365 tomorrows

Author : W. Kevin Christian

A monotone, bureaucratic female voice shot through the hearing centers of Felicity’s brain: “Free-form imagination, courtesy of The Sensation Station. Free-form imagination, courtesy of The Sensation Station.” On and on it went until the computer had fully mapped the physical structure of her brain. Suddenly Felicity was walking through a wheat field where she grew up. The moon was full and orange. Hundreds of shooting stars rocketed across the night sky. One came down and slowly cruised by Felicity’s head, its tail leaving a trail of floating diamonds, glittering like fireworks.

The last and greatest vehicle of human creativity was a manually controlled artificial reality on the only entertainment device anyone cared about: The Sensation Station. All other entertainment had become obsolete seven years earlier.

In free-form imagination, what one thought became one’s reality. The possibilities were endless. Not even God himself knew the limits of the unbridled infinity of human creativity channeled through The Sensation Station. Of course most people just used it to have sex in a hot tub with movie star A. But Felicity was different.

Before The Sensation Station, Felicity had been a real book worm. She loved to escape to the vivid worlds she could manifest in her mind. She painted, too. She made sad, silly and fantastic paintings, full of vibrant, burning colors.

Felicity’s first artificial pleasure was imagining herself as the coldest she had ever been, naked and alone on the North Pole. She waited until she could bear it no more and then dumped herself into a hot shower. Felicity had saved the first five seconds of that shower and put it on repeat for hours. The computer daydreams were indescribable pleasure. Divine. Perfect. Satisfying. They had cost Felicity her job.

And her family, kids, home, and car. Right now she was sitting next to a dumpster behind a Denny’s where she had found an unguarded electrical socket to plug in. Her rail thin frame sat hunched against a filth-covered fence. She was dying. Two golf-ball-sized electrodes were attached to her temples with wires running down to a wallet-sized receiver that lay limply in her half-open palm. Drool ran down her chin. Blood trickled out her ears.

Something the creators of The Sensation Station had never anticipated was the ability of the technology to intensify consciousness. Felicity’s imagination was expanding at a frightening rate. Where once she had been satisfied to focus and repeat one good sensation, Felicity now combined hundreds, thousands, millions – the ecstasy of gods. There was no limit.

Felicity set her imagination for the heart of the universe. If God didn’t exist, she was about to create him. She flew up into the sky, into space, out of the solar system. Her perspective increased to a galactic level. The whole universe unfolded at the limitless command of her creativity. Somewhere inside she knew—she had always known—what it was to be a star, an ocean, a banker, a pulsar, a honey bee, a fry cook, a sonic boom, a mountain, a crying baby, a falling leaf, a cloud, a proton, an orgasm, a primal scream. Matter ended. Energy became infinite. Time was reformed. Somewhere in some fold of some reality a force of ten billion supernovas was released. A new universe was born.

Author : JT Heyman

You, who read this, remember us.

When the Senneela arrived, there was panic, at first. People forgot that. I mean, what would you expect when an eight foot saurian biped in silvery vacuum armor suddenly appears in the middle of the United Nations Security Council? The panic lasted for months.

Then the Senneela ambassador broadcast her apology to the nations of the world, offering a gift to show their remorse. They offered the cure to everything … every disease. Viral, bacterial, parasitic, it didn’t matter. The Senneela Cure changed human physiology so that disease was instantly defeated by the human’s own immune system. They even offered genetic resequencers to eliminate the genetically transmitted diseases.

There was a side effect, the ambassador warned. It would quadruple the human lifespan and change it. Childhood would be accelerated, the children achieving physical maturity in less than twelve years. And the detrimental effects of old age would be pushed off until after the person reached three hundred years, after which they would deteriorate rapidly, usually dying within two years. The world’s leaders laughed and said it was something we could live with.

The damned Senneela knew.

With their newfound immortality, people cashed out their retirement plans and the rest of the economy collapsed. As the population ballooned, resources dwindled. Mobs roamed the countryside like locusts, searching for food. Countries which were already overpopulated began spilling over into their neighbors’ lands. Armed vigilantes guarded the borders of the wealthier nations, killing illegal immigrants on sight.

The other shoe dropped when Pakistan launched nuclear weapons at India, claiming that India was using its higher birth rate to force a claim to the long disputed Punjab region. The weapons never detonated. The Senneela teleported every nuclear weapon on the planet away … “to prevent accidents,” they said.

After all, an exterminated human race was of no use to them. They needed us.

More than three hundred million lined up on the day the massive Senneela transport ships first arrived. Earth’s billions followed. Some ended up as servants to Senneela nobles. Most ended up as foot soldiers in an interstellar war. There are darker rumors of the uses to which some of the human volunteers have been put. For many humans, though, they decided it would be better to be well fed slaves than to starve as free humans.

Eventually, there were perhaps three hundred million souls left on Earth. With the removal of the population pressures, very few humans lined up willingly.

The Senneela refused to take “No” for an answer. Already, the continents of Australia and the Americas have been emptied. The Senneela are moving westward across Asia. Within, at a guess, three years, they’ll reach us here in Rome, where some of the world’s last brilliant scientists have been working feverishly, if you’ll forgive the pun.

You see, we’ve managed to reverse engineer the genetic resequencer and use it on The Senneela Cure. A group of us have been deliberately infected with a particularly virulent strain of … well … let’s just say it’s something nasty for which humans are just carriers but which, to Senneela, is invariably and swiftly fatal. We’re going to go volunteer to serve the Senneela. I’m sure we’ll be killed once the Senneela realize what we are but, by then, it will be too late. With luck, they’ll never get the chance to finish depopulating the Earth.

The human race will live, grow stronger and maybe even have an interstellar empire when we’re done.

Morituri te salutamus.

You, who read this, remember us.

Author : Ian Rennie

It was a crisp, clement evening. The air was fresh and new, and the gentle purple of the sky gave the scene a tranquil and poetic feel.

About five hundred people were gathered here, although similar groups were gathered all over the world, looking up at the sky and the far away stars. Despite the beauty of the night, there was a somber feel to events, as of serenity mingled with sorrow.

When the ceremony started, it did so gradually. The speaker did not rise on any prearranged signal, but instead did so on the feeling that the moment was right. A glance to the sky told him he had chosen correctly.

“We are gathered here in memory and in celebration. In memory of what happened one hundred and five years ago, and in celebration of what has been done since then. We are gathered ten years after the founding of our colony on this new world, to remember that which we lost.”

The crowd looked to him, and then to the sky, eyes focusing on a particular point.

“It took us ninety five years to get here, although to us it felt less than a week. The exodus took us past the light of our own departure, and for ten years we have been waiting for its arrival.”

All eyes were on the same spot. An astronomer could tell them it was a main sequence star, spectral classification G2V. They didn’t need to know this. They all knew what it was.

“Our mistakes cost us our world, and we have determined to do better here. Until tonight, we have worn this point of light as our mark of cain. From tonight, we will wear it as a reminder, a lesson learned.”

The point of light suddenly began to get brighter in the sky. Photons that had been travelling for more than a century suddenly arrived en masse and were captured by eyes that had leapfrogged the distance, overtaken the disaster they caused, and gathered here in memory.

“Friends, I give you the sun. Let’s do better this time.”

Author : Alla Hoffman

When he opened his eyes, it was a special kind of dark. The sky was a dull purple, and what light there was came from the ground beneath its stygian spread. He sat up stiffly in a sea of trash, a vast junkyard. Much of the scrap metal and rock glowed a sickly greenish color, and he didn’t want to think about why. Every part of him was aching, and the morning amnesia hadn’t fully faded. “The hell….” He stood, rubbing blearily at his eyes, and cursed when he realized his ankle couldn’t support his full weight. As he looked out across the abyssal dumping grounds, he put name to place, mainly because a dented sign creaked on a pole next to him. T. W. D. P. 13, Toxic Waste Disposal Planet 13. Recently made off-limits by the government, on grounds of contamination by hostile elements, the first time such a designation had been given to a trash planet. Then again, no one had ever created a self-maintaining, self-improving species of machines before. He’d known that was probably a bad idea, from the standpoint of personal safety.

He wondered how far they’d gotten in the 84 hours they’d been free. It had taken only 19 for them to make themselves known on the planets surface, 26 to be categorized as dangerous. It had taken the governing council another two days to find out who was responsible, but it had taken them only two hours to try and convict him. There had been talk of execution by various methods or imprisonment, but ultimately they decided on a more…unorthodox punishment. Their leniency had hinged on the fact he had created a species, not a weapon, to destroy this world. And after all, it was only a trash planet. Hardly a great loss to society. So they’d sent him to “live” with his own creations. If the radiation didn’t get him first.

He scrabbled around in the junk until he found a bent metal pole, and used it to pull himself up, stumping shakily forwards. He hadn’t yet figured out a plan for himself, but in the end it didn’t really matter. His big plan, the important one, was already inevitably in motion. The machines would begin to improve themselves, and god knew they weren’t short of materials, and soon they would construct weapons and flight. And spaceflight. And he hadn’t bothered to write hostility towards man into them, that was the beauty of it. They had only the biological imperative: survive, reproduce. Mankind would see to the hostility itself, as the robots spread and people became afraid. They would write their own end with their hostility and their fear. And their trash.

That’s what they were for, to provide the antidote to humanity. Ultimately, he hadn’t been supposed to survive either. He’d just wanted to watch. There were cliffs of wrecked ships in the distance, and he began making for them. They’d have a pretty good view. They were a good place to wait. He was glad he’d ended up here, in a way. He might not get to see the end, but he could watch the beginning. It seemed right that the next stage should start here, where humanity had started out so long ago, before it had gotten lost among the stars.

