my friend.

It’s not my shrinks fault. I was just born into the wrong body. Or perhaps the wrong time. Or was it the wrong place? Ah yes, there was that other place. His place. He took me there once. I tried to tell others about it. No one would listen. No one listens when they think you’re crazy. My friend, well he listened. He took me home, to his place.

To his world. A world of lights and movement. And buildings. I’ve never seen so many buildings. And they pierced the sky. It was just so beautiful. I know, I was there. I didn’t dream it.

The drugs tell me I did. My shrink tells me I did. My family tell me I did. But I didn’t. And now it’s starting to fade.

He told me it would.

As a follow up to the contest we ran a few months ago on deviantART looking for 7 top notch Flash Fiction pieces to feature here on 365tomorrows, this is our second ‘week of deviantART’ where we feature the Runners Up. We had a fantastic response from the writing community there, with 40 entries coming through in the short time they had to prepare. After reviewing all the entries, 7 were selected as winners, and each story was published here in March, and will also be featured in upcoming episodes of the podcast, Voices of Tomorrow.

For the next 7 days we’re featuring the 7 stories that nearly won, and as such are each too good not to share with you here.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading all of them as much as we have.