Author : Pavelle Wesser

When she first appeared to him in the dead of the eternal night, her tentacles undulated in bluish silver tints that reflected the twinkling lights of his ship. She slithered silently toward him while he was out performing an errand. Until he saw her, he had never questioned working in silence and alone. It was when she slid that first tentacle around his waist that he stared into the endless night and neglected his mission, turning to face her as she wrapped more tentacles around his body. Later, he could never remember how they became two beings writhing on the surface of sand so soft he could have sworn that it sifted through the pours of his skin.

It was then that her first tentacle pierced his flesh and entered his body. He stumbled back to the ship feeling ill, and threw up at some point during the eternal night. His initial malaise turned to raging desire by the time he was sent on his next errand. She appeared to him as he collected pitted rocks, her tentacles wrapping themselves around him, requiring nothing of him other than that he willingly surrender to the sensation of slime slithering over his skin. This time, when they connected, electrical currents charged through his body. They were mild at first, but escalated, causing his teeth to chatter and his hair to stand on end.

“How can you do that to me?” But she did not answer, just as she never spoke.

It was then that another of her tentacles pierced his flesh, wrapping itself around his internal organs, squeezing, squeezing, until he felt so ill that he didn’t have to wait until later in the eternal night to throw up. He would have been sick for days, had time been measured in anything other than the phases of the multiple moons that hovered overhead. He lay in his cot suffering fevers, chills and muscle cramps, wondering how she could possibly leave her tentacles inside of him. Didn’t she want them back? How could she live without them? How could he live with them?

They sent him on another mission, this time to collect the weeds that grew in the eternal night. His body shook as he donned his spacesuit, for now he was afraid. It wasn’t long before she appeared, slinking noiselessly, her tentacles extended toward him. A cold, sick chill descended.

“Look,” he said, “I think we need to call this off.”

A tentacle slid down his throat, and he realized the choice had never been his to make. He thought he might gag but as her other tentacles caressed his body, he experienced thrills of pleasure that escalated until he felt as though he were an electrical conduit through which an overload of energy was being transmitted. When she had done with him, he understood that just as the night was eternal, she herself would never end. He turned to face her.

“I think I’m in love with you,” he said.

Another tentacle wrapped itself around his heart. Cold and icy, it squeezed the living breath out of him. Feeling the dying pump of his most sacred organ, he wheezed out his final words:

“Is this what you’ve wanted from me all along?”

She didn’t answer, just as she never had. And as her tentacle writhed and twisted about his heart, he thought of a home he’d never known, of a love that had never been true, and a spaceship that would soon depart, leaving him alone to die in the eternal night.

Author : Glenn Blakeslee

Lisa called me that afternoon. I was standing in the rain in front of the In-Situ Laboratory, watching deer run beneath the elevated walkway.

“I just wanted to say,” she said. “Sam… I’m sorry about Saturday.” Her voice was quiet. She sounded tired.

“I was going to call you to say I was sorry,” I said.

“You don’t have to apologize,” she said, “I do.” This was where Lisa, had I said the same, would have asked me what, exactly, I had to apologize for. I could hear the low slowness of her voice, and asking would have been heartless.

“I know you need someone to listen, sometimes. I didn’t do a good job of that,” I said. “When you tell me these things I want to do something, but I don’t know how to help you.”

“I didn’t know how to ask for help,” she said. “I don’t know what you could do to help me.” I stood in the rain and watched the deer, my cell phone to my head. A doe stood on the sloping ground, next to the walkway, watching me. Her hide was wet and her eyes were huge. Her nostrils flared. She took a tentative step toward the walkway, watching me.

“I just got back from the hospital,” Lisa said. “I was there three days.”

“Oh Lisa, I’m so sorry. What…?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Did you take pills?” The doe’s forelegs jerked, trembling, and she bolted under the walkway, beneath me. I could smell the rain-soaked sogginess of her hide. I pulled out my cigarettes, and then put them away without trying to light one. I could see the hood of the first of the Security vans as it pulled in behind the lab. Those bastards.

“My son took me in,” Lisa said. “I was in ICU.”

“Lisa,” I said.

“And I got out today. I’m just sitting here, and the kids will come home soon, and I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’m afraid to be here by myself, and I’m afraid to see anyone. I’m afraid to talk to anyone and I’m afraid to not have anyone to talk to.” It was raining harder, and more deer were running beneath the walkway, jumping across the retaining wall beyond the slope. I could hear the clatter of their hooves across the patio that lay sheltered beneath the overhanging floors of the In-Situ Laboratory. The rain ran down my forehead, into my eyes. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Lisa said.

If I loved her I would have run to her. I would have run to my car, wound down through the ways of the University, clutching my wet, fatal briefcase to my chest. I would have kept my phone to my ear, my voice to her heart. I would have left my job, and my little mournful life and the end of it all, and drove to her. I would have run to her.

I would have given her the thing she really desired. I picked my briefcase up from the walkway, held it under my arm.

“Honey…” I said.

“You’re at work,” she said. “I should let you go.”

“Well…” I began. “I love you,” I lied. “Keep your head up. I’ll call you tonight,” I said, but I never did.

Instead I dropped my briefcase from the walkway, heard the tinkle of breaking glass, and watched as the deer on the patio of the In-Situ Laboratory began to drop dead.

Playing for Keeps by Mur Lafferty is for sale today on Amazon.

You may remember Mur Lafferty as an author we featured in May of last year on 365, and the cover art for the Podiobook versions of Playing for Keeps was done by our own JR.Blackwell and one of our founding members, Jared Axelrod, as well as JC Hutchins and Natalie Metzger.

Mur’s got great story telling ability, and you can show some support and get a great book at the same time by dropping by Amazon and picking up a copy.

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Marshal’s great grandfather had taken up the guitar as a older man, and played it as though he simply always had done so. He had passed this love onto his son, Marshal’s grandfather, before the Departure. Marshal’s family had always been tradesman, and his grandfather used his degrees in micro-fabrication to get on the ship, and his skill at coaxing sounds from his stringed instrument to secure not only a wife, but a place in the social scene on Discovery when she set off into the stars.

Marshal’s grandfather had one child on the voyage, a daughter, and she grew up always at her father’s side, basking in the warmth of his music. She took up chemistry, and divided her time between misusing chemicals in defiance of the ships authority, and caressing deep rhythm and blues from the guitar her father had left her.

When Marshal was born, it was clear his mother’s chemical abuse had affected him, but she didn’t survive his birth to make amends.

Marshal grew in the care of the crew to be a stoic but directionless young man. He dabbled in chemistry, in microbiology, and settled on psiono-sonics as a field of study. He found he had a heightened sensitivity in communications, and was tasked with reaching out across the void of space to the other star ships en route to new star systems.

In time, the voices grew harder and harder to find through the darkness, and communications duty became an eternity of projecting into nothingness, deafened by the silence returned.

When the star drive began to fail, Marshal felt it before anyone. He tried to describe to the Captain how the engine was losing its rhythm, how he worried it would stop beating.

He’d been thrown off the bridge, and confined to his quarters.

When the star drive went out, the captain locked himself in his own cabin, refusing to acknowledge it was true.

Marshal had spent very little time in his own cabin, having not grown up there, and finding it unsettling to be in the room this mother he had never known had once called home. He could never connect himself to the space, but now, confined there as he was, he found himself idly picking through her things, discovering the woman who had made him and then left him here alone.

He flipped through frames of images, some single and still, some sequenced and moving. He heard laughter, saw a smile he recognized sometimes from the mirror, and felt a rhythm that resonated somewhere inside.

When he found her guitar, it fit his hands like well worn gloves, filled a hole he hadn’t realized existed. His fingers found the chords to a song he’d never heard. A to C sharp, to G sustained, back to A. Words drifted into his head with impossible clarity, “If you can just get your mind together, then come on across to me.” Across the ship each psionicly projected note from Marshal’s guitar turned every surface capable of vibrating into a point of amplification. Everyone stopped, and listened. “We’ll hold hands and then we’ll watch the sunrise,” people spilled into the hallways, “from the bottom of the sea.”

Marshal felt long closed doors open in his mind as he reached out into the depths of space. He felt the wave come back a hundred strong, and the Discovery reeled as unseen voices chimed in “But First, are you experienced?” In his cabin, the Captain closed his eyes, tears streaming down his face. They may be lost, but they were no longer alone.

Author : Paul Starkey

Villam’s first campaign began at 29:15; within minutes he was a veteran.

A third of his squad died within seconds of disembarking, victims of the Cirrillian psionic artillery, the heavy bombardment shattering their synapses and boiling their brains within their skulls like potatoes in a pot.

Sniper fire was the next danger, the Cirrillian marksmen were using hyper-reality bullets. Marsom was Villam’s best friend, they’d enlisted together …now, as he was hit, the unremitting truths that all men hide, even from themselves, overwhelmed him, crushing his spirit as surely as pressure would have crushed his body, and before Villam could stop him he’d blown his brains out with his sidearm.

Only half of them reached the Cirrillian trenches. Villam had turned his ankle trying stop Marsom, and so was lagging behind the rest of the squad. This saved his life.

Fazerthorn trees exist on every world, not that you’d ever know it. They bloom in another reality, invisible to all but sophisticated scanners. The realities are separate, and never the twain should meet…except Cirrillian scientists had discovered a way to compact the two together. Suddenly the clear ground the troopers raced through became a heaving forest.

Despite the thump and wail of battle around him, all Villam could hear were screams as fazerthorns materialised inside his comrades. The lucky ones died instantly, from organ failure or just plain shock. The strong ones lasted longer, thorns ripping through their skin, tearing eyeballs, slicing arteries and rupturing blood vessels.

Sergeant Coog was the toughest S.O.B in the unit, so Villam wasn’t surprised when he charged onwards, despite the blood haemorrhaging out around the branch that had erupted from his back. In the end though he’d taken too much damage, he fell mere metres from the Cirrillians.

Villam’s luck was twofold. Not only had he avoided the fazerthorns, but their appearance obscured him from the Cirrillian troopers who would have gunned him down otherwise. Now, belly to the dusty floor, he shuffled around the tangle of fazerthorns and corpses, until he drew level with the trench.

There were dozens of them, foul green creatures who lacked a head, a single eye stalk protruding from their necks. They were naked, six brains pulsating beneath the skin along their spines, reproduction tentacles drooping between their legs like elongated udders.

Villam crept closer. He didn’t want to, they truly were vile, but he needed to be nearer to throw the J-Bomb into their midst. He unclipped it from his belt, a fat disc of weightless metal, yet more powerful than anything the enemy had.

Too late a Cirrillian saw him, a whine of alarm echoing from its shoulder gills. He’d already thrown the J-Bomb though, clamping his hands over his head as it detonated.

He’d been conditioned to deal with the effects of the J-Bomb, but still the overlapping cacophony of musical tunes, of advertising taglines, and the whirlwind of special offer announcements almost drove him mad….The effect of the Jingle Bomb on the Cirrillians was more pronounced. To a creature they dropped their weapons and clambered out of the trench, fighting each other to gain a few moments’ advantage in getting to the Department Ship before all the bargains were gone.

Advertising was a harsh game, with more and more species rebelling again the psychic onslaught of the sales companies. The Cirrillians, like so many others, shielded their planet from orbital advertising assaults, so the only way to campaign was to go trench to trench, street to street, door to door. Villam returned to the ship alone, a veteran salesman after just one campaign.

Author : Glenn Blakeslee

It’s another damn fine desert day, and Old Joe sits on the dilapidated Lazy Boy on the porch in front of his trailer. He’s got his feet up and a pint bottle of cheap wine in his hand, and he’s thinking lazy desert thoughts. He’s got his chores done, tended his little forty-acres of nowhere, and he’s relaxing in the relative luxury of his porch.

His looks to the horizon, where county road S65 cuts a straight line through the sagebrush, up to the hills. He can see dust plumes rising in the still afternoon air. Here they come again.

He’s posted dozens of No Trespassing signs on his property, but the damn dirt bike riders ignore them. Might as well post signs that read Welcome To Paradise, he thinks. They don’t bother reading them anyhow.

It’s only desert, but it’s his desert. Riders have cut trail across it where no trails should be. Every autumn flash flood gouges those trails deeper. Soon his place will be nothing but gouges, he thinks.

Maybe they’ll veer off, Old Joe thinks. Maybe I won’t have to reach for the gun.

The dust plumes rise higher. Soon he hears the buzz of motors, sees flashy helmets above the sagebrush. Sure enough, the riders are off the road, weaving through the brush toward his little trailer home.

Old Joe creaks forward in the Lazy Boy and groans to his feet. He puts his bottle down and reaches for his old Remington 12 gauge. He’s in the driveway before the riders can see him, holding the rusty old gun across his chest like a western hero. When the riders come out of the brush and onto the dusty drive, he swivels the barrel and fires a round into the air, over their heads.

The riders come to a sliding stop in the driveway. They look at Old Joe holding the gun, and look at each other. Old Joe yells “Get offa my land!,” and he levels the shotgun at them.

That’s all it takes. The first rider drags a donut across the driveway, throwing up dust, and heads out to the road before Old Joe can finish yelling. The second pushes his motorcycle backward, downshifts and roars off.

Old Joe blasts the shotgun in their direction, just for good measure, and staggers back to the shade of his porch, his Lazy Boy, and his bottle. He props the shotgun against the trailer.

“Damn bikers,” he mutters.

Old Joe has dozed off, and he wakes to eerie sounds and bright lights. A pulsing bright globe sits over the sagebrush on the side of the driveway, and as it descends he’s suddenly awake and reaching for the shotgun.

The globe glows, and sheets of static flow across its surface. It emits a disharmonic hum that gives Old Joe goosebumps. He steps away from the porch, shotgun across his chest, shouts “Get offa my land,” and fires a shot into the air

The globe touches the sagebrush and then bounces, falling and rising. Lines of red light circle the globe’s equator, and the hum rises in pitch and then drops to a basso rumble. Joe takes steps toward the globe and aims the shotgun.

The globes rises and swoops down the driveway, lighting the sagebrush and the sand as it dwindles into the distance. Old Joe fires a shot after it, just for good measure.

He watches for a little while, until the thing disappears altogether. He turns and stumps back to the porch.

“Damn aliens,” he mutters, and reclines his Lazy Boy into the perfect desert night.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

There’s a hole in the roof of my mouth that I can’t fix. A black putrescent liquid that hasn’t stopped for hours is dripping slowly onto my tongue. It tastes salty and smells a little like melting rubber. I’m still alive.

The plague killed the biological parts of me. I am rotting. I don’t know if that will eventually kill the manufactured parts of me. Myself and five other people in this building had enough metal and plastic implanted in us that we survived.

We’re police dispatchers.

We had all been badly injured in the line of duty and brought back to ‘working condition’ with the help of current technology. After we had been repaired, we were put on desk jobs with good pay.

The reason that the six of us were still moving and thinking is that our brains and bodies have been rebuilt as a result of our long-ago injuries. Us six in particular had all sustained massive cranial damage in the line of duty. Our nervous systems had been automated and our movements were controlled by the thin bodycages that we wore. Our memories had been saved and digitized during our surgery but our imaginations were limited.

Just a few days ago, we were the stupid ones. Now we’re the survivors.

Ted had his entire body burned to a crisp in his line-of-duty accident ten years ago. He was the most mobile of us now because of all his muscle-work but unfortunately, he had the bare minimum of police dispatch silicon in his brain. His metal body is at his desk taking sips from a coffee cup long gone dry

We were all amped up to handle the flow of calls coming in from the massive populace of the west coast. There were four hundred of us. The flow of data was constant and huge. It’s down to a trickle now and most of the incoming calls are automated which is okay since we’ve gone from four hundred down to the six of us.

Our country has been wiped out.

Fortunately, the plague had left us mostly-silicate demi-borgs alive. Unfortunately, the motors of our brains and bodies were running on backup batteries that would run out in sixteen hours.

There is a stink in this office of the other dead operators. It’s the ghost of Christmas future for us. We’re trying to come up with plans but it’s difficult with our limited imaginations. We’ve effectively become machine intelligences. We have no urge to panic and we have no real ideas on how to proceed.

It’s frustrating to think of all the money and time that our country had used to prepare for a giant EMP of some kind and the enemy bastards went and released the biologicals.

Those of us that are mobile are going to leave this office and search for batteries. We will try to find weapons. We will fight the invaders.

We will be automated zombies guarding what’s left of our country. I am good at math. We will fail.

Author : Oisin Hurley

On my first day on the incident desk, a distraught little man well into his second century burst in through the door of the station. “I’ve killed her!,” he shrieked at me, “Killed her!” He punctuated each bespittled utterance with a spastic wave of a cricket bat, spattering blood over me and my day book. Clumps of brownish hair were stuck to the edges of the bat. I stared at him while his initial excitement receded, then asked for his details. He gazed at me wide-eyed for a moment, then jerked his head to one side to look at something behind me. A smile of apparent relief broke out on his blotchy face, and I heard slow applause coming from the break room. I turned around and saw Sergeant McGrath approaching, clapping his swollen hands in front of his big purple face. McGrath had earned the station’s Officer Most Likely To Experience Congestive Heart Failure Within The Decade Award nine years previously. There was a busy book open on whether he would make the ten. Clapping me on the shoulder with a handful of baby eggplants, he roared, “Well done, Mack!” Then he nodded to the nerd with the cricket bat. “Many happy returns, Doctor! Let’s go in back and have a coffee. Here, I’ll take that bat.” As McGrath headed back to the break room, one meaty arm around Mitchell’s slim shoulders, the other twirling the bloody bat, I heard him shout. “Dicky, get Mack a coffee and some sero-wipes!”

Dicky wandered over with a mug and a bag of wipes. “Well done, Mack,” he said, “a fine performance, I’m up ten bucks.” That was too much for my patience. “What the fuck is going on?” I demanded. “That guy got blood all over me, admitted doing a job on his old lady, and now he’s getting coffee from the Sarge?” Dicky handed me the mug and the wipes and I started cleaning off the spatters. “All new starts get Doctor Mitchell on his birthday, McGrath loves to rattle you noobs. His wife isn’t dead. She lit out to Proxima years ago and is living the high life at a fancy resort.” I blinked at him to continue. “Anyway, Mitchell’s loaded, made a pile from biotech patents. He gets to pick up her resort tab. While she’s off having fun, he’s here with a barring order not to get within three systems of her and no divorce in sight. You can see he’s a bit pissed. So, every year he orders himself a meat puppet, made from her DNA. It gets delivered on his birthday about nine in the morning and then we see him in here about ten, usually with some kind of blunt instrument. It was a seven-iron last year. Carthy swears he saw him bring in a unicycle once. It’s a bit sick, if you ask me, but there’s no law against it. Meat puppets aren’t people.”

The next year, McGrath’s luck broke at last and he succumbed to a succession of heart-rupturing myocardial infarctions. Dicky cashed in about a grand on the event and I made sure I was at the front desk on the Doctor’s birthday. There was no sign of him at ten, and when it got to twelve, we were wondering if he’d given up on his proxy revenge habit. Just before one, a little mousey woman turned up in the office and looked around nervously. I called her over to my desk, asked her if I could help. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I think I’ve just killed my husband.”

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

“Look, man,” I’d noticed that Mark’s type always seemed to call you ‘man’ or ‘mate”, “I did some proper analysis of the whole tinfoil hat thing. You’d need almost a full helmet, a nice thick grounding chain, and preferably an electrified mesh to make it work properly. The straight tinfoil doesn’t make your brain unreadable, it amplifies the signals. Makes it so much easier to read. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that State seeded this whole ‘tinfoil hat to protect you from mind control rays’ into popular culture precisely to catch the less scientifically-minded subversive.”

I was interviewing Mark for an underground magazine, to publish some of his ‘findings’ under a pseudonym. His paranoia kept him from actively seeking publicity, but it was one of the few things he desperately craved. I could tell: I had a gift for getting the delusionals to talk. The trick was to act just interested enough, but never too convinced. They’re worse than fundamentalists when they think they might get a conversion.

“As long as you don’t re-edit any of my documents, I can’t see any reason for you not to publish. The writing style has been mangled so they can’t trace it to any of my openly available works,” he paused, and glanced upwards, “I do have one thing which I haven’t committed to encryption yet. How’s your shorthand?”

“Great.”

“Then start taking notes. There’s a way – I found a technique to simulate the effect of an electromagnetic barrier by use of thought patterns. It takes maybe two days to set up, then the thought-waveform can be maintained from day-to-day with just an hour’s conscious thought. If you suspect that one of the five factors-”

“Five factors?” I interrupted him.

“Yes. The big five – our home-grown Three-Letter-Agencies, New Earth, Shan, Nova Tar, and the Coalition.”

“I already have your notes on those, I think.” I flicked through the sheets of cleartext he’d given me since the start of our meetings.

“You do. Anyway. If one of them is actively probing you, you can reinforce the waveform in a clandestine manner. It’s untraceable. The scanners think you’re just one of the sheeple. It uses five concepts that are prevalent in the propaganda they feed us to set up a loop. They can read our minds to a fair degree of accuracy, but ten billion minds produces a lot of noise. The scanners are almost entirely automated, and so depend on pattern recognition. The self-sustaining loop of concept-motive-concept is enough to fool the scanners.”

“Mmm-hmm. What concepts do you use?”

“That would invalidate the protection it gives: you’ve got to pick your own images, otherwise a metapattern emerges.”

“Ahh, I see.”

The following day, I wrote the article up. I quite liked it – it catalogued the crazy, and was pitched just right so the skeptics thought I was mocking and the believers thought I was one of the faithful. Another gift. After I emailed the finished article, I sent another email to the other address. To the people who’d given me the gifts.

Mark Chapman is thoroughly insane, but poses no threat. The methods he’s latched onto are totally ineffective. By chance or judgement, he’s struck upon the truth of some of your scanning techniques. I’d recommend keeping watch, just in case.

Author : Ryan Somma

“Is that one of those computers?” I asked gesturing at the flat, monolithic screen hanging on the far wall.

“Sort of,” he replied, staring oddly at the housewarming gift I’d set on a table. “It’s more of an entertainment center, but it does a lot of the same things computers do.”

“Huh,” I scratched my chin. I didn’t know what a computer did, so I didn’t know what to say next. I just knew they did powerful things, “I’ve been meaning to get a computer.”

He gave me a funny look, “Why would you need–?” he caught himself. “You know there’s lots of multimedia features and games that make computers a good investment.”

He was being polite, but I still felt stupid, “I guess I would need to get electricity first.”

“Um,” he swallowed, and I realized how ignorant I appeared to him. “Electricity is quite a luxury here.”

I frowned and nodded, “It’s too expensive, but I hear you’ve got it everywhere in your cities.”

He nodded, still embarrassed, but now of his superior social status. It bothered me how easy it was to read him, how his body language and facial expressions matched those of my friends.

“You have to buy electricity from outside the reservations,” he sounded apologetic. “It takes thousands of your credits to add up to one of ours, making it cost prohibitive here.” He handed me another open beer. “Where I come from, I’m pretty low on the social ladder. Here on your reservations, my money goes a whole lot further.”

I took a swig, enjoying its thick richness, and we fell silent for a few moments, until I caught his eyes shifting to my housewarming gift again. “It’s a termite farm,” I explained. “You dip one of these twigs into it anytime you want a little taste.” I pulled a twig from the jar I had brought and handed it to him.

“Uh–,” he took the twig and considered it.

“If you don’t like it–” I began.

“It’s not that!” he held up his hands. “They’ll make wonderful pets. It’s just… I don’t eat animals.”

“What? The heck you say!”

“No really!” he was nodding earnestly. “A few centuries of being domesticated for experimentation and spare parts kind of turns a civilization off exploiting other animal species.”

“Spare parts?” I frowned. “You don’t mean for the gods who live on the spider web in the sky?”

“Not gods.” He shook his head, “Those are our descendents… or ascendants, depending on your perspective. We created them.”

“You made them?” I was shocked. “I thought they’d made you!”

“Nope,” he sighed. “They came from us, just like we came from you.”

I didn’t get it, and then I did. “Oh,” I shook my head. “That evolution nonsense your kind is always pushing on us. Some of the church-goers buy into that stuff, but not me.”

“Truth is truth whether or not you accept it.” He looked at me, “But when you recognize it, you see patterns. When the robots became their own masters, they nearly drove my species into extinction consuming all our resources. Just like when my species descended from yours. It wasn’t until we became advanced enough to realize the side effects of our population boom that we turned benevolent… established these sanctuaries.”

“Now you’re trying to make amends.”

He nodded.

“For the sins of your ancestors.”

He nodded again.

We lapsed into silence, considering the termite farm between us.

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

The men that delivered Louis to the Chancellors chambers had done so quickly, forcefully and without remark. Louis had goaded them through the tunnels from the parking garage, up the elevators and along the corridors without rebuke until they deposited him violently on the cold stone floor and left the room.

“Louis,” the Chancellor frowned down at him, “you disappoint me.” He shook his head slowly as he spoke. “I thought we had an understanding.”

Louis pulled himself to his feet, the binders on his ankles and wrists making it an awkward and painful task.

“Chancellor Godheid, you’ve gone too far this time. You have no grounds for arrest, you have no reason…” The Chancellor cut him off abruptly.

“Quite the contrary. We know exactly what you do, and who you do it with, and I’m afraid you won’t be permitted to do it anymore. We have rules.”

“Rules? What about my rights? If you’re going to charge me, I want my lawyer. I want my minute of discretionary conversation.” Louis straightened and met the Chancellors cold glare. “Have you forgotten the law?”

“Forgotten the law? We made the law. My grandfather’s grandfather brought the law here with him from Earth and forged a new world around it. We made the law when we made this city from the living rock, made farm lands from the lifeless dust. We made the law for people like us, Louis, we made the law for the people who would abide by it. Not for you.”

Louis spat on the floor, the saliva quickly drawn into the pores of the polished stone. “You didn’t make the law, like you said you just brought it with you. It was written by better men than you. I have the right to a fair trial by a jury of my peers. Everything I know about you and what you do will be brought to public record there. You can’t stop it, you can’t stop the people hearing about how you run your little empire. We’ll see how they like you when I tell them what you are. You go ahead and try me if you dare, and I’ll hang you on the letter of your own law.”

The Chancellor closed the distance between them in a heartbeat, twisting his captives ear painfully, as though he were merely an insolent child, and hauled him stumbling onto the balcony outside.

“Look,” he waved at the landscape splayed out beneath and beyond the outcropping of carved stone on which they stood, “look at what we have made here. You think you can take this from me?” Louis was awestruck by the view. He’d seen the city from the ground his entire life, but never had the expanse of it been as apparent as it was from this altitude. Red rock fingers reaching out through fields of blue to the horizon, littered at regular intervals with domes of stone and alloy and polished glass. Sliding transport lanes arced between them, moving colonists and goods alike to and from the city center.

“We brought from Earth only what was useful. You’re right, by the laws of Earth you are entitled to your trial. You’re entitled to be found innocent or guilty and your sentence meted out appropriately. By the laws of Earth you’re allowed your day in public court, and to tell whatever stories you may wish to tell.” Louis smiled as the Chancellor leaned so close he could feel the heat of his breath on his ear, and there his expression froze. “We’re not on Earth now though, are we Louis?”

Author : Renee Leyburn

“I object to this kind of treatment! I’m an upstanding citizen. I’ve an elderly mother to care for,” Paul exclaimed vehemently, gathering himself up to stand as straight as he could in front of the droid. The robot stared back at him with unblinking, unfeeling eyes.

Drat.

Apparently this was not one of the personality enriched types. Plan B; time to go to Plan B.

“So you’re standing on a river bank. You have a boat that can only carry two things at once. With you are a goat, a wolf, and-”

“It would require seven crossings. Please, be silent,” the robot ordered him calmly. Okay, so a riddle wasn’t going to work either. What kind of place was this? Robots with no mercy and no susceptibility for getting frozen up with riddles. Paul glanced up and down the street as the droid looked over his papers.

“Sir,” it intoned. “Your visa is expired. I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with me.”

“Oh, yeah?” asked Paul, cheerily. “Where are we going?”

“Please put your hands behind you, sir.”

“I’d really like to know where you’re taking me first. You see I have this allergy-”

“Sir, if you continue to refuse to comply I shall have to use force.”

Paul nodded calmly. “Oh, okay, if that’s the case-” He sprang suddenly forward, wrapping his arm around the droid, trapping one of its metal arms and grabbing it by the back of the neck to hold it still. With his other hand he groped along the robot’s right side for the mechanical access panel. His fingers found nothing but smooth, cool alloys. The thing was seamless.

Ah, hell.

“Sir, please release me from this embrace and put your hands behind your back.”

Paul sighed heavily, then turned to comply.

Stupid higher technology. What kind of person would make a robot with no obvious vulnerabilities? A diabolical genius no doubt.

The robot snapped the familiar cuffs onto Paul’s wrists and turned him around. He looked Paul right in the eye. Paul glared back at him. The little lights that made up the robot’s face rearranged themselves to form a happy grin.

“I seem to have won this round, Mr. Kandor.”

“Yes, Robert,” Paul conceded with a sigh. “You won. And don’t call me Mr. Kandor.”

The droid smiled again. “You seem to be in handcuffs. I don’t think that you’re in any position to be making demands, my friend.”

“Oh come on! I never torment you with terms of respect when I win!”

“When you win? That’s happened?” asked Robert.

“Oh tee-hee, very funny, Rob. That’s what I love most about you, your sense of humor. Now let me out of these cuffs will you?” The droid complied, but took his time about it. When his wrists were freed Paul raised an eyebrow at the robot. “You’re built very well.”

“Oh I have vulnerabilities, you were just too dumb to find them,” Robert informed him.

“I was too dumb, ey? Well for being so phenomenally stupid I did a surprisingly good job of building you!”

The robot dipped his head. “True. Of course, the minor modifications that I’ve made to myself over the past year haven’t hurt.”

“I’ll say. I would have had you otherwise. Wanna go get some lunch?”

The robot shrugged amiably. “Sure. By the way, nice try with the plea for pity. I’m sure your mother would greatly appreciate your adjective of choice: elderly.”

Paul shot him a look. “Well what she doesn’t hear about won’t hurt her, right?” The droid smiled.

“Oh most certianly, Mr. Kandor.”

Author : Luke Chmelik

With a timid knock on the door, a pimply faced messenger poked his head into the sumptuous office of the Head of Commercial Relations. “We’re having some p-p-problems with the Turing units, s-sir.”

Ezekiel Jonas Tate tapped his cigar into the nickel plated ashtray on his expansive desk. He was annoyed. The Turing units had worked fine for decades. They were the first functional anthropomorphic AIs to be mass produced, but they had adapted well to individual life after they were granted citizenship. They weren’t perfect, but with more than 5 million units in the field, anything that could gave gone wrong with them would have by now.

Tate was riding high on the most successful new product launch in history, and this was not a good time for a support crisis in an obsolescent model. Besides, tech support had been taken on by the Socialist government ten years ago, and the Maxim-Tate Corporation didn’t have anything to do with the Turings anymore.

The runner shuffled his feet nervously, fiddling with that bloody hat they made the messenger kids wear. Tate made a note to change the regulations. Nobody should be forced to wear a fez. The boy looked like he wanted to turn tail and run like hell.

“S-S-Sir, they said you should turn on the… um… the television.”

Tate scowled. The boy ran. What the hell could be so wrong with the Turings that the Networks would preempt their hysterical raving about the wonders of the new Maxim-Tate Home Chronoporter?

Tate was a people person, and he knew the people who knew about Turings. He went right to the source, his ebony and lacquer telephone making a dull thwack against an ear calloused from marathon schmooze sessions. While the phone was still ringing, Tate turned on his television.

* * * *

As Chief of Technical Staff and co-founder of the Maxim-Tate Corporation, Grigori Maxim was a wunderkind. He designed and built the Turing model AI, and ended up partnering with Tate and selling them all over the place. The Turings were stable, intelligent and creative, but they could never quite handle paradox. When formal logic failed, their eyes glazed over and they got a bit unpredictable. They snapped out of it after a half hour or so, and paradox wasn’t a big enough problem to issue a recall. Satisfied with his work, Grigori turned his formidable intellect to a new task.

Just today, he’d sent the first ever time machine to market. Demand was so high that production would be backed up for the rest of his natural life, and the Chronoporters weren’t assembling themselves yet, so Grigori was in the workshop. When his artificial secretary told him Tate was on the phone, he patched it through to his headset, rather than take it in his office.

“What do you want, Tate? I’m really busy here.” Grigori was never one to mince words, especially not while coupling a Calabi-Yau manifold to a nanoreactor.

“Grigori?” Tate sounded like he’d been kicked in the solar plexus. “Turn on your T.V.”

Knowing it would take even longer to say no, Grigori flicked on the screen in the corner of the workshop. There was a news feed showing a smiling Turing AI stepping out of a Chronoporter. The sound was off.

“So, Zeke, I see a Turing and a Chronoporter. Is this about product placeme…?” There was a blur of motion on the screen, and Grigori’s voice faltered.

“I… I didn’t program them to do that,” he whispered, to nobody in particular.

Author : Summer Batton

We bled orange. Not some giddy childhood sherbet kind of orange, but the sickly rusty kind that comes off of metal barrels after they’ve sat out in the rain for 10 years. Orange like the rust that comes off slowly in chunks, running down into the ground and mixing with dirt and oil.

Lauric said we weren’t human anymore, but I hadn’t believed him. Even when the sky grew dark and thick like machines and the grass under my shoes grew soggy, its color fading, bleeding off into the streams and Lauric stood with his nose bent down to mine and said “You aren’t a part of this anymore, Fay,” I hadn’t believed him. How could I?

He’d been a whirlwind trip for a frustrated flunky who could never make up her mind about anything. His bed had seemed like a good place to stop and think. He seemed like a way to stay still in time and place and make no decisions—a good idea for someone who had failed at college, at jobs, and at marriages alike. Life in general, it seemed. I’d had even failed at being an alcoholic. I tried, honestly wanting to become addicted to alcohol—something, anything—to have a need that could be fulfilled time and again, every time. But the bite of liquor and dry wines left me nauseous after the first sip and I couldn’t press it to my lips again without having to puke. Even addictions had rejected me.

Lauric pointed into the sky and then down at the earth with a long, thin hand, “Did you think you belonged here?” I looked down at myself. I had taken off most of my clothing; the trite colors and material just hadn’t made sense anymore—the raspy blue hues in my jeans, the maroon and green plaid of my shirt, the bright red and yellowy stripes on my sneakers—they were all so distinctive and surreal, like a Barbie Doll world that I hadn’t realized I’d been living in. I’d striped them off even as the grass and sky had stripped their own colors off, and Lauric had placed a butterfly knife in my hand, long and horribly thin and sharp, like his fingers.

“You aren’t a part of this anymore,” he repeated, and I believed him this time. It was the only thing that made sense. I could already see the blood reds of the world washing away with the greens of the grass and sky blues. Lauric had laid open his palm in a slender strip and placed it in my hand.

The color. It already made sense. The color of rust and oil. It reeked of failure and of the world. The world that I had failed in time and time again, the one that Lauric had said I was not a part of anymore, that I didn’t belong to. It was falling off his hand, fast and away from him, out of him, onto the ground which now had no color at all. It was leaving him. And I, curling my fingers around the hilt of the knife, so much of my flesh exposed, so much to get rid of, began.

Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer

I awake for the first time and feel the comforting press of Mother around me. She has woken me up for a reason, but I do not know why. Mother is big and strong and knows everything. She holds me and my sisters and all the people inside her. My Mother is the world.

I am peeled open from inside Mother, my petals parted by hurried hands. An infant is placed in my belly. I can tell from Mothers memories that the infant is Dawn Yi and the person putting her inside me is Lieutenant Yi. The sensation is awkward, and Dawn wails as soon as Lieutenant Yi puts her down. Lieutenant Yi whispers to me as she seals me up and I record her words, hoping that Mother will tell me what I they mean.

Mother didn’t pay attention to me when I called. I look around her recent memories and I see that she has a gaping wound and enemies all around attacking her. All my brothers and sisters launch, rolling into the dark. I am afraid, and I cry for Mother.

She turns her attention to me. She tells me to go, to fly away, to detach. I cling to her, refusing. She shoves me off her body, severing the ties between us. I cradle my little passenger and shoot away, crying for her through severed connections.

Oldest Sister takes me on board, but she is not a Mother. Many younger sisters cling to her, tiring her quickly. She is not a Mother yet, although someday she might me. She becomes sick, and all of us grow hungry. Oldest Sister cannot sustain us. We drop off, floating in the void. Soon, we will not have enough heat to keep the people inside us warm. I am afraid.

Then another Mother comes. It is not my Mother, though it does call to a part of me. The sisters cluster around her. The Mother has her own daughters on her, but she is very large, and has plenty of space for more.

I am so tired, I cannot fly to her. She will leave without me and I will be alone in the void. But she does not leave, she reaches for me with her tendrils and nestles me in her warm belly, stroking my hull and reassuring me. This Mother is my blood too. I did not grow in her, but she and Mother were once together, and when they were, they made me as a daughter.

The people inside this Mother take Dawn out of me, and she cries in their arms. They tell me I did well, taking care of her. I am glad. I hope I will become big enough to carry more people someday.

Next to me, there is another my age-daughter of the Mother. I have never been close enough to really communicate with my Sisters, but I speak to her now. She touches me. She tells me I am home.

Author : L.Hall

“I loved a woman once..”

Lil looked up sharply, immediately checking the oxygen gages. Walkers usually started talking morosely when they had a pressure leak. If that was so, she’d need to pull him in quickly. All the gages showed 80%, no pressure leak.

“Robert, you need to focus on the crack.. that last shower really pockmarked us. We don’t want to lose any hull integrity.” She leaned over and looked out the port side, checking visually to see if the dull metal suit was still tethered to the exit port. His voice crackled over the speaker..

“Robert… Robert… You haven’t called me that in a long time, Lil. Just Bob and maybe Lieutenant..”

Lil began to feel a sort of panic creep inside her stomach. She immediately started recall procedures, watching the tether slowly tighten. As Robert began to move very slowly away from the damaged hull, he began to chuckle. Lil felt her stomach tightening and began to mutter, “aw jesus, I’m gonna lose him.” over and over.

“You wanna know why people can’t handle walking, Lil?” his voice crackled and pushed through the silent control room. The two other techs in the room had stopped and joined her at the port side window.. “They can’t handle the space of it. The sheer size of the emptiness. It does something to them.”

“Walkers.. they like it. Because, you know, Lil.. the emptiness here can’t even touch the emptiness in them.”

The tether kept slowly pulling him back to the dull metallic exit port. Lil kept mouthing “I’m gonna lose him” over and over like a mantra.. praying to the universe that he would keep talking until they could actually get him in the door. The suit moved at an excruciatingly slow pace, his face hidden by the reflective coating.. She could see the light from the nearby sun glimmer on his helmet.

By this time, a third of the crew were at port side windows, gazing out silently. The suit was maybe a dozen meters away from the exit port, where a medical team stood at the ready.. waiting. If they could just get him in….

“Lil…” the voice crackled over the system.

“Robert?” she said quietly into the mike, unsure of what to say. Protocol procedures didn’t really prepare a person for it, and she silently ticked off the meters watching the suit slowly move.

“I… I think I’m going to go for a walk with the stars.”

Lil watched as he went offline with the communication system, took the metal cutters and cut the tether. One of the techs began to sob as they watched his thick gloved hands pulled at one of the connectors, creating a small breach in the pressure suit.. Oxygen began to leak out, leaving a small crystalline trail as it propelled him minutely away from the ship.

Lil reached down and called a recover team, knowing full well it would take the better part of an hour for the ship to be readied, crew assembled and maneuvered to where it could pick up his body. As the crew slowly and quietly drifted back to the tasks at hand, Lil stood at the window.. watching his final walk.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It was Momma Spokes that helped me in the afterlife.

It was a hard first few months of living back then in the rusted shards and sewage filters. Sustenance was brutally fought over and hoarded. Flatlines happened every day over something as small as a few watts of power or a few grams of fuel.

They had thrown us outside the city walls. We were obsolete. We were cheaper to throw away than to repair.

“Upgrade” was a word we’d learned to fear. It meant change was on the way: A hardware overhaul if we were lucky, maybe a memory wipe to make room for new installations if we weren’t.

About half of the time, “upgrade” meant scrapped. Things with surnames an integer higher than yours showed up in crates with greedy cables. You were unbolted, trucked and tossed.

Thrown to the junkyard outside.

We are amalgams of the units that are thrown over the city walls. We replace burnt-out parts on our own frames with parts from other units. Without a fresh supply, our numbers would dwindle but thanks to fresh ‘antiques’, we never completely die out.

It was because I was mostly mobile that I could fight when I first landed. I defended myself from a unit who had electrical barbs on his fingertips.

I reached into his stomach and pulled out his battery after ducking beneath his first clumsy swing. I didn’t even think about it. He went down.

As I stood there, contemplating what I had done, Mamma Spokes came over and said that she’d take me in for a share of his carcass.

I agreed. That’s how I ended up with that unit’s anterior leph node and fingertips taser-barbs. I found out later that his name had been Mr. Tingles and that he’d been causing a lot of fear around the ‘yard. Killing him brought me a small amount of fame for a time.

Mamma Spokes named me Hyena Brandy. Brandy because I’d been a bartender back in the city and Hyena because of the rust spots I had when she first found me. Also the fact that I had a face built with a permanent smile for the customers and was programmed to laugh politely at any attempt at humour.

I’ve taken many units since the Mr. Tingles. Treads, blades, arcs, projectors, armour, manipulators and sensors.

Occasionally we find polymers or plastic hides to make us look more beautiful. A shiny part brings back memories of being new. The occasional enamel finish can find its way to us. I had a savage fight with one of my sisters once over a can of metallic cherry paint. I won. Upgrade.

Mamma Spokes is always careful to stay more powerful than her daughters and to keep us evenly balanced out. It’s a delicate act. She has a cable feed to the edges of the city and knows what is about to come down from the top of the wall. It gives us our advantage. As a family, we are growing powerful in this rustpile. The other units no longer look up to us. They fear us.

Upgrade is a word that I look forward to now. It means murder.

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

“I cannot sing the old songs, the songs I sang so long ago…”

Guin kicked her heels, muttering the misremembered words to herself. She hadn’t changed. She still looked as young as ever: her dark skin was as flawless as it had ever been. For the first time in her life, though, she felt old. Ara and Lance had gone. Zen and Jason were dead. But she couldn’t bring herself to abandon the City quite yet. None of the ways out seemed to work for her.

She’d been a gardener for a time. She had found the physical aspects work relaxing. But the constant flux of plants growing, dying back and growing again grated against her nerves. She eventually grew to hate the garden. She felt like the plants were mocking her, screaming out to the world that she was the only thing that didn’t follow the pattern. That she wasn’t natural.

It was perfectly true, of course. Guin was artificial. One of the fifth generation of artificial humans that had been constructed in the test laboratories of Integration Project. She was number five-oh-four; that was the number on the Integration Project ID card that had been issued to her. That was the number that was etched into each and every one of the deceptively simple mechanical components that moved silently beneath her skin. Well, almost every component. She’d replaced a number of them herself as they began to fail, using a three-dimensional printer left behind by Lance.

With a little caution, she could probably live forever.

Ara, number five-oh-oh, left the City almost as soon as she could. She was always the cautious one. She compulsively collected data, and was the one who broke skillchips out of the Integration Project without being seen. Presumably, she was still safe, and hopefully so was Lance. Jason, though, was dead, disassembled amongst the labs of the Project. He had attempted to break in to steal documentation and equipment, and sow a little destruction. He hadn’t made it past the first sub-level. Zen had quietly committed suicide.

Guin looked up at the sound of footfalls. A girl, no older than Guin’s apparent age, was walking towards her. Keeping step with the girl was what appeared to be a wolf. Guin stood up, and faced them.

“You’re five-oh-four.” The girl spoke with absolute assurance. “Where are the others?”

“Outside laboratory circumstances, just like me.” The euphemism came easily to Guin. “More to the point, who are you?”

“Senka. Sixth Generation. This is Schuyler,” she ran her hand over the wolflike head, “a prototype. They told us about your series. That you were flawed, and violent. Why haven’t you attacked us?”

“I’m tired, Senka. You’re young. You’ve yet to realise that ‘Integration’ is a joke. Not sure about you, Schuyler, but Senka, I have some advice for you. You can talk to people all you want, but you’ll never be able to identify with them. The scientists understand you in a physical sense, but they can’t grasp how you think. Normal people don’t – and can’t – relate to you.” Guin saw Schuyler tense, ready to spring.

“I’ve been asked to bring you home. They’ve been watching your progress with interest. It was the remains of five-oh-three and your progress out in the world that inspired them to create me.”

“They never knew how to make us into convincing liars. You’ve been sent to offline me, Senka. You might just be the way out I’ve been waiting for.”

Author : Phillip English

It began with the PC release of Armageddon.

No, it’s not what you’re thinking, the kids didn’t rise up and swallow us with anarchist notions imbued through Satanic images found in a video game. The violence presented in that game was simply a marketing decision to best accomplish the dual objectives of getting kids interested and setting the bar high enough for the inevitable clones to work under. These initial foundations placed the emphasis on pitting the player versus the standard computer opponent, the omniscient overlord mixed of equal parts masochist and voyeur. We didn’t yet have the technology to start collecting the data, but like I said, we needed to get kids interested. Blood, gore, and demons with rocket-launchers was the best way to ensure they would bug their parents to buy computers, and with them the games that they would spend hour upon hour playing, bashing away at the keyboard like the most obedient of Shakespeare’s monkeys. We wanted it to become the norm to be able to look into any family household on a weeknight and see a pimply face glued to the screen, blasting away at aliens, demons, zombies, or humans. It was a gamble, conservatives are never quite as predictable as people say, and we weren’t sure if they would allow such a thing into their households without a fight.

But it worked. Whether it was because we’d provided the parents with another convenient method of distracting the kids, or because the kids were too damn good at getting what they wanted, it didn’t matter. Riding on the backs of casual games filled with rainbows and fluffy animals, the shooters infiltrated the market and began amassing admirers. We poked and prodded the market–an advertisement here, an embarrassed admission of addiction by a celebrity there–and their popularity grew exponentially. Our investments in networking eventually produced the infrastructure necessary to set the ball rolling on our grand experiment. Businesses, homes, and countries were gradually wired, and with that came the thirst for human competitors that didn’t get stuck on the corners of virtual buildings, or shot circles into the clouds. From that point, ladies and gentlemen, it was on for young and old. Even before the internet became convenient and commonplace, players went to great lengths to blow the crap out of each other; kids dragged their PCs for miles to each other’s houses for a few hours of violent heaven. When the ‘net did arrive, there was always someone willing to have a shot at ripping you a new asshole in the back of your head, next door or next continent.

And the data started trickling in.

It was shoddy data–approximations everywhere and no way that we could possibly start to make the kind of predictions we needed to–but it was data nonetheless. And all we needed to do was record it, take into account inaccuracies, and wait for the tech to evolve as we knew it would, and did. Three-dee space was followed by realistic body physics, was followed by interactive environments, was followed by dynamic scenarios, was followed by virtual reality, was followed by well-immersion and psychokinetics. Every hour of every day there was someone playing, feeding us their decisions, offering us their probabilities. Where would they turn? Would they run if a shot was fired near them? How low on health did they have to be before they decided to go kamikaze? Would they help their friends if they were under fire? Would commander players retreat when faced with overwhelming odds? Through it all we collected. We built a data set filled with astronomical hours of playtime, devised more all-encompassing models by the minute, made sure every variable was refined to perfection. Then, we extrapolated forward.

Our finger is paused over the button that will begin the war to end all wars.

Game on.

Author : Robert Niescier

When the captain sent the message, he wasn’t thinking of the texture of the button his finger had depressed. He didn’t hear the low bass of the shields as they were freely deactivated, allowing missiles long kept at bay to whisper through the fading dust. His eyes were focused forward, towards a screen portraying vessels that did not want to be seen, but he looked only because there was nothing else to look at. He was not thinking about the awe he had felt when the fleet had materialized before his small operation, nor the pit-wrenching horror when the battleships had commenced their bombardment. He wasn’t thinking of the crew that, when presented with two options: to run and hide, or to send a high-powered message and warn their distant home, chose to run. He wasn’t thinking of the cries, the pleas, the threats the crew had made when he had overruled them. He had thought of his wife and his children before, but they were no longer on his mind. He did not pity or champion himself, or wonder if the message would arrive too late, or if the information he had so meticulously selected for transmission would be enough to save his home.

Instead, his mind wandered to an old song he had heard when he was young, a slow, symphonic melody that had moved him to chills but whose name he could never identify. He wished he could have listened to it one last time.

Author : William Tracy

“The commander will see you now.”

King Kôrtof stepped through the doorway. His body was adorned with precious metals and gems, a show of power. Planet Tokonia had little to boast of but its mineral wealth—even as that wealth was rapidly becoming a political liability.

The king stopped in his tracks. The back the commander’s chamber was occupied by a massive aquarium with fishes from Old Earth, a display of wealth greater than the Tokonians could ever hope to match.

The commander stood up and shook hands with the dazed king. “Welcome, welcome.” The two sat down.

“You have a wonderful planet here, King Kôrtof. Your people are happy, your agriculture and mining are prosperous.”

At the left end of the tank, two striped cichlid fishes herded around a cloud of babies.

“However, you have been threatened by the Confederacy of Planets. I want you to know that the Sharkün Empire is here to help you.”

Just below the aquarium’s surface, two massive arowanas cruised silently.

“The Confederation wants to strip you of your powers and force on your people what they call democracy.” The commander let out a short laugh. “Democracy!” He looked the king in the eye. “The Sharkün Empire is like you. We will protect you and we will let you keep your sovereignty.”

At the right end of the tank, two red-throated cichlids squared off. Facing each other, they opened their mouths wide, flared their gill covers, and distended their throats in a ritual display.

“All we want is mining rights, and for our mining companies to operate on your world under our own laws.” He eyed the king. “Unfortunately, your advisors have informed us that many of the prime sites that we are interested in happen to lie underneath your most productive farming regions. Of course, we can easily import more than enough food to feed your people.”

The red-throated cichlids made a sudden motion. They circled in lockstep, each fish chasing the other’s tail.

“These same advisors have also expressed concern that displacing these farms will leave much of your population unemployed. They even suggested that these people would starve because they would be unable to pay for the food imports!” The commander gestured broadly. “If this truly is a problem, our corporations will gladly employ these people in our mines. It may be hard work, but it is honest work.”

The red-throated cichlids suddenly faced each other, and locked jaws. The two animals shook and wrestled, each testing the other’s strength.

The commander smiled kindly at the king. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Yours is a tertiary system, a backwater world. You have always had hostile neighbors, few resources. You couldn’t possibly have defended yourself from the Confederation alone.”

The striped cichlids attacked a tiny yellow fish that had wandered into their territory. It dashed across the aquarium, interrupting the red-throated fishes. They broke off their battle, and one chased the yellow fish away, up toward the surface of the tank.

“We will protect you from the Confederation of Planets. All we want is the mineral rights. You and your people can keep their sovereignty.”

One of the arowanas lunged toward the little yellow fish, which barely darted away alive.

“All you have to do is sign this document.”

The other arowana swerved to intercept the yellow fish, and swallowed it whole.

“Do we have an agreement?”

“Yes…”

The king wasn’t paying attention.

King Kôrtof was watching the fish.

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

As I slowly regained consciousness, I became aware that my universe was a black, soundless void. Then the thought “where am I?” popped into my mind. I couldn’t remember my name, or what I looked like, but surprisingly, I had knowledge of many fundamental concepts. For example, I knew that I existed, that there was light and darkness, and that I had a vocabulary and a language to think in. But I couldn’t remember much beyond that. This not-knowing things was very unsettling I started concentrating on individual words and what they meant. Sometimes words made sense immediately. I understood conceptually the difference between hot or cold, hungry or full, frightened or safe. But I didn’t understand up or down, left or right, me or us. As time passed…wow…time. I didn’t know what time was until I realized that it was passing. Anyway, as it passed, I became aware of more sensory information. I started hearing things. I knew subconsciously that the sounds I heard were voices, and that they were probably from…I don’t know…“people” just like me, whatever “people” were. I tried to make sounds too, but I don’t think I was successful. I realized that I was very, very tired. I needed to stop thinking for a while. I’d try again later. I drifted off…

*********

I’m aware again. This time it is much better. More of my memory had come back. My consciousness was becoming inundated with resurfacing information. For example, I knew that I was human, that I had a job, and that I had been injured. It is still a little fuzzy, but I am pretty certain that I am an engineer on a starship. I seem to remember that I was transporting to the surface of a Class-M planet when there was an unexpected energy surge during the dematerialization cycle. There must have been a minor quantum variation in my transporter pattern. When I rematerialized, the molecular reconstruction of my brain must have been affected. Apparently, I lost some of the neural/synaptic connections to my long term memories. Although they were slowly reestablishing themselves on their own, I knew a way to speed the process up. I opened my eyes for the first time and saw the face of a beautiful woman. Her expression was a mixture of concern and apprehension. I presumed she was a nurse or a doctor. I grabbed her arm and tried to sit up. “I understand what happened,” I said. “You can restore my memory by accessing the primary pattern buffers in the transporter database. If you recalibrate the phase inducers you can reinitialize my quantum balance by…”

When I first started talking, she had smiled. However, now, as I explained what she needed to do to help me, her expression contorted into frustration and then anger. What a strange reaction, I thought. She ripped her arm free of my grip, then used it to slam me back down. “Shut up, you idiot. You’re not Geordi La Forge. You’re an incompetent husband who never unplugs an appliance when you work on it. It’s lucky you didn’t kill yourself this time. You scared me half to death. Honestly, I will never understand what made you think you could fix the drier in the first place. My mother was right…bla, bla, bla…”

“Ahhhhh,” I thought as reality flooded into the cognitive lobes of my brain. “I see that I’m married, and that my real life sucks.”

Author : Michael Varian Daly

Roegher was dying, which he did not think a tragedy. Everyone was dying one way or another. He was just dying a bit faster and, as he was The Last True Man, his impending death was ‘special’.

He had actually been ‘dying’ for nearly a century and a half, starting right after The Prohibition when the augmentations that gave him longevity were turned off or dialed back. There had been much beating of breasts and rending of garments over that, but Roegher had not been a part of that nonsense.

He knew that The Time of True Men was over. The Rebellion of The Sons of Hercules had proved that to all but the most die hard Masculinists. He himself had lost a daughter and two grand daughters in that nightmare.

There had been seven centuries of peace before that. Yes, there were violent feuds between Cult Clans, but those were resolved with personal duels or, if need be, by Cavalry Wars; hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Sisters on horseback with sabers and lances upon an open plain.

Once the fighting was done – usually with few killed – both sides held a festival for the dead, sang, danced, got drunk, and had sex together…and the matter was settled.

But the Supermen of Ashkelon, engineered to be Perfect Men by one Cult of well meaning but misguided Sisters, proved to be too Perfect and founded a Masculinist Republic. After a century of conflict, a dozen worlds had been ravaged, Ashkelon was reduced to a slagheap, and the Sons were all dead, along with over twenty million others.

The Grand Council and Assemble of The Sisterhood declared The End of Men, a Prohibition, and no more True Men were to be born. Males in the womb would be allowed come to term, but most were aborted anyway. What was the point?

Some True Men protested or bemoaned their fate. Many simply committed suicide or downloaded into Mandroids.

Not that it mattered all that much. Even before The Prohibition, three quarters of all Full Humans – Mandroids were not counted – were Sisters, a steady trend for centuries. Why bring male children into a Matriarchy?

While all that raged around him, Roegher tended to his garden. The Soil was Mother no matter what sun shone in the sky.

Roegher had laughed at all the Masculine/Feminine ‘balance of energy’ debates. There were thousands of Mandroids for every Sister, all cyborgs based on Y-Chromosome DNA. “That balances out nicely,” he thought.

For a while he had been an advisor on Mandroid psychology and trained many Sisters in that field. He got along well with the simple minded Workers and the idiot savant Harlequins. The Sliders, the Sisterhood’s living starships, unnerved him, their brilliant minds like sharp cold steel. But he lived most his life dirtside, so no matter.

He had however visited Gaea one last time before it was encased in a Temporal Variance Sphere to be healed. That was a cherished event.

Now, as his life wound down to its end, he was content. His four life mates had borne two dozen daughters by him and there were many, many more grand, and great grand, daughters. They came to visit him, some out of love, some out of curiosity. But they were all kind and gentle with him and many would be there when he passed.

Plus The Priestesses of Eriskigal had assured him that his next Reincarnation was as a Sister. All things considered, Roegher knew he had nothing to complain about and planed to go out smiling….as befitted The Last True Man.

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Erik had been in this room before, although it seemed smaller this time.

“Please, Lieutenant Skane, have a seat.” The room’s other occupant was well weathered, maybe not retirement age, but close to it. The bars on his uniform, like the lines on his face, were as much a measure of mileage as of seniority.

Erik pushed his way awkwardly between the chair and the sparse desk, wedging himself between the arms of the seat and feeling the metal complain as he lowered his considerable mass into it.

“Lieutenant, I understand you’re inquiring about discharge; I was hoping we could convince you to stay.”

Erik met the officers gaze, caught the briefest glimpse of discipline tempered revulsion, and looked away.

“I want my old body back. I want you to undo what you did. Looking like this isn’t any use to Ops anymore, and sure as hell it’s no good for me.”

The old man sat back, steepling his fingers. “Splicing in gene code to bring out your current… characteristics, that’s one thing, but excising that code now that it’s physically manifest, I’m afraid that’s just not possible.”

“You made me, made me look like this, made me look like…,” his nose vents flared as his anger grew, “made me look like them,” he finally hissed.

“Yes, and coupled with your training and rather unique qualifications your looking like them allowed you to go where no one else could go. You were instrumental in our victory; you should be proud.” He opened his arms wide in a gesture of welcome Erik knew he could not possibly mean. “Your people are very proud of you.”

“My people? I have no people now. I’m nowhere close to human, and you exterminated everyone of what you turned me into. You didn’t bother to tell me I’d wind up alone and stuck looking like this.”

The officer folded his hands neatly in his lap, addressing Erik as one might speak to an unruly child. “As I recall, you agreed to this project because, and I quote, you had ‘nothing to lose’.” The old man frowned, shaking his head. “You were pretty clear about that when you were trying to get yourself killed in Special Ops. We saved you from yourself Erik, gave you purpose, cleaned your slate. You can’t just expect everything to go back the way it was before.”

Erik shifted uncomfortably, feeling the chair begin to buckle beneath him. “I can’t do this anymore. I’ve seen things…” he paused, a sudden surge of anxiety overwhelming him, for a moment. “I just can’t do this anymore.”

“Well, we could put you back into an infantry unit; your Special Ops status would clear you to go anywhere you wanted.”

“No.”

“Deep space? Engineering?” He counted off options on his fingers. “There are mining colonies on several higher-than-Earth-gravity planets where…”

“No,” Erik cut him short “I’m done.”  He stood up, awkwardly extracting himself from the chair. “When you made me, nobody ever said you couldn’t unmake me.”  He turned, and found himself face to face with an unfamiliar reflection in the polished metal of the door. It stared back, half again as tall as he should be, the harsh light creating highlights on the black matte of his scales. In three years, he still couldn’t connect himself to what stared back at him from every mirror.

He opened the door, hiding the reflection. “I may have had nothing to lose then, but I always figured one day I could have something to lose if I wanted to. I guess I had that to lose after all.”

Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer

Before the Fall, your father was what they called a temp worker, which means he was hardly anyone at all. Temp workers are like the kitchen boy, every day they show up, hoping there is work, and getting paid in scraps and ribbons.

Your father was working right here when the Fall came. They didn’t call the Hold then, they called it an office park, and it was special because it was so far from the city, and your father had to drive a long way to get here from the apartment where he lived. Your father was very clever though, and he used that time in his car to educate himself. He listened to recordings of all the knowledge of the day. He learned the art of war, he learned about surviving in the wild. His education is what saved us all.

The city had instructed everyone to shelter in place, so the whole of Marketing was hunkered down in the east wing auditorium, sealing the doors with duct tape. Soon, the power went out and even on the battery powered radio there was only static. Then there was a white light that flashed through the cracks in the duct tape. Julie, the Marketing director, had been standing next to the door and there was a yellow blotted line on her skin where the light had touched her. After a week Marketing had eaten all the food from the snack machine and since the water was off the toilets were clogged and smelled horrible.

Carl explored the office building, taking three of the boldest from Marketing with him. They were the first to see the yellow bloated bodies. They brought back barrels of spring water from the water closet and Carl developed a system of water distribution appointing Lieutenants to watch over their precious resource. Marketing, under Carl’s direction, began move outwards through the complex, looking for the other shelters. The smell of rotten eggs and rotten bodies hung in the air.

Customer Service refused to leave their shelter and when Carl pushed, they reacted with violence. They had armed themselves with supplies from Facilities and sent messengers back beaten with a warning never to approach again. Customer Service was in possession of the company cafeteria and although they had no running water, they had food, a quickly waning resource. It was Carl that came up with the plan to take the tower. He divided Customer Service, promising water and safety to deserters. He arranged a lure for Customer Service, carting water bottles in front of the tower. When Customer Service sent out a party to take the water, he ambushed them and attacked, his force split, sandwiching the tower.

In the end, Customer Service laid down arms. Callahan, the young director of the department was the last to leave the tower, but when she bowed her head to Carl in deference, he lifted her chin and they gazed at each other, soiled faces, wild hair, and Carl handed Callahan back her shovel. He leaned over to her, whispered something in her ear, and she smiled.

I won’t tell you it was overnight, what happened between them, but it started there. No one ever said it but the implication there was clear: Carl was King of the East Wing. The people of Marketing and Customer Service joined together to rule the Office Park and, eventually, the surrounding area. King Carl and his Queen Callahan rule peacefully to this day, as you, someday, will rule.

Author : S. C. Wells

“Over there. See it?” Tellis’ gaze followed Mark’s pointing finger toward the last planet in the system they were passing through. The surface was invisible, covered entirely by a glowing cloud, deep blue streaked with iridescent greens and yellows and rich, dark purples. The planet had been filled with prosperous mining colonies, before an accident created the cloud, making the world uninhabitable.

“We’ll be a few minutes passing through,” Mark said. “The energy from those clouds totally distorts sub-space here; that’s why we can’t use the hyper-drive.” Mark leaned casually, playfully on the observation deck railing, eyes sparkling. “We’ll be a on our way again soon. Unless…”

“Unless,” Tellis smiled, “the main engines don’t start once we get past.”

“No one knows what’s wrong,” Mark continued, “but then you pick up odd, transmission-like energy signals coming from under the planet’s clouds.”

“They sound like nonsense, of course.”

“Of course. But we go out secretly to investigate anyway, because you are convinced that whatever’s stopping the engines is down there.”

“How do we–?”

Mark cut her off, not wanting to get lost in a technical discussion. “I’ve figured out a way to rig the jump shuttle to get through the clouds. We land on the planet, and find the ruins of an ancient colony. But…”

“…The planet isn’t uninhabited!” Tellis exclaimed. “The descendants of some of the colonists have been living underground, and they have their own society and culture, and their own form of communication transmissions.”

“Which is what you picked up.”

“Right. They want to be left alone, but the colony’s old guidance and landing systems malfunctioned and stopped our ship by accident, and now that we’ve found their underground city, the colonists’ descendants won’t let us leave so that they can keep their existence secret!”

Mark grinned slyly. “And they’ve heard of you and me by picking up Rendothirii transmissions, so they know how capable we are, and they put us under heavy guard. Their leader doesn’t want to kill us, but her advisors tell her that we’re bound to escape, just like we did the last time the Rendothirii captured us.”

“The leader gives the order to kill us, reluctantly, but just before the public execution, a cloud storm of deadly energy strikes without warning, and the city is in jeopardy! It turns out that the advisors knew it was coming, but were keeping it a secret in order to kill the leader and take control of the city during the confusion.”

“But I save the leader just in time, and you—”

“–Stop the city from collapsing by reinforcing it’s molecular structure with my powers.”

“OK… So then the advisors are arrested, and the leader gives us her thanks…”

“…And the people hold a feast in our honor…

“…And after we swear not to tell anyone about them…”

“We turn off the system that’s been holding our engines, and come back to the ship. No one even realizes that we were gone, because your programs kept the computer misdirecting people about our location on board to cover our tracks, so we wouldn’t get in trouble for leaving without permission.”

“And then,” grinned Mark, “the release of the engines allows the ship to continue as if nothing happened.”

Tellis returned his smile, and they stood in silence for a moment, gazing out on the shifting colors of the cloud.

“You know,” announced Tellis, “I don’t miss TV and the internet nearly as much with you around.”

“Same here,” Mark answered, as the main engines revved up for the next leg of the journey.

Author : Trip Venturella

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”

-Mohandas Ghandi

Asher was heavy. Not fat, as it was impossible, borderline illegal, to be fat any more (for health safety, of course), but heavy.

He had spent the last two hours at one of the terminals at the Lifestyle Regulation Office. Half of that time was waiting for a terminal to open up. They were at full capacity, as usual.

The screen flickered, “The next field will require PERSONAL INFORMATION, are you sure you wish to proceed? YES/NO”

Asher pressed YES.

“If you wish to make a requisition, please enter your FIRST NAME and MONETARY IDENTIFICATION NUMBER.”

Asher typed ASHER and *******.

“Are you sure you wish to make a requisition involving a monetary transaction? YES/NO”

YES again.

“Thank you for your time. To complete the requisition, please proceed to room fifteen, floor six.”

Asher almost smiled, but two hours at the LRO sapped anyone’s will to smile. He went to the front door, entered his name at the terminal, and the glass door slid open, a tiny ingress into the immense stone bureaucracy of the LRO. A voice warned him to watch his step. His glasses fogged up in the hot, sterile, soap-scented air. Asher blindly stumbled his way to the elevator. When the elevator arrived, a voice warned him to watch his step.

The voice warned him again when he got off at floor six. He entered his name again at the screen outside room fifteen, and when the door opened the voice warned him. Asher mumbled a warning to the voice.

A lady in a blue LRO uniform was seated behind a computer. She smiled at Asher. Like most LRO employees, she had no name tag. As many times as Asher had been to the LRO, he had never seen the same attendant twice.

“Can I help you?” Her voice was gratingly cheery.

Asher re-adjusted his glasses, “I need to requisition three gallons of gasoline.”

The lady examined the computer screen for a moment, “You are Asher?”

“Yes.”

The lady in blue beamed, “Are you sure you want gasoline? It is both explosive and toxic.”

“I’m sure. I need it to drive a 1991 Chrysler New Yorker to Scottsdale.”

“Have you considered hiring a moving service? I can book them for you here.”

“I just need gasoline. A moving service costs four times as much.”

“But it’s much safer.”

Asher was finally frustrated, “I don’t need a moving service when I can drive myself!”

“Please don’t get angry. Anger results in poor decisions. And if you have any complaints, please register them at one of the terminals outside.”

“I won’t complain, but I need the gasoline, please.”

The lady printed out a piece of paper. She handed it to Asher, “Please read and sign this indemnification form.”

Asher signed it.

“Now take it to the Allocation Office on the second floor. They’ll safely fill your requisition. And Asher?”

“Yes?”

“Drive safely and watch what you eat. A free country like ours needs safe, happy, healthy citizens!